James 3:16:

“…where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and ever vile practice.”

We ask ourselves about some chronic sin, ‘why do I keep doing this?’, we look at our churches and say, ‘why don’t we look anything like the faithful depicted in scripture’, we look at our culture and our corporations and wonder, ‘why does that happen?’.

‘That lawsuit is just greedy.’

‘She hit me with her car, why is she yelling?’

‘Why isn’t he there for his kids?’

‘Why can’t he spend even one night without getting drunk and passing out?’

Sin has its roots in our personal and pervasive commitment to our own ambition. From the very first sin beneath that tree, it was only considering ourselves that lead us to neglect God and the purposes he had designed for us. And it continues today in every country, culture, people group, family and individual. Even the church. It is the personal commitment to self and our ambitions that leads to ‘disorder and every vile practice.’

I’ve often spoken to people frustrated by their inability to stop sinning. I sympathize because in so many ways, I suffer the same frustration.

The total message of James, and the frequently overlooked solution, I believe is this: We must see and trust God’s grace, and we must meet that with our own personal commitment to selflessness.

James 1:27:

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans, and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

As we know from the whole of scripture, by trusting God’s grace, we have the power to live a religion undefiled before God, and by our own commitment to selflessness, our actions, by the same grace of God, begin to fall in line with those of God’s desire.

Of course, that is all much easier written that worked. It’s a good thing grace is the much greater part, no matter what it’s contrasted with.

I think that most people at first have a hesitation to be honest about their struggles when speaking to someone they recently met, or that they don’t know well. It makes sense. We’re unsure of their reactions. We don’t know if they will be sympathetic or judgmental. We don’t know if they’ll understand.

Even more so, I think that most of us have that same hesitation with God, but for much deeper reasons. We know of God’s holiness, and even though we hear of and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice, there remains a disconnect. God his holy, we are not.

But just as it is with people, the more we get to know them, and the more they get to know us, the more aware we become of their struggles and imperfections. Most, in time, become sympathetic of our struggles and the judgment from people who we’ve become close to stops being a worry. We can look at them and know they’ll understand. We come to trust their sympathy.

John Piper makes, perhaps, the most intelligent argument for why we can have that same confidence before God, right out the gate.

“On the way to the cross for thirty years, Christ was tempted like every human is tempted. True, he never sinned. But wise people have pointed out that this means his temptations were stronger than ours, not weaker. If a person gives in to temptation, it never reaches its fullest and longest assault. We capitulate while the pressure is still building. But Jesus never did. So he endured the full pressure to the end and never caved. He knows what it is to be tempted with fullest force.”

Humans know the displeasure of failure, and that’s something. But no human understands the full force and weight of temptation to sin—except Jesus. When we sin, Jesus knows, and relates to every ounce of weight we experienced before meeting our failure.

As John Piper continues later, “Jesus feels with us, not against us.”

Before Jesus, in spite of God’s holiness, we are able to come with our struggles and failures. Not only before a gracious God with a legal obligation to pardon us, but with an emotional understanding of what led to our struggle and sin. He gets it. And not only in a cosmic, all-knowing sense, but in a real, “I’ve been there” sense. One that is much more potent than any brother or sister we might have confidence in.

Philippians 3:12

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

Paul has just finished talking about the perfection we will achieve when we come into glory with Christ. He’s speaking about sanctification. And he’s made it clear that he’s not perfect. He’s admitting his imperfection and his own proneness to sin.

He hasn’t already obtained it, but he’s trying. Imagine that.

But it’s that last bit that I forget. Sanctification is an ongoing process of which we are co-workers with God. God shapes and forms us in all kinds of ways, meanwhile we attempt constantly to mortify the flesh. But why? Because Christ has made us his own.

By Christ’s blood, we were purchased and invited into the family of God. We are objects of mercy, which God is taking great care to conform to his own image. But what motivates us to fulfill our part is the constant and growing knowledge that we were bought with a price, that we are not our own. That we were plucked from the pathway of doom, and placed down in the seat of mercy, in spite of our widespread infection of imperfection.

It it is gratitude. It is our striving to live a life worthy of the Gospel. It is the child who knows his father loves him and does not want to disappoint him. Of course we will. And for that, there is grace too, yet again, feeding the motivation and desire to stand and reflect God’s glory back to the world.

John Piper writes in 50 Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die:

One of the greatest heartaches in the Christian life is the slowness of our change. We hear the summons of God to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength (Mark 12:30). But do we ever rise to that totality of affection and devotion? We cry out regularly with the apostle Paul, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). We groan even as we take fresh resolves: “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).

Piper continues, referring to this verse. Hebrews 10:14:

“For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”

And so Piper continues:

One of the greatest sources of joy and endurance for the Christian is knowing that in the imperfection of our progress we have already been perfected—and that this is owing to the suffering and death of Christ. “For by a single offering [namely, him-self!] he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). This is amazing! In the same sentence he says we are “being sanctified” and we are already “perfected.”

There is a tension, a dichotomy, going on here. We are both perfect, and being perfected. It is a mystery of sorts. Both are completely true. In Christ, we are perfect and thanks to Christ we are being made perfect.

It’s as if the princess kissed the toad and he is now a prince. He really is a prince. But now he has to learn to act like that which he really is.

Christians have been made perfect in Christ. Now we just have to learn to act like it.

