Category: Grace

Blue Christmas: The Cure for Christmas Melancholy

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

I imagine everyone has something that epitomizes their Christmas experience. It’s often a song or a movie. For me, it’s that moment in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Linus and Charlie Brown are discussing the meaning of Christmas. “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy,” Charlie Brown complains. “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess.” A little later, after Charlie Brown selects a scrawny little Christmas tree that drops its needles for the pageant, he laments, “Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I don’t really know what Christmas is all about.”

I first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas on television in 1965, when it aired on CBS. I was twelve years old at the time, and it captivated me. I loved everything about it: the music, the animation, the storyline. But most of all, I loved its honesty, because even at that young age, I had already noticed a connection between Christmas and melancholia.

A famous song, performed by just about every musical artist who has ever released a holiday album, describes Christmas as “the most wonderful time of the year” and the “hap-happiest season of all.” But many people have a different experience. Theirs is more like Charlie Brown’s. Like him, they wonder why they don’t feel the way they are supposed to feel. Their Christmas experience is tinged with longing and sadness, and they blame themselves. Or the universe. Or maybe God.

I notice it in myself, and I’ve concluded that Charlie Brown is asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering why we don’t feel the way we are supposed to feel, we ought to ask what it is about Christmas that causes us to expect to feel something remarkable to begin with. The answer to this question is more complex than you might expect. It’s not just one thing—this feeling of seasonal melancholia springs from multiple sources.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

One reason our feelings tend to fall short is that we expect Christmas to match our memory. This expectation is infused with nostalgia. I don’t think that it is an accident that the first spirit that visits Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol comes to remind him of his past:

“Who and what are you?” Scrooge demanded. “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge observant of its dwarfish stature. “No. Your past.”[1]

This is Dickens at his best, functioning as the master psychologist. He understands that what we are is the sum of what we have been. This does not mean that we cannot change. The possibility of change is the promise that lies at the heart of his story. But the fact that the first Spirit to appear to Scrooge is the ghost of his past is a signal that change is unlikely to occur before we have understood the forces that have shaped us.

Take a careful look at your Christmas tree, and you will find that it probably says as much about your past as it does Christmas. If your tree is like mine, it is as layered as an archeological dig. Most of us aren’t just celebrating the arrival of a new holiday; we are celebrating the past. What is more, it isn’t some biblical past that moves us but our own. As Christmas draws near, the collective weight of every Christmas we have ever known bears down upon us like a demanding parent with impossible expectations. We aren’t merely trying to celebrate something; our aim is to recreate.

This is a vain hope for two reasons. First, because the conditions that made Christmas Past have dissipated. Time has moved on. The children have grown. People have moved. Some have died. Even the same ingredients, after we have measured them with meticulous accuracy, take on a slightly different flavor. Try as you might, you will only be able to reproduce an echo of what you think you remember.

All these things point to the second reason for our failure. The Christmas you recall is probably not the one you experienced. What you are feeling is nostalgia, not memory. The term comes from a compound word formed by joining the Greek noun meaning “return” with the noun meaning “pain”. In other words, to the ancient mind, nostalgia is the pain of longing to return. It is an acute case of homesickness.

Unfortunately, the vision of the past that nostalgia provides is one that has been enhanced by distance. It is a picture of our experience with the sharp edges worn down by time and forgetfulness. I am not exactly saying that it is a lie. But it is not exactly the truth either. It is a softer version. As if this version of our reality had been reproduced by that artist who called himself the “painter of light.” I don’t mean Rembrandt or Turner.

Days of Future Past

What we experience as a longing for our past actually has to do with the future. It is what C. S. Lewis has called, in The Weight of Glory, a “desire for our own far off country” and “a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.”[2] As James K. A. Smith similarly puts it, “We are always on the way; the Christian life is a ‘refugee spirituality,’ because we are longing for a home we’ve never been to.”[3]

As Lewis and Smith describe nostalgia, the feeling is not quite a distortion. It is more of an anticipation of the life to come. We experience the ache of nostalgia as a kind of pleasant grief, the sorrow for a bygone age that will never return. But what if it is the opposite? Is it possible that this longing springs from a desire for what is yet to come? If this is the case, then our orientation is all wrong. Instead of looking backward and trying to recreate the past, the purpose of this ache is to help us face forward. It was the disposition of the patriarchs, who the writer of Hebrews says were “still living by faith when they died.” According to Hebrews 11:13: “They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.”

During the holiday season, we feel obliged to be happy. I am not talking about the kind of happiness one sometimes feels in the ordinary course of events. What I am describing is more extreme. It is a sense that it is our Christian duty to have a transcendent experience at Christmas. When I became a serious follower of Jesus shortly after I turned 19, I can recall wondering how that would change my experience of Christmas. The honest answer was that it diminished it to some degree. Learning the truth about the Nativity of Christ stripped Christmas of its gaudier aspects. The things I loved most about the holiday season had nothing at all to do with the event it is supposed to celebrate.

The Myth of Christmas Magic

Christmas cards, carols, and just about every holiday movie we have ever seen have told us that the Christmas season is supposed to be magical and transforming. Scripture does, in fact, portray the Nativity and the incarnation of Christ as something miraculous and transformative. The birth of Christ was a singular event with cosmic significance, not only for “all the people,” but for creation itself. Yet describing it as magical is something quite different.

But the effects of Christ’s Nativity are not linked to a particular season, if by “season” we mean a specific month of the year. The idea of sacred time does not originate with the church. It was an essential part of the religious landscape of the Old Testament from which the gospel sprang. Yet the arrival of Christ so altered that landscape that the apostle Paul would later call those things: “a shadow of the things that were to come” and tell the Colossians their reality is found in Christ (Col. 2:17). The Nativity was a sacred event. Christmas, as we know and celebrate it–not so much.

