One of the small disappointments of my time in seminary at Regent College—there weren’t many, but there were a few—was that Larry Crabb did not succeed Eugene Peterson as professor of spiritual theology when Eugene retired. That might seem odd, but it was announced in chapel that Larry would be taking Eugene’s position, and then it just . . . never happened. One of the joys of our time here at VSF was getting a second chance to learn from Larry and his wife, both here and at the School of Spiritual Direction. I learned much from his teaching, both his content and his method; as we’re talking about detachment in this season, it’s worth noting that a particular sort of detachment lay at the heart of his approach to teaching, counseling, and leadership. It’s not one I’ve ever been able to manage, alas, which may be why I was blessed most of all by Larry’s honesty about his failures in life and ministry and his frustrations with God.
At the top of that list is a comment that still sticks with me for how powerfully it resonated with my own experience. I can’t tell you the context, but I remember Larry expressing his exasperation at God for not being as concerned about Larry’s holiness as Larry was and thus not giving him victory over his sinful behaviors on Larry’s preferred schedule. That wasn’t a new thought for me; I’ve been wrestling with that issue for many years now; but his clarity and forcefulness spoke of a man who had been wrestling with it for many, many more. Does it seem strange to you that I found that, and still find it, comforting and encouraging? True, it suggests strongly that I won’t find an end to that struggle in this life; but more importantly, it tells me this struggle doesn’t mean I’m on the wrong road.
Hold that thought in mind as we turn to Ephesians 2; in our passage this morning, Paul is laying the foundation for our understanding of what it means to live as followers of Jesus Christ, and it’s important we not come to this passage with the assumption that God’s primary concern is with our behavior. Paul is saying something profoundly different here.
In the first place, notice how he begins this section of the letter: “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.” The problem isn’t that you used to do a lot of really bad stuff—you were dead. Bodies alive, minds alive, spirits dead. Spiritual zombies. Doing a lot of bad stuff, that you can fix with self-help programs and life hacks and counseling and better friends; you can’t fix dead. What’s more, Paul doesn’t say, “You were dead because of your trespasses and sins,” he says, “You were dead in your trespasses and sins.” They weren’t the reason you were dead, it’s the other way around. The bad stuff you did was the outward evidence of your inner deadness—and not just that you did bad things, but that you walked in them. They were your way of life. Your whole pattern of living was to do bad things. That pattern pointed to something deeper, which was the real problem. Now, you still do bad things, but you don’t walk in them; the pattern of your life has changed because something deeper has changed.
That change, we’ll get to in a minute. That’s God’s solution, and Paul isn’t done laying out the problem yet. When sin was your way of life, he says, you were stuck in the same rut as the rest of the world, following “the prince of the power of the air,” which is to say, the Devil. This, Paul says, is “the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience,” and we need to read that phrase carefully. A lot of our English translations reduce “the sons of disobedience” to “people who are disobedient,” and I get that—inclusive language—but I think it misses a lot of the point. We’ve talked about this a bit, you may remember, that when the Bible talks about us as “sons of [whatever],” the concern is not gender but inheritance. Granted that’s because laws of inheritance were gendered, of course, but if we want to do a cultural translation here, we should say “heirs of disobedience.” That’s the point. Those who follow the way of the world do so not because they are bold, radical, creative free-thinkers but because they have inherited their spirit of disobedience to God; along with their disobedience, or perhaps from it, they will inherit its consequences. The world thinks it’s setting its own course because it has rejected God, but it actually has the prince of lies leading it around by the nose.
Or perhaps not the nose, exactly; to walk in the way of the world is to live “in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.” When we lived that way, we were slaves and we didn’t even know it. We thought we were free because we thought—because the world tells us—that freedom is being able to do whatever we want. Sure, the world hedges its bets a little—“consenting adults,” “no one gets hurt,” etc.—but that’s the basic idea. We buy it because we don’t stop to ask where “whatever we want” comes from. Do we choose what we want? Do we choose our desires? And if we did, what would be the basis of our choice if we didn’t want anything until we made the choice? No, if we define freedom as being able to to act out our desires as we wish, then we are slaves: our desires are running the show. We can do what we want, sure, but when we hate ourselves for what we want—when we know what we want is killing us and destroying everything we value—we can’t stop doing what we want. Only in Jesus can we find true freedom, which is the freedom to not do what we want.
