Category: grace

You Have No Idea

by Andrew Micah, posted in gospel, grace, justice, theology, Uncategorized

“Consider this also: if you don’t believe in a God of wrath, you have no idea of your value. Here’s what I mean. A god without wrath has no need to go to the cross and suffer incredible agony and die in order to save you. Picture on the left a god who pays nothing in order to love you, and picture on the right the God of the Bible, who, because he’s angry at evil, must go to the cross, absorb the debt, pay the ransom, and suffer immense torment. How do you know how much the “free love” god loves you or how valuable you are to him? Well, his love is just a concept. You don’t know at all. This god pays no price in order to love you.”

-Tim Keller,  Jesus the King

The Fear of the Lord and the Comfort of the Holy Spirit

by Andrew Micah, posted in family of God, grace, reflection, theology

“So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria has peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.” (Acts 9:31)

As John Newton wrote in his timeless hymn, “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” At the foundation of the Christian life is a composite awareness of two realities. The first is that God is great and terrible and holy, that He is more fearful than anyone or anything else. His present goodness and His present power should make us tremble to do anything that displeases Him or is against His character. The second reality is that God in His great love has redeemed us and rescued us from all ungodliness, not first by transforming our character, but by changing our identity from “sinner” to “set apart” through the finished work of Jesus. We’ve become members of His family. We are unconditionally loved by Him. All this is made real to us by the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit helps us to trust. The Spirit calms our fears. The Spirit makes the bed on which the believer rests securely.

The fear of God, without the cross of Christ, would certainly crush our spirits and make us miserable. But in light of the cross, what we know of God’s dangerous goodness, awesome dignity, and unmatched power inspires us to deeper love and worship, because we understand what an act of grace it is for God to redeem us, and because we can trust that whenever He appears to come against us in our sin, He is simply breaking down our pride so that we’ll be humble enough to receive His goodness and power in our hearts so that we can grow in His likeness. Without the fear of God, the comfort of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean much. But without the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the fear of God can’t do accomplish anything good in our hearts. “‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.”

Some thoughts about God’s passion for our goodness

by Andrew Micah, posted in encouragement, exhortation, family of God, grace

“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the heart.” (Proverbs 21:2)

As people with a propensity to sin, we spend a great deal of time and mental/emotional energy trying to protect ourselves from being found out as sinners. We fall short of God’s glory every day in the words we say and the things we do. And even though as believers in Jesus we know that our failures to do and be good have been completely covered by His blood, so often we try to stand in our own righteousness instead of just giving it up for the better covering we receive from God by the finished work of the cross.

One of the ways that we do this is by legalistic self-justification. We treat God’s commandments like an arbitrary set of technical rules that prescribe exactly how much goodness we need to get by, or how little goodness we can get away with. And the tragedy in this is that we trade God’s invitation to know Him deeply and share in His passionately good nature for a program by which we can get something out of God that we want–respect, vindication, and the right to be blessed.

God’s reason for giving us rules for life is not that He has some pet peeves that He doesn’t want to be bothered with. It’s not that He’s trying to shore up His reputation as a certain kind of God by establishing blessings for good behavior and consequences for bad behavior. He’s not carrying out some drudgery on behalf of the universe. God made people because He wanted (not needed) to share His glory and goodness with creatures. He created us in His image so that our lives could reflect the beauty of His infinitely good character, and so that we could experience the deep satisfaction and joy in being like Him. And His rules reveal to us what it means to be like Him. They are intended to expose the ways that we fall short so that we’re humbled before God and come to Him for mercy and transforming grace so that we can be restored to that created purpose–to know Him in His passionate goodness, and to share in that goodness with Him.

God’s not looking for people who carefully navigate life according to a set of arbitrary rules. He’s not looking for people who color inside the lines. He’s looking for people who want to commune with Him in His goodness, with all that means. Faithfulness. Mercy. Beauty. Joy. Abundant generosity. Uncompromising justice. Long-suffering love. And who out of that passion for the goodness that is only found in Him, seek to know Him through obedience to His commandments. God’s question as He examines our lives is not “did you do all the things,” but “what are you seeking?”

