Our Real Problem in Marriage...and Most Everything Else

Allow me to riff off of something that my former pastor, Steve Shelby, used to say. When marriages are struggling, conventional wisdom tends to point to one issue--communication.

But here's the deal: communication is not your main problem in your marriage. Your main problem is that your both sinners. You could communicate perfectly and it still wouldn't fix your marriage. You'd still be broken, messy people with messed up motives, hard-wired with the desire to manipulate the other, full of pride, anxiety, fear, and selfishness that wrecks marriage...and all the rest of our relationships.

Ergo, apart from repentance, there is no healing in marriage.

This mis-diagnosis plays out not only in marriage. "Mis-communication" gets blamed for all sorts of things in our culture as we gave done away with any cultural concept of sin. Sometimes with results that would be hilarious if it weren't all so tragic.

Last spring, for example, on campus at UNC one student group brought in an extremely conservative speaker who was speaking against immigration. Another group (made up of some students, some townies) protested and ended up disrupting the event--calling the speaker (and the sponsoring student organization) racist. A couple of folks got arrested.

In the paper the next day, one student leader was quoted as saying, "I think that we've got a good bit of mis-communication."

Uh, no we don't. I think we're communicating loud and clear.

But without a category for sin, we're stuck--with the only correct diagnosis not available to us ("sin" has been taken off the table by our own cultural volition), we're stuck with options that are weak and, put bluntly, wrong.

Incorrect diagnosis, of course, means that we can't cure the real problem--as anyone who plays a doctor on t.v. could tell you. Without recognition of sin, we cannot repent. No repentance, no peace.

So as Christians, we must not be shy of calling sin what it is--sin. This is a good gift for our culture. And we must be equally eager to invite people into the offer on the table for healing and right relationship. That is, we are to call sin sin, and we are to speak the good news: the invitation to everyone to repent, be reconciled to God and serve and love one another--even in the context of legitimate disagreement.

True, this diagnosis (calling something "sin") has been mis-handled at times--there is such a thing as mis-communication, for example, and it does cause problems. But the abuse of something should not therefore eliminate it's availability for proper use.

Rescued from Compulsive Jaywalking

So if this whole thing started with a celebration, and we're invited to be a people of celebration, what is it, exactly, that we're celebrating?

Here a passage from George MacDonald that I read just the other day might be of service: "Jesus did not just die to save us from the punishment of our sins; he died to saves us from our sins"--that is, he died to re-orient our nature away from sin and towards life.

In other words, Jesus didn't just save us from having to pay the fine for our jaywalking. He actually works in our hearts so that our compulsion to jaywalk is no longer reigning over us, causing us to put ourselves and others in danger.

The old church fathers often talked about how we have been delivered from these enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil. We barely (if at all) believe the last one exists; we'd much rather coddle our flesh than conquer it; and the world seems to have a lot of nice things going for it, thank you very much, why talk so harshly about it?

Clearly we Christians can 'overdo' the propensity to identify our enemies. The results of over-eager condemnation have been well-documented. What has been far less well documented has been the consequences of pretending those enemies do not exist.

To live a life where sin (and the result of sin, which is death) no longer reigns--that's something worth celebrating. Anything less, and we are far, far too easily pleased.

Purity, Integrity, and Post-Dating, Part 2: Adding Angels

It seems that in the Scriptures we're called to look at and take sin seriously--both the ways that we've been sinned against and the ways that we've sinned ourselves. But we never do that as an end, in and of itself.

Looking at the ways that we've sinned and been sinned against is always supposed to be a stepping stone to the need for grace, rescue, forgiveness, and healing--all things that are offered to us at the cross.

In the Luke's account of the resurrection story, the women go to the tomb and they meet a couple of angels who pronounce these glorious words: "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he is risen!"

Given how emphatically the New Testament, particularly Paul, emphasizes how we once were dead in our sin but now we have been raised in and with Christ (see Ephesians 2, and Colossians 3, among others) I think that we have a right to take on the angels' words as describing our own situation.

Next time you find yourself either over-infatuated with how you've been sinned against (therefore reveling in your victim status) or overly-fixed on how you've sinned (and stuck in the cycle of self-condemnation and guilt) hear these words of the angels directed to you:

"Why do you look for yourself among the dead? You are not here! You have risen!"

