The other day I tweeted that I am more impressed with my savior’s humility than my own pride, and more bedazzled by his faithfulness than my own inconstancy. I just want to amplify that comment a bit.
First, let me say that I take these polarities between the new Adam (Jesus) and myself in the present age as given. He is faithful, I am not. He is wise, I am not. He is humble, I am not. He is shalom, I am a wreck. He is contented and satisfied, I am too-often overwhelmed by hungers and lusts.
However, I also recognize that it would be unbiblical of me to make such statements and follow them with a period, full stop. This is most emphatically not how Paul spoke to his struggling flocks, and I’m beginning to lose patience with some of my brothers and sisters in Christ who seem content to wallow, in word, thought, and song, in recognition and confession of their failings without always proceeding to the essential next step: “Such was your old life. But do you not know what Christ has done? Therefore, live a new and different life in Him!” (see Romans 6, 1 Cor 3, 1 Cor 6, 1 Cor 9, Colossians 3, Ephesians 4, etc)
Now, some theological neatniks will invariably misunderstand me and say that I am downplaying sin in general or my own sin in particular, but in so doing they demonstrate that they have missed the point and are straining at gnats. I am acutely aware of my own faithlessness; however, if I am not even more acutely aware of Christ’s faithfulness, I have proven that I am still a self-worshiping idolater who would rather fix his eyes upon himself than upon his savior. If my consciousness is overrun by my own foolishness more so than awe at the depths of the riches of the mind of Christ, both at and with the generously-given wisdom of God, then I truly remain the worst kind of fool, unrepentant, unregenerate, untransformed by the glorious redeeming grace which has been offered to me in Christ. In Christ: a new creation.