So often in interpersonal conflicts we examine and debate the finer points of the law instead of readily admitting our obvious failure to love, to seek good, to truly forgive, to prioritize justice and mercy. But God is looking for people who, instead of saving up counterfeit goodness to buy our way into His love and the respect of other people, openly declare our bankruptcy of goodness so that we can receive His own goodness. (Matt. 5:3) He’s looking for people who, in response to a genuine awareness of the purity of God’s heart and ways, genuinely grieve their failures to live in His likeness. (5:4). He’s looking for people who don’t selfishly insist on their rights, but surrender them when they stand in the way of blessing others. (5:5) He’s looking for people whose lives are controlled by one ruling hunger, one burning thirst: to see, understand, and celebrate His goodness, and be transformed into the likeness of Him. (5:6) He doesn’t care if we’re able to explain our actions as outwardly conforming to His rules. He cares about what’s in our hearts. And He’s bursting with desire to fill us with His fullness through the gift of His Holy Spirit and supply what is lacking in our hearts. He’s so passionately committed to this relationship with us where we see how beautiful He is and that beauty lives in us that He pursues us with discipline, with hardships and trials that help us to see what’s really in our hearts so that we’ll cry out for transformation. He loves us. Why would God share His goodness and His likeness with us for any other reason than that He loves us? This is why He searches our hearts. This is why He doesn’t give us a pass for our technical rule-keeping.

There was once a rich young man who came to Jesus with the claim that he had perfectly kept the law. This man was as much a failure in living up to the glory of God as the rest of us. His legalistic self-justification blinded him to that reality. Jesus could have exposed him, as I think many of us would, by challenging his assertions about his own goodness. “Have you really never committed murder? Hatred is the same as murder. Have you always kept all your promises? Have you really never helped yourself to that which wasn’t yours? Have you really never bent the truth to satisfy your own desires at the expense of others?” But Jesus does not ask these questions. His reply might catch us, as it did this rich young man, completely off guard. “Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” This was not a self-satisfied “gotcha” moment on Jesus’ part. The gospel says that “Jesus, looking on him, loved him.” Jesus was also not advocating self-denial as a way of buying eternal life. He was offering the young man an invitation to share in His own divine goodness. Before He took on flesh, Jesus had greater possessions than anyone. He had all the riches of Heaven. And He emptied Himself of all of it to seek and save the lost. What is more, He spent His entire earthly life saving up enough righteousness to buy our way into heaven. On the cross, He made Himself poor in terms of righteousness so that we could be rich. He exposed Himself to all the abandonment and suffering that was rightfully ours in our guilty, self-inflicted moral poverty so that we could receive the riches of His righteousness, and with them eternal life. Paul says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9) Jesus wasn’t asking the rich young man to do anything that He Himself hadn’t done. He was exposing how the young man’s heart was unlike the heart of God revealed in Himself, and offering him transformation. Thank God that when presented with the choice (speaking in human terms) to give up all that He had to purchase salvation for poor sinners, Jesus didn’t “go away sorrowful”! But this young man would not follow Jesus, because his righteousness was of an entirely different kind than the righteousness of Jesus. The righteousness of the young man was about measuring up. The righteousness of Jesus is about emptying self, about embracing emptiness and suffering to bring fullness and rest to someone else, about offering everything that He has to bless the unworthy with love. How can we not wonder to realize that the very things which God imposed upon us as the penalties for our failure to obey are the same things that He willingly took upon Himself to demonstrate His perfect love? Are we hearing what God is saying in this?

When God made us in His image, He made us to bear the weight of His glorious, self-giving goodness. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15) When we fell short of God’s likeness, He moved toward us in love. And the first thing He did was to get our picture of God straight. We were supposed to be the picture of God to ourselves, each other, and all creation. We failed. Jesus came to do that. And He did it by carrying a cross. He set the record straight about who God is. God doesn’t “measure up.” He pours Himself out. The character of God as revealed in the work of Christ is the “new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” that we are called and welcomed into by the finished work of Christ. Simply put, we’ve got to stop trying to figure out how little goodness we can get away with and start seeing every relationship, every gift, every situation, every moment as an opportunity and an invitation to be like Him. That’s what God is looking for. It’s not about a standard that we must live up to so much as it is an identity, a calling, and the burden of God’s desire which will either destroy or glorify us. And if by faith we take shelter in the finished work of Christ, we will certainly not be destroyed, but glorified. In the process, we will surely suffer loss of all that it is no loss to lose, all that is not like Him. And that also is a gift.

It is no light thing to be loved by God. It is no easy thing to be wanted by Him. It is a gentle yoke, yes, but it is a scourging gentleness. We have a name and an identity and a destiny to live up to, and all the resources of the Spirit sufficient to that calling. He has canceled all our debts, and He will never release us from His jealous longing for our glory in His goodness. And that is why, even though He has made peace with us, He makes war with our legalistic self-justification. He wants so much more for us, and that is why we’re not going to have it our way.

