In
my early years, the only thing I could see was that I had to try to be a good
person. I had to try to be good for God, because I believed in him, and I knew
he wanted good kids. I had to try to be good for people, because I wanted them
to accept me. I knew that people would sometimes accept me if I was good, and that
no one would accept me if I was bad. So, from childhood, as my strength of body
and mind increased, so did my efforts to find ways to be good.
What
became clear was that I lived between the elusive goal of what it meant to be
good, and the inescapable conclusion that I was never good enough. The negative
experience of someone judging me as a failure drove me to seek the positive experience
of someone acknowledging that I was a success.
At
some point in my life, and I cannot say when exactly it was, something inside
me died. Perhaps it would be better to say that, at some point in my life I
came to realize that something had died inside me a lot earlier than I would have
imagined. Whatever the case, I woke up one day to the realization that I felt
something inside my inner man that could only be described by the word “dead”.
It
was actually a very strange feeling to discover this. Perhaps it was like
someone waking up from a coma to discover that the accident that had knocked him
out cold had also made him a quadriplegic. It was like someone discovering that
his very best friend had died, and he had missed the funeral. Only thing was
that the deadness could not be buried in an ornate casket and left six feet
under. It was buried inside my soul, and there was nothing I could do to fix
it.
And
then I discovered that this was the point. There was a deadness inside me that I
could not fix. I do not believe it was the deadness of my sinful condition,
because I had repented of my sins and received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior
while in my early teen years. In fact, I think that I was made aware of this
other dead feeling by the very reality that I had been made alive in Jesus
Christ and could now have the sense of something being wrong within me.
At
some time in my life I understood that the thing that happened to me when I
received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior was what the Bible describes as “justification by faith”; while the
thing I was dealing with later on in the discovery of something dead inside me
was under the umbrella of my “sanctification
by faith”. Justification gave me the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ as
a free gift, making me as righteous in God’s sight as the Son of God (strange
as it still feels to admit such a thing). Sanctification set me apart in that
righteousness of Christ so that the real condition of my being could be “transformed
into the same image from one degree
of glory to another”.
Which
brings me back to this issue of why a good Christian boy needed to know he felt
dead somewhere inside. The answer? Because good Christians need to know in
their heart-of-hearts that they are saved by grace, not goodness.
Here
is the thing about God that I had to learn: it would not be loving of God to
leave a “good Christian” thinking he or she is saved by their own goodness when
any reliance on goodness would leave us living with that incessant, worrisome,
consciousness that we just might not be good enough. If you know your Bible,
that is the Romans 7 life, the life where we are always aware that we never
quite do the good that we want to do, and we always seem to fall into the
badness, the “not good enough”, that we don’t want to do.
I
suspect that I did not learn this easily. However, I have now come to realize
that God forcing me to see that deadness inside me is the most loving thing he
could do. While some of those early experiences of feeling that deadness made
me feel like the most worthless piece of garbage I could imagine, the conscious
acknowledgement of my need was the necessary prerequisite to knowing God’s
grace. Knowing that, “by
grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is
the gift of God, not a
result of works, so that no one may boast”, is the most liberating discovery the inner man can ever know.
I now know what it feels like to believe that God has loved
me with an everlasting love; that, “In
love he predestined me for adoption as his son through
Jesus Christ”; and that I am his “beloved child”. I have come to believe Scriptures that tell me to,
“See what kind of love the Father has
given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” I know this is all because of God’s love expressed
through his grace, not of any good works on my part.
My hope is no longer in trying to be good enough for God,
for he has clearly been good enough for us both. Rather, my hope is this: “Beloved, we are God's children now, and
what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall
be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” I know this applies to me, not because I have been
good enough to earn it, but because God has graciously justified me, he is graciously
sanctifying me, and he has promised to graciously glorify me when Jesus
returns. It is a very good feeling to be saved by grace
through faith, relying on a work that rests solely in the hands of a very good
God.
While the responsibility for making me fully conformed to
the image and likeness of Jesus Christ rests in God, and God alone, there is a
fascinating way in which this gracious work of God brings us into the fulfillment
of our desire and longing to be good. While God tells me that I am saved by his
grace, through the free gift of faith in Jesus Christ, not of any good works on
my part, he continues on to show what happens once this free
gift of grace through faith takes effect. God’s word continues, “For we are his workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk
in them.” It now makes sense that I can only be saved by
grace, without contributing any good works of my own, and now am liberated from
the tyranny of sin so that I can walk in the good works God has graciously
prepared for me to experience and enjoy.
The same thing is stated when we were told that we are already
beloved children who will one day be fully conformed to the image and likeness
of God’s Son. The conclusion of the matter is not that we “continue in sin that grace may abound”. To that Paul declared, “By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” Rather, when we know we are beloved children of
God who will one day be fully conformed to the likeness of the beloved Son of
God, our response is that, “everyone who thus
hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”
There is the gracious work of God. It is the Beatitudinal
journey of grace working into our lives through faith. It awakens us to our poverty of spirit whereby we
realize that “None is righteous, no, not
one”, hence the necessary discovery that I am not good
enough. It causes us to mourn our sinful condition whereby we say, “For I know my transgressions, and my
sin is ever before me.” It leads us into the meekness where we admit to
God, “apart from you, I can do nothing!” And, these three steps bring us to hunger and
thirst for that righteousness that can only be experienced by faith, and so we
cry out to God,
Create in me
a clean heart, O God,
and
renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
and
take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and
uphold me with a willing spirit.
It is when God has so transformed us by his gospel of grace
that we can then go about doing those good works God prepared in advance for us
to do. It is when grace has saved us without our good works that we can become
the humble servants of God who do good works as an expression of the grace that
has made us alive in Jesus Christ our Lord.
The same gift of faith that first brought us into our
justification, will continue to lead us through our sanctification, until it
most assuredly brings us into our glorification. The God who began such a good
work in us not-so-good people will bring it to completion at the day of Christ. Therefore, we wait for that day in the activity of
grace that bears fruit in all kinds of good works.
Or, as brother Titus put it, Jesus, “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify
for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.”
From my heart,
Monte
© 2013 Monte Vigh ~
Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