Christmas as a season does not have the power to suspend the regular order (or disorder) of the fallen world. It does not possess magical powers to make all things whole. We see the evidence of this in the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s birth. Miraculous events do take place. There are signs and wonders. But, simultaneously with these remarkable events, we see that all the ordinary functions of the world, along with its failings, are also in full view in the Nativity story. Taxes must be paid. Governments rule inequitably. Joseph works away at his carpentry. The inn is so full that there is no room. The religious leaders who ought to know what has happened are puzzled. The world is indeed invested, but not with magic. It is visited by God, who has come in the form of a child. Creation itself will eventually be remade as a result, but that has not yet happened. Then, as now, “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4).

The Great Reversal

It may sound as if my message is the gospel of “lower your expectations.” But what I have to say is really the opposite. The great hope of Christmas is that at the incarnation, God entered the broken world in human form. As a result of this act, a series of events was put into motion that have fundamentally changed us and which will remake the world. The miracle of this event was not only that God became flesh but that he also subjected himself to the brokenness of the world he entered. Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death” (Phil. 2:8). This is what C. S. Lewis calls “the deeper magic” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It is a kind of unraveling and drawing in. The curse of sin is reversed and for the believer, its consequences are drawn into the sphere of grace. To quote from The Great Divorce, another work by C. S. Lewis, it is what he calls the “retrospective” power of redemption. Lewis writes: “The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”[4]

Of course, when Lewis speaks of “the good man,” he is not talking about goodness as an achievement. This is a goodness that comes to us as a gift. The theological words for this are grace and redemption. They are words that describe the great reversal that the preacher Phillips Brooks writes about in the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem:

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in,
be born in us today.

I think we sometimes misunderstand the preacher’s intent with these words. It is not Christ who is born in us. It is we who are born in Christ. To use the language of Jesus himself, we are “born again” (John 3:3, 7; See 1 Pet. 1:27). The Nativity of Christ was a singular and unrepeatable event. It may be reenacted in the Christmas pageant each season, but it can never be repeated. The new life that comes to us as a result of that act of God is something else. It is our repeated experience, but it has no season. The life we celebrate at Christmas is something that we draw upon every day and which is reproduced in others through the preaching of the gospel.

The cure for Christmas melancholia is not, as another song tells us, that we “need a little Christmas right now.” Nor is it necessarily Puritan austerity or renunciation of all observance of Christmas. The cure, strange as it may seem, is good theology. We should not expect from Christmas what Christ alone can supply. It is not a sin to look back, but we can become trapped there.

We need not fear Christmas melancholy. I think we ought to view it as a kind of signpost that points away from that which is not God and toward a life yet to come. It says, “This, not that,” and “Then, not now.” It ought to prompt us to say, “Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.”

[1] Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), 69.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 29-30.

[3] James K. A. Smith, Jennifer Abe, John Swinton, Brandon Rickabaugh, and Michael Vincient Di Fuccia, “How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 16, no. 1 (2023): 90.

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperOne, 1980), 69.

https://www.moodyradio.org/programs/chris-fabry-live/2025/12/08-the-bittersweet-side-of-christmas/

Bright Lights in an Age of Complaint

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Some centuries have cooler names than others. Historian Will Durant labeled the Reformation period “the age of faith” and called the 18th century “the age of reason.” Lately, I have been wondering what historians will want to call this century, and I think a good candidate might be “the age of complaint.” 

The thought came to me the other day when I read Philippians 2:14, saying that we are to do all things “without grumbling or arguing.” I am not sure that I could find a directive in Scripture that is more out of step with the spirit of the current era. As proof, I submit the ubiquitous and generally disingenuous phrase, “I don’t know who needs to hear this but. . .” It is one that often shows up in Christian posts on social media. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but most of the time, the person who uses this phrase knows exactly who they think needs to hear what they are about to say. 

On the surface, Paul’s admonition that Christians should distance themselves from grumbling seems a bit trivial, coming on the heels of his stirring description of Christ’s descent into humility in verses 5–11 of the same chapter. It is as if, after urging us to make the effort climb to a great height because of the vista it affords, the apostle uses the occasion to draw our attention to some relatively insignificant blemish on the horizon, say a gas station or fast-food restaurant. What he points out is ugly, but is it really so serious as all that?

Given the magnitude of Christ’s example, we might have expected Paul to set our sights higher by urging us to a greater level of sacrifice. He might have asked us to meditate on the possibility of martyrdom or spoken of some great act of surrender or sacrifice. Give up your kidney. Sell yourself into slavery to preach the gospel to the heathen. Something like that. Instead, the admonition Paul leaves us with is the rough equivalent of a warning nearly every parent has had to give when taking the family on a long trip in the car: “Stop arguing with your brother. Don’t make me come back there.”

Not only are grumbling and arguing commonplace occurrences in everyday life. They are now a source of popular amusement, thanks to social media. As long as they do not direct it at us, we find the expressed contempt of friends and strangers immensely entertaining, second only to the articulation of our own dismay at the stupidity and wrong-headedness of others.

Censoriousness is no longer a character flaw. It is treated as a virtue, especially on social media, where our observations compete with one another for the audience’s attention. We do not feel that we have done our job until we have driven a stake through the heart of our opponent’s argument. The sharper the comment, the greater its sticking power. It is even better if we can express the sentiment with the cynic’s half-smile.

There is, however, an unsettling subtext to the apostle’s command in Philippians 2:14 that deconstructs our utopian fantasy of what we should expect from church life. When Paul tells us that we must do everything without grumbling or arguing, he implies that others in the church will provide many opportunities to do those very things. Tertullian, the second-century church father from Carthage, wrote that observers of the early