Songs of His Pursuit: Between the Dreaming and the Coming True

by Andrew Micah, posted in grace, music, Uncategorized

Earlier today, as part of my weekly Six for Saturday post, I highlighted a new article on Relevant magazine website called “C.S. Lewis, Sadness, and What Eternal Hope Looks Like.” The author, Jonathan Trotter, is arguing that honestly grieving the brokenness of the world we live in can be–in fact, must be–a very important step in the process of fully coming to terms with the hope of the Gospel. I’d like to try to say the same kind of thing, in my own words, using my own metaphors and examples. And because what I’m going to say ties in so much with the story of God’s grace in my life told through the music that He has used to reveal Himself and His love to me, I’m going to make this part of the series I started a couple of weeks ago called Songs of His Pursuit.

Six years ago, when I was sixteen years old, I went through a season of great personal crisis. It was a season when a hundred deeply rooted insecurities, fears, and doubts about God and who I was to Him came violently to the surface. Whatever structure and direction there was in my life at that point came suddenly and rather violently to a halt. There were spiritual realities that demanded my attention breaking out from under the surface of my life, and I fought for the right to listen to them. There was a darkness jealously contending for my soul that I had to find a way to face. Of all the various instruments of God’s grace that kept me from being overwhelmed to the point of suicide or worse, I can point to two above all. One was a youth pastor who simply listened. The other was a contemporary Christian musician named Bebo Norman. Specifically, an album that he wrote and recorded in 2006, called Between the Dreaming and the Coming True (supplemented with a few songs from 2008’s eponymous album, and a smattering of tunes from other records). Without Pastor Joe and Bebo listening to me, affirming my desperation, and helping me be a man fully assured of the poverty of my own soul apart from God, I doubt that I ever would have been able to take my own sense of suffering and spiritual need seriously enough long enough for the work of God’s saving and healing grace to take root in my heart. As much as I wanted to, there’s only so much that a broken heart can do on its own in a world that doesn’t seem to give or care.

Between the Dreaming and the Coming True (link is a youtube music playlist) is about the tension between hope and suffering, between the way things are and the way they are meant to be, and about a God who draws near to us and delivers us even as we’re torn by that tension. It opens with these words:

You could turn a hundred years and never empty all your fears
They’re pouring out like broken words and broken bones
They could fill a thousand pages, be the cry for all the ages
And the song for every soul who stands alone
The ache of life is more than you are able
Hold on love, don’t give up, don’t close your eyes

This is a way of saying, “I see you, I hear you, I feel what you feel” that goes beyond what simple sympathy can say. These are the words of a fellow sufferer who has somehow been lifted above his suffering by the kindness of a savior.

As the hungering dark gives way to the dawn, my love
Hold on, hold on
It won’t be long

I needed language like this. I needed someone to tell me that “hungering dark” was not just an overwrought construction of my imagination, that it was something that actually was, and that there was a dawn that could break through it. The open wound of my need is where the grace of God gets in.

What is hope? For suffering people, hope is the belief in a not-broken reality which we will someday come into out of our brokenness. It’s health to a sick man, full sunlight to those who cannot escape the night, spring to those for whom it is always winter and never Christmas. Our greatest danger is to forget in the midst of the sickness that health is actually a thing. “Don’t let the night become the day,” Bear Rinehart croons in the bridge of one of NEEDTOBREATHE’s best songs. The worst thing that can happen when you’re walking through the valley of the shadow of death is to forget that there’s another place which is not the valley of the shadow of death, because at that point, anything is possible. This is what Jonathan Trotter so aptly describes in the article I referenced at the beginning with these words: “hopeless people are dangerous people, willing to hurt themselves and others without measure or limit.” When Puddleglum defies the witch, it’s because he realizes that giving in to her version of reality is a worse death than death itself.

On the second song of Between the Dreaming, “Be My Covering,” Bebo sings,

War-torn are the rags of every nation
Fear lives in the heart of every home
Louder than the groans of creation
Oh, my God, be the voice of hope

One of the beautiful things about what we believe who believe in Jesus is that like no one else, we know ourselves to be fallen, and understand that we have a right to think of ourselves that way. This is a deeply comforting thing if you think about it, and I think that sometimes we as Christians take it for granted. Things are not what they were meant to be, and the word of Christ actually affirms and encourages our grief at that fact. One of the things that sets Christianity apart is that it is the only groaning ‘religion’ that has ever been. We groan, and we hear a groaning in the world around us, and instead of being told to put a faux-holy face on things, we are told to listen to the groaning and trust that the groans of Jesus on the cross has made (in a now-but-not-yet sort of way) an end of all of this groaning.

When I cry out under the weight of fatherlessness or loneliness or betrayal or cancer or poverty or whatever I might suffer, the Christian way of thinking and believing tells me that my suffering is part of a bigger story of a world that fell and a God of grace who is making all things new, and that though these waters rise, they will not pull me under, because I’ve been united to the one who has conquered death and all his friends, and I have been seated with Him above the fall. But having this certainty of victory doesn’t have to make me flippant about the fall at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The depth of our fallenness only magnifies the power and the glory of God’s grace that is lifting us out of it.