So if you’re dead, and you can’t fix dead, what can you do? Nothing, Paul tells us—you’re children of wrath. You’re hosed. Then he turns and says, “But God . . .” We were dead, all dead, nothing left to do but go through our pockets for loose change—but God made us alive. And note this: it wasn’t because he thought we’d eventually repay his investment, it was solely because of his great love and mercy.
The underlying concept here is the Hebrew word hesed, the relentless, unyielding, infinite covenant love and faithfulness of God, and it’s important that we get this here. The world—which thinks God is one big buzzkill because he won’t let us stay up as late as we want—thinks God hates sinners. Nothing could be further from the truth. God hates sin, and he hates sin because it is the mortal enemy of those he loves—us. His wrath toward sin is one of the faces of his love for us, and he shows us mercy because his desire is to separate us from the sin which is killing us, which will otherwise separate us from him. As such, the wrath of God is temporary, because it will end when sin is finally put to death once and for all. Only his love is eternal.
Thing is, of course, when we’re dead in our sins, slaves to our desires, the life of God is completely alien to us. Not only can we not be good enough to earn it, we can’t even want it. In fact, we can’t even want to want it, or want to be good enough to earn it. His life comes to us as pure gift, and one we can only see as a gift after we’ve received it. This is why Paul says—for the first time, just as a parenthetical comment—that we have been saved by grace. God has made us alive in Christ, raised us up and brought us into his presence in Christ, so he can pour out the incomprehensible riches of his goodness on us, because he knows that’s what we were made for even though we don’t. He doesn’t give us just enough life, he gives it abundantly.
And so Paul comes to the core of his message, expanding his parenthetical comment to give it its full weight and significance: “By grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of anything you’ve done.” Our salvation, everything good about us, all of it, is purely God’s free gift. We don’t earn salvation by our faith; even our faith is his gift. He gives us his grace, and then he gives us the faith to respond to his grace—it’s all God, coming and going. We don’t earn salvation by our works; even our works are his gift. He crafted us, with our gifts, our skills, our training, our experiences, to do his good works, and then he created the works for us to do and gave them to us so we could do them as he designed and prepared us to do. Again, it’s all God, coming and going.
And why did God do it this way? Paul looks us straight in the eyes and says, “So that no one has any right to boast”—and that sticks in our craw sideways. The world might be able to go along with everything Paul says, our egos might be able to take it all, but for that; them’s fightin’ words. God’s word offends every culture somewhere, as Tim Keller has noted, and for the most part it’s in different places each time, but this is the point of offense common to all: it’s the intolerable offense of God’s grace.
Now, when I say that, you might think I’m nuts. Doesn’t the world condemn the church for being legalistic? Doesn’t everyone want grace? Well, no, not really. There are certainly plenty of legalistic churches out there, and plenty more that aren’t which the world brands as legalistic anyway, but the world doesn’t actually object to legalism at all. It just wants a set of laws it likes. There are three reasons for this, which are also the three reasons why legalism is a powerful and ever-present temptation for the church. One, if you have a list of things to do, then all you have to do is those things, and you’re home free. You can measure yourself against the list and know if you’re good enough. You can look at where you stand and where the line is, where the fence is, and know which side of it you’re on. This means you know just how far you can push it without going over. Living by grace, you can’t do that, because infinite gratitude calls for more than just a limited response.
Two, if you get to decide what rules are the right ones to follow, you can pick ones you can follow and that seem to serve your purposes. As the author and pastor Jared C. Wilson put it some years ago, “[a lot of people] want to be told religion is not about rules and regulations while at the same time being told each week which four steps (with helpful alliteration) they need to do in order to achieve maximum what-have-you. They want to be reassured that works don’t merit salvation while at the same time convinced salvation is about trying really hard to do things that unlock the power or secret of God’s such-and-such.” He wryly concluded, “making discipleship about helpful hints and positive power for successful living [is] really just making a works religion in our new image. In an odd twist, the Oprah-ization of the faith is really just optimistic legalism. Because what is Pharisaical legalism, really, but self-help with bad PR?”