Our culture is notorious for reparative medical practices. We don’t prevent illness, we fix it when it breaks. A much better practice is preventative medicine—the practice of taking medical precautions to stop illness from happening in the first place. Many other cultures use this practice (Japan is a good example). But we seem to be fine running as hard (or as carelessly) as we can until something stops working. Of course, unfortunately for us, parts like the heart or brain don’t usually get a second chance.

After a discussion with a good friend a few nights ago, it occurred to me that this isn’t really isolated to the medical industry. We do it with our emotions and spiritual life too. Most people, in most cultures probably do, but I don’t really have a way of knowing that.

Besides Jesus, who can know us better than we do? Who can better predict our common pitfalls better than we do? After a lifetime of mistakes, we usually know what kind of activities and situations will cause us to ‘break’. Yet most of the time we walk into them anyway, then attempt to repair it later.

A woman knows a particular type of guy is bad for her, yet she ends up with relationship after relationship with the same kind of guy. A guy knows that if he hangs out with a certain set of friends he’s going to drink too much, yet he goes and drinks anyway. In spite of knowing our own patterns we repeat them. Or even less obviously detrimental, a Christian knows that if he doesn’t read his bible first thing in the morning, he won’t read at all, yet he skips it anyways.

Or, more abstractly, rather than working to truly repair our emotional distress and difficulty in a lasting, meaningful way, we take a proverbial aspirin and sit in front of the TV or hours on end; numb ourselves with excessive social obligation; or bury ourselves in work.

What if instead of all these things, we honored the reality of our patterns and took deliberate steps to change them? What if we made honest efforts to allow Jesus to deal with our real problems, rather than using 6 hour pain killers?

It’s not as popular a sentiment as it used to be. Or at least it seems that way. That is, the idea that our salvation is a matter of outweighing our bad deeds with good ones. Kind of like a works-based Gospel meets karma. Or something like that. But nevertheless, it is still an idea that has a way of prevailing. And at first, it makes sense. After all, that is how we operate.

We often assess people or things by their greatest good, and neglect their evil, provided it’s to a lesser degree. Or vice-versa. In a spiritual sense, deed-counting seems like a reasonable approach.

Of course a careful rational exploration of what God must be like will reveal that keeping the works in balance probably wouldn’t get you anywhere with a true deity of cosmic proportion—at least not one that is hands-on. And, the Bible flat out tells us that this isn’t the case. However, the Bible also leaves other clues that this couldn’t possibly be the case. Even if we were somehow misunderstanding what is meant when it tells us that our Life is not based on “works” but on “grace”.

The clues lie in the bible’s teaching that all of man’s works are flawed. Our good deeds aren’t good per se. They are good, in one sense, that all things that hold some reflection of God’s character are good. But they are not “good” in a different sense that nothing is so unless it comes from faith.

The bible teaches that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” (Romans 14:23). It also teaches that before we are made alive through Christ, we are “dead” in our trespasses (Colossians 2:13).

Before being redeemed by Christ, a persons ‘good deeds’ are in their greater part not good deeds. They have the appearance of good deeds, and in a way they are good because they are a reflection of God’s character, but they are still bad deeds.

If our salvation were a matter of balancing the scales, we would never pull it off regardless of how many we manage to perform. For every good deed we do, we not only add weight to the good side of the scale, we add even more weight to the bad side. It would never balance out and we would invariably perish in our sin, thinking to ourselves, “but I’ve been so good!” And our final prideful declaration would dot the T’s and cross the I’s of our well veiled life of sin.

So much for Christian Karma. Thank God for grace.

I was in the back yard watching my dog Mikey as I drank my coffee this morning. Like most dogs, Mikey has a real obsession with squirrels. It’s impossible to say if his excitement is sporting or a true bloodlust for the furry rodents. But one thing is for sure, he wants to get his jaws around them and tear them to shreds at every possible opportunity.

Mikey will spend hours tracking squirrels through the back yard. He’s part beagle. That little nose of his will stay pretty close to the ground all the time. Going over and over the squirrels tracks. He knows where they come in and where they go out. He’s even wise to the squirrel nest in a tree tree twenty feet above the yard.

Yet still, in spite of all his hard work and constant ‘research’ of squirrel behavior, he’s never caught one. And still, when one dares to come in our out of the yard, invariably, Mikey isn’t ever close enough to put an end to the trespasser.

Rationally, with all this constant investigation, you’d think that he’d be honing in on the critters. Like a police detective, Inching closer and closer to capturing them. But that never happens. You know why? Because he’s a dog. His memory span is about 15 seconds. He can’t employ reason, just instinct, and some element of habit. But never reason.

This all got me thinking—we kind of do this too.

Who has done more research and investigation of my own habits than me? No one. Yet I will consistently walk into my own pitfalls.

Just think about it. Have you ever been to a party, drank way too much, puked your guts out, then throught a hazy hang-over said, “I drank way too much. I’m not going to do that again.” What happened a month later? Too much drinking. Puking. And dehydrated resolves to reform your habits.

So maybe not the drinking. But how about dating someone who’s bad for you? I’ll bet you’ve gotten into that (kind of) relationship more than once. How about speaking carelessly and hurting people’s feelings? How about pornography? Yeah. I see all this and a lot more in the people around me—and of course my own ludicrous failure to learn from the mistakes I’ve made. I think most people can relate to the apparent inability to learn from our own personal research of ourselves.

Problem is, you’re not going to be able to fix this. Even with a massive resolve to do so, the best you’ll ever do is push the problem into some other context.

Enter Jesus. Problem solved. On so many levels—though perhaps not the ones you’d expect—problem solved. Problem so very, very solved.