It’s the honesty of Between the Dreaming and the Coming True that drew me in. It was an honesty I could bathe in and be lost in for a while. How is it possible for an album which gave birth to such an intimate and triumphantly hopeful anthem of worship such as “I Will Lift My Eyes” (probably Bebo’s most successful radio song to this day) to close with a gut-punch of inconsolable regret like “Now That You’re Gone”? It’s possible because even though there really is a God who meets us in our emptiness and forsaken-ness, redeems us from sin and carries our burdens (“I Know Now”), sometimes our shadows still surround us (“The Way We Mend”). There are moments when the beauty of everlasting love breaks through into our little lives with such radiance that we wonder whether our dreaming can lift us right out of this life (“Sunday”), and there are moments when words of gold grow cold and it seems that time is wearing down the best of our intentions to the bone (“Time Takes Its Toll On Us”). There’s something about listening to another man be honest with himself and the world that cuts a path for you to be honest in the same way. This is one of the holiest opportunities of the artistic calling. (You might, think, for all of this talk about the lyrics of the record, that my interest in it is more lyrical than anything else. I swear, I have never heard anyone succeed in marrying lyrics with music ten to twelve times more gloriously than Bebo Norman does on this record. I’m a perfectionist about such things, and listening to the record for the second hundredth time, it still seems that almost every note is perfection.)

Bebo’s exploration of other themes only adds texture and depth to his main theme. Yes, the well of eternal things is all that I thirst for (“Bring Me To Life”), but human love is more than something I merely want (“To Find My Way to You”), and somehow those two realities don’t need to stand in opposition to each other. Maybe holiness is not about a forsaking of the creature for the Creator, but seeing and seeking the Creator through the creature. Maybe loving others and being loved by them is something that can help me understand the way God loves me. I would give up on a thousand dreams just to find my way to you, and the reason I would ever feel that way is because I’m made and being re-made in the image of a God who abandoned paradise to seek and save that which was lost, bring me to life, and reveal His kingdom in me. My feeble earthly loving is a picture, however humble, of His uncreated, everlasting love.

And as I’m drawn in by all of this, right around track nine, any sorrowful reflection on my own suffering, any quiet cherishing of my best hopes and wrestling with the day-today reality their disruption, dissolves into weeping awe and wonder at the mercy of a God of majesty who stoops to show grace to sinners.

I come in rags, tattered by the fall and all the earth
A witness to my crime

Mercy,
Weep over me and let your tears
Wash me clean
Majesty
Be merciful with me,
For my eyes have seen holy

This is what I need to hear most of all as a broken man in a broken world, because the Jesus who doesn’t belittle my suffering is the same Jesus who doesn’t belittle my sin. The kindness of God towards suffering man could not be greater. His only Son went to the cross to experience the infinite depths of every kind of suffering in order that He might one day make an end of our suffering forever. But we have to understand that He did this, not to make some sort of apology for creating a world that got broken or for writing the story of our lives with brokenness in it, but to redeem us from the sin that is the first cause of our suffering. Rightly understood, this reality of our need for redemption doesn’t act as a counterbalance to our sense of our need for healing in a broken world. Instead, it only reveals in more brilliant colors the generous heart of a God who chose to be with us in spite of ourselves and how absolutely wrong we were, and still would be without Him. This is a God who came to earth to be crushed for our sins so that we could be made holy. The morning can find us alive because there was once a morning that found Him dead. If this God is for me, who can be against me? If He did not spare Himself, how will He not also with Himself freely give me all things?

What need, then, is there for me to be anything less than honest with this God of great compassion about the suffering in my human condition? I will not close my eyes to the helplessness and turmoil and pain inside me and around me. I will lift my eyes to the maker of the mountains I can’t climb. I will lift my eyes to the calmer of the oceans, raging wild. I will lift my eyes to the healer of the hurt I hold inside. And when it seems like all that I ever wanted is broken, I don’t have to pretend to be something I’m not. I can settle into the sorrow without fear of sinking, because it is in those moments of letting go that I discover myself upheld by everlasting arms. He is, and He was, and He will be forever, the love that I need to save me.

When I listen to Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, the one voice I hear running through it all says this: Listen to the reality of your humanness. Listen to your longing. Listen to your brokenness. Don’t run from it. Don’t cover it over. Settle in, and listen, and let the sadness and the yearning that you feel in the midst of a broken world be all that it is. Jesus is here, and He will meet you here.

~Andrew