This is the good news of the gospel. We need to hear it. We need to preach it to ourselves and remind ourselves what is true.

And we need to speak it to one another. We need to remind one another over and over again what is true because we have so many other messages coming at us all the time.

This is one of the main purposes of Christian community: to speak the gospel of our "risen-ness" to one another in real-time, in the midst of our everyday lives. We need people that we can call on who will remind us what is true: we are no longer among the dead, we have risen with Christ.

Apart from that, we are barely alive.

Purity's Yes

I recently heard a mentor of mine share how he pleads with teens in his church about sexual purity: "Purity paves the way for intimacy."

I like that. It takes something that is almost wholly thought of in terms of the negative ("purity" usually equals "I don't get to do what I want to do") and focuses it on the positive fruit that is the outcome of a life of purity.

Sexual purity is a means to a greater ends. It is a "no" that serves a much bigger, much more significant "YES." The final word in our life with Christ is always "YES!" We get some "no's" along the way, but they always, always, always are there to serve and bless us...to lead us into the joy of the yes.

Intimacy is what we were designed for. Purity makes a way for genuine intimacy to happen. It's not that purity automatically means intimacy. It's that without purity, genuine intimacy is much more difficult to cultivate.

Impurity builds walls, builds more obstacles to the life of intimacy that we are hard-wired for. Given our fallen and hiding nature, intimacy is already challenging. When we fall into a pattern of sexual sin, it only makes matters worse, more complicated, sometimes impossible.

This is challenging stuff given that in my work with college men my operating assumption is that there's some degree of ongoing porn consumption unless I know for a fact that it is otherwise. I don't know as much about post-college-age men, but my guess is that this struggle doesn't magically dissipate once someone has a diploma.

But porn and the hook-up culture and all our other ways of acting out sexually are like trying to find a short-cut to intimacy that dead-ends before the promise is delivered. All sin is like that. Sin makes promises that it can't deliver on and leaves us with the consequences.

All the various abuses and distortions of the gift of sex are like drinking salt water. It never actually meets the thirst for intimacy that we were designed for.

Purity paves the way for intimacy. That's worth pursuing. That's something worth fighting and living for.

Achan Over Justice

Joshua 7 is one of those passages that I wish wasn't in the Bible. In brief: the Israelites conquer Jericho and are instructed to give to God all of the spoils. They were to keep none of the articles of gold or silver or anything of value for themselves.

Achan doesn't listen. He keeps some gold and silver for himself. So the next battle that the Israelites take on they get routed and about 35 of their men are killed. God tells Joshua that there's sin in the camp. Eventually they find out that it's Achan, and they stone him and all his family--women and children.

Yuck.

Monday I told God that this was a hard passage for me. I told him I didn't really like it, and asked him to help me with the image of my wife and kids getting stoned (a nasty way to die) by God's orders on account of my sin.

Tuesday, I went back to the same story and realized that my problem with the passage was due at least in some part because of my own problem: I don't take sin very seriously.

See, my assumption with sin is that it is there to be excused, forgiven, winked at, shrugged off, disposed of quickly and easily and painlessly. My assumption is that sin is not a big a deal.

My presumption upon God, therefore, is that he is there to dismiss sin, ignore it, clean up the mess and not allow us to deal with the consequences or reality of it.

But the reality is that sin is death. It is corrosive, destructive, vile. Sin is not something to take lightly, dismiss, laugh off or pretend that it never happened.

Sin is a cancer on the beauty of humanity, a plague, a parasite, a tyrant, a despot that destroys people and relationships and families and governments and churches and communities and cultures and ultimately, if left un-checked, would collapse in on itself and consume all the world.

I want Achan to be let off the hook easily because I want to be let off the hook easily. But Easter will not let me do that. Good Friday will not let me skim over the depths and the horror and the seriousness of my sin.

And so I need Achan today. I need Achan to teach me new and holy appetites. My sin is not to be ignored or excused or shrugged off--I must learn to hate the thing that would hijack my life and destroy me, body and soul.

And I'm tentatively praying a new prayer this week: to see sin for what it truly is. I'm afraid of what that might mean, what I might see in my own heart as well as what I might have to see in the world around me. But I think my response to Achan is showing me that I need a bit of a reality check as to the true nature of sin.