Reason three is where all this lands, and where it collides head-on with Paul’s message in our passage this morning: legalism lets us take all the credit. It lets me point to myself obeying the rules and say, “Look at me—I did that. Am I not wonderful?” It lets me point to whatever is good in my life and declare that I’ve earned it. Now, granted, this is probably more appealing to people who are successful by the world’s standards, and you might rightly say I can only see this because I’m not; but then again, how easy would it be for me to twist that and say, “Look at me—look how wise and spiritual I am because I can see this flaw in other people. Am I not better than them? They’re successful because they’re telling the world what it wants to hear, but I can . . .” yada, yada, yada. Remember what I said a few weeks ago about spiritual pride. That’s a fire that can keep the ego warm like few other things. That’s probably, honestly, the greater part of the answer to Larry’s frustrated question. Why doesn’t God prioritize our outward sinlessness? At least in part, I suspect it’s because that would create fertile soil for spiritual pride and spiritual arrogance, which would poison our lives far more in the long run.
We really want to believe we’re enough, and we’re good enough, whatever “enough” might look or feel like to us; and you can’t blame us for that. The Piano Guys recorded a song a few years ago called “(It’s Gonna Be) Okay” which declares the idea that “we are not enough” is a “lie” that “the world’s gonna try to sell you.” I enjoy the song, but that’s the exact backwards of the truth. The world is heavily invested in telling us either that we are enough or that we can be as long as we follow the right program, depending on who’s trying to sell you something this week and what breed of snake they get their oil from. Bone-deep, we want desperately to be enough, and to be good enough, to make life work for us the way we want it to; and if we seem to be managing that, we also, understandably, want to be able to take the credit for our success.
To receive God’s grace, Paul tells us, we can’t cling to any of that. It’s not wrong in itself to want credit for things we do or accomplish; all is gift, and certainly our salvation is pure gift and nothing of our own doing, but our choices and our efforts along the way do matter. We didn’t make ourselves who we are and we didn’t save ourselves, but we aren’t puppets. Phil is the pianist he is because God gave him a gift for music, but it’s also because, y’know, he practices. If we give him credit for that, if we applaud him, that’s evidence that the time, effort, and love he has put into the work matters. Is it wrong for him to want that assurance? No! But—he needs to hold that with open hands. We all do. When you have committed your time and energy and disciplined yourself to do the good works God created you to do, when I do, we want to know that it has meant something and that it’s bearing fruit in our lives and the lives of those around us; to open our hands and say, “I trust that God sees, and I will rest in that whether anyone else does or not”—that’s hard. Sometimes that really hurts. We need to do it all the same.
Now, if you’re sitting there thinking, “That’s easy for you to say,” I get that. It is in fact very much not easy for me to say; the faithful preacher begins by preaching to the mirror, and sometimes ends there as well, and this is one of those times; but I get the reaction. If it is only right for me to get the credit for pouring out my life for the people of God, if it is unjust that the fruit of your blood, toil, tears, and sweat should be ignored or dismissed or rejected or belittled, how can we tell one another to hold that with open hands?
As unjust as that may seem, there are two good reasons to call each other to do exactly that. One, as Emily has noted, is that when we cling to something, our grip tends to get tighter and tighter until we eventually crush the life out of it. The other is that when we cling to something, it doesn’t stop there. This is a lesson I learned from Gert Kumi—I think a few of you remember him—when he was Rebekah’s violin teacher. During one lesson, for whatever reason, she was holding her bow far too tightly; Gert pointed out that the tension in that hand had spread through her body, and particularly to her other hand, where it was interfering with her fingerings. Clinging to things creates tension in us, it creates anxiety, and anxiety always spreads, in our lives and beyond them to others.
By contrast, the more we can release our grip on the credit we deserve (or feel we deserve), the more we can begin to let go of the need to be good enough—and that truly is a matter of letting go altogether, because in ourselves we aren’t good enough and never will be. Thing is, the more we accept that humbling reality, the more we can hear the good news of God’s grace. Human religion tells us we can be good enough to raise ourselves up to reach God, and in so doing it lays on us the crushing burden of being good enough to do so; and when we fail, there are always some who think they’ve made it who are happy to tell us our failure is our own fault (and proves we aren’t as good as them). This is not Christianity; this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel is that Jesus has done what we cannot do, and that no matter how hard we may fall and no matter how low we may go, Christ is lower still.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563.