Don’t Count Sins this Christmas

We dedicated seven beautiful children a few months ago. We brought them before God and his church. We pledged an abiding interest in and commitment to their spiritual welfare. We did so fully understanding that these babies will one day choose to do what is wrong in the eyes of God. They will sin. It is inevitable. They have a nature that is bent away from God and toward sin. This is not to say that they are ONLY prone to sin. No, they are also amazing miracles of God’s creative imagination and unending grace. They are part of the creation judged to be “very good” by the Creator God (Genesis 1:31). And they are born with a longing to know the One who has made them and to do what is right. But they will need to be rescued. The spiritual flaw which plagues them from birth—and plagues us all—is not something we can fix on our own. Despite all the instruction that we receive and all the guidelines given by parents and society, all of us err. We lack sound judgment. We do things we regret, that we know are unwise. And we do them knowing that they are unwise and harmful to ourselves and to others. Christmas is the story of how the Creator God chose to address this relentless moral and spiritual failure of humans. He acted to rescue us from our sins. God has not missed his opportune moment on Planet Earth. God actually arrived at precisely the moment he chose. This is the meaning of Christmas. It was just the right moment in the spiritual condition of humans. We were powerless. After a thousand years of trying to keep the law, it was obvious that we were not going to be able to do it. The failure of the law to bring righteousness was clearly evident to all objective observers. Some would insist that it was man’s move, that God had done all he could possibly be expected to do. He created humans. He gave them stewardship of a lush and beautiful planet. He gave them relationships and communication skills. He gave humans amazing intellectual capacities. He equipped them for social networking that would enable them to achieve their greatest potential and highest good. Humans messed up the creation of God, including and especially themselves. All sin. That is who we are and how we are. Despite our flaws, we have the moral sense to identify evil. And we are incensed at injustice and wanton death and destruction. As it turns out, the greatest barrier to faith in God is often the question of evil in the world. We cannot reconcile in our minds the state of death and disease in the world with a loving and engaged God. God acted at this very point, experiential and philosophical. He struck at the heart of ungodliness. This is what Christmas is about, God dealing with evil in the world. The ungodly are the undevout and ungrateful of the world. They display qualities that a loving God abhors and practice things which he disdains while lacking virtues which he exemplifies and commands. Christmas is the season for the skeptic and the cynic to take note. All unbelievers should contemplate for a moment the notion that God became man in order to address the fatal flaw of humanity both personal and universal, individual and comprehensive. We are sinners. The manner of God’s movement against evil is surprising--not the violent, military annihilation of evil that leaves us all as casualties and all of us wondering why no other solution was possible. God addressed violence, disobedience, sin and evil by allowing these things, working through humans, to kill his only Son. Two words stand out in the story of Jesus: love and death. God responded to the evil of the world with unconditional love. God loved us all to the dying point. It was terrible this murder of the righteous one. But it was also planned in the foreknowledge and predetermined counsel of God. “Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). God knew that not one of us would ever be who we were created to be. Therefore, God’s one and only Son was born of a virgin on Christmas day. God became a man. He became a good man, good in the most authentic sense. He became a PERFECT man, a man as men were meant to be from their creation as designed by their Creator. This man was the Second ADAM, as Paul describes him: For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:17). Only this kind of man could take away our sin, God’s lamb without blemish, sacrificed on our behalf for the sins of the world. Christ reconciled us with God by eliminating the conflict. We were enemies of God. Christ identified all the places where we were wrong, sinful in our behavior. He addressed those through his blood. He made us clean and right through his death upon the cross for us. The ministry of reconciliation has been committed to us by God: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). God was “not counting men’s sins against them.” That would be a great Christmas attitude for all the upcoming family gatherings. In the light of God’s great gift of grace, how can we do less? Oh, if we could practice and pass on the reconciliation that God has given us and NOT COUNT sins this Christmas.

Snake in the Well

Our big family moved 500 miles without leaving Texas, from Canutillo to Richland Springs, when I was a freshman in high school in 1967. I was not a happy camper when Dad announced the move. I had friends, including Irma, my girlfriend, and I liked my life the way it was. Dad insisted on the move. Mom went reluctantly too. She was terribly upset that first night, I remember, crying and saying, “It’s the worst move we ever made!” She was standing with her feet in debris in the middle of a small living room with rotten wallpaper peeling off the walls and Sheetrock sagging from the ceiling joists. The idea Dad had was to make a living farming, but 140 acres of anything in central Texas was not enough to make a living for a family of ten children. We tried, though, by picking pears, planting peanuts, raising chickens, harvesting pecans, and hunting wild turkeys for food. Mom even roasted two armadillos for dinner one night—not my favorite meal. Dad soon returned to his former professions, teaching in the local school and preaching at the local church. It was for the best, really. He was a better teacher and preacher than he was a farmer. He made ends meet, but the farm was neglected. A hand-dug water well near the deep-rutted dirt road that ran by the front gate supplied our home and the barn with water. It was open-mouthed, rimmed with rocks, and around 40 feet deep. Hidden in the weeds that grew tall in the valley, it was out of sight and out of mind most of the time. Then the water became murky, and we all became aware again of our solitary water source. Dad asked people at Locker Baptist Church what to do about the water. Locker was a tiny community with a cemetery and a white wooden church building situated on the northeast side of an intersection between a ribbon of beaten asphalt and a thinner ribbon of rutted dirt. The tiny congregation held a meeting and decided to ask Dad to preach for them, and he did. Then they asked him to become the pastor. So we were all baptized again and became Baptists. I remember this well because I voiced the loudest protest in the family against getting dunked again. The church members were concerned about the dirty water. They asked Dad if he had treated the well with bleach. He had not, he said, and vowed to treat it as soon as he could secure a gallon of bleach. “Town” to us then was Richland Springs with a population of 300 people, a school, and a couple of stores. Dad bought the bleach there. We all waded through the weeds and went down to the well to see how things would go. We peered into the pit and saw something moving. Dad sent one of his boys back for a flashlight, and soon we discovered a snake was slithering around on the water in the well, maybe 30 feet below our feet. The water was mud-colored, and we were all disgusted that we drank it, but we were also fascinated by the snake and leaned over the well for a long time to get a good look. We had no idea how that snake got in the well. Dad did not know how to extract the snake from the well. He decided to go ahead and treat the well with the snake still in it. He screwed the top off the plastic jug and poured the whole gallon of bleach into the water below. We never saw the snake again. It makes my stomach flop just to think about what happened to it, but the water soon became so clear we could see the stones at the very bottom. The bleach did the trick. We tried not to think about the snake and drank our clean water with gratitude. Humans always need water, and getting it almost always causes problems. It’s why plumbers make so much money and rain is such a big deal in every human settlement. Water is the perfect illustration of simplicity, a clear liquid that comes down from above, flows over and under rocks, gathers in puddles and ponds, and constitutes most of every human’s body weight. We cannot exist without it. The goodness of God is like water. We cannot live without it, and if we conclude that we came into existence without the goodness of God, then existence itself is a moral perplexity. We go to this well all the time, every day. The goodness of God is a reservoir of strength and wisdom that channels its way through our daily thoughts and our most profound dissertations. It is where we begin and end in our moral reasoning, and where we go multiple times a day to quench the spiritual thirst that builds in our souls. The snake is in the well, a disturbing symbol of evil that slithers through biblical history and theology from “the serpent deceived me, and I ate” in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:13) to “that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan” in Revelation 20:2. Why is this snake in the well? Why does evil exist in a world created and sustained by a good God? The problem of evil is the most persistent and perplexing puzzle in religious discussion. It clouds the vision like disturbed sediment clouds the water. It makes you pause before you drink and look for a clearer spot somewhere in the pond. Sometimes you move on without the water because the snake is in the well.

Pain will come to you

Pain will come to you, deeper and darker than you ever imagined. Your suffering will be profound. It may be relentless. If not already, you will one day become acquainted with the suffering of mind and body that inevitably happens to humans in this world. You do not get to choose the events that come your way nor the sorrows that interrupt your life. They will likely be a surprise to you, catching you off guard and unprepared. You may hold your head in your hands and lament your weak condition and wonder what you ought to do. You are human, made in the image of God. You will choose your attitude and mind-set and lifestyle in the wake of your greatest sorrow and pain. You are a steward, not only of your resources and gifts, but of your limitations and disasters. Suffering will probe your soul more deeply and expose your true character more fully than all the victories life can bring. You discover both your constitution and your potential when you are called upon to give “the last full measure of devotion” (Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address). The roll call of faith is not a list of those least troubled or touched by the sufferings of life. On the contrary, the list of the faithful often includes those most beset by unjust treatment and painful ordeals. They are distinguished not by their freedom from pain but by their faithful response in the midst of it. This, too, will distinguish you in the family of humans. To suffer, that is common to all. To suffer and still keep your composure, your faith, and your smile, that is remarkable. In fact, onlookers will liken you to Jesus of Nazareth if you suffer patiently without complaint. They will note this quality of faith in you, and it will set your light upon a lampstand more surely and more brightly than any other opportunity in your life. Pain will change you more profoundly than success or good fortune. Suffering shapes your perception of life, your values and priorities, and your goals and dreams. Your pain is changing you, this is true.