I must learn to embrace the hard-earned forgiveness offered to me in Christ without arrogant presumption that "of course" God would die a bloody tortured death for me. My sin puts my Maker on a wooden beam with nails in his hands. Good Friday is when Jesus becomes Achan for me.

This doesn't quiet all my internal objections to Achan and his family and the judgment passed on them. I love mercy. I fear justice. I don't always understand how God is both just and merciful.

But for today, I can embrace the lesson of my tendency to downplay my sin and my need to repent of it. And I pray that God might use this repentance to lead me more fully and deeply into the wonder and mystery and power and awe of Easter.

The Christian Worldview Response to Secular Pluralism

The Christian worldview offers us this: human nature is fundamentally broken. This is not an angry or pessimistic perspective, any more than the dentist telling you that you've got a cavity. It simply is.

We were made to be image bearers--bearers of God's perfect image. We were made to represent or reflect something of God's goodness perfectly, if incompletely.

Scot (only one 't') McKnight in his book Embracing Grace uses the analogy of icons on a computer. When you and I were double-clicked on, whenever we took on a task--answered the phone, drove to work, checked e-mail, took a nap--we were supposed to mediate something of God's goodness, His beauty, truth, love, perfection to one another and to experience it ourselves.

But then sin happened, and the icons cracked. Sin is broken relationship. We are fallen, broken relationship-type people. Now when I'm double-clicked on, this icon may or may not produce something of God's character. It depends on how much sleep I got, what I ate for lunch, and if I happen to like you today or not.

We've broken relationship first with God and secondarily with one another, with the ways that we write laws and handle money and sexuality and t.v. and power and natural resources.

See, we were made to worship God, love people and use things. Instead, we worship our own desires, love things and use people.

And so when we come together and make nation-states and militaries and build supermarkets and churches and make movies, it all so easily goes so very wrong.

Soundbytes for Repentance

I'm speaking tonight on how God invites us to share in the final reality that Hope Wins by inviting us to repent of sin. I'm trying to talk about repentance and obedience without sounding like a freakish, angry Pharisee. Here are a few soundbytes:

Temptation: the lie that life outside of being with God is qualitatively better than life with God.

Sin: breaking relationship with God in order to act in faith on those lies.

Repentance: to turn away from beliefs, motives, or actions that are outside of God’s character and to turn towards God for life and ultimate satisfaction and fulfillment.

Obedience: to live a life in faith on the promises of God that life with him is qualitatively better, more in line with reality than any other thing offered to us.

Repentance and obedience are the relentless campaigns of those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.

All sin is war against God’s peace

God is eager to unleash all the forces of heaven against all the forces of sin and hell to undo sin that has caused death and destruction and disfigurement of men and women whom he created to be image-bearers, to be ones who showed forth God’s glory and beauty and goodness

Sin is thin, the payoff is weak, the returns get smaller and smaller, it gets more and more hollow the further down into it you get; one person's testimony about struggles with pornography: “I was thirsty for real intimacy and my involvement with pornography was like drinking salt water.”

All sin is like this—it promises much and delivers only very little.

Sin is boring, there’s only 5 plot lines in the arsenal of sin: sex, power, money, escape, fame. It’s like a bad soap opera with recycled plot lines over and over again throughout history.

Sin and evil is on a short leash and one day will be done away with, and so there are only a finite number of ways sin can express itself because sin is itself finite and one day will no longer be.

Sin barely exists in and of itself—it only exists as a parasite to the good. Sex is good, sin distorts it. Money and power and recreation and applause are all good, sin just distorts it.

Sin is actually foreign to our humanity. Humanity was not made to live in sin, we were made to be sinless--it is a cancer, a corruption of our human nature

Sin and death and brokenness are all on a leash, the clock is ticking and there will come a day when they will exist no longer.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, how monotonously similar are all the tyrants and famous sinners of the world! How gloriously different and diverse are all the saints.

There are, in fact, billions of ways to delight in the freedom and wonder of holiness, and really only a handful of ways to really revel in sin.

God is infinite and he is holy—therefore, there are an infinite ways to experience the joy and wonder and freedom of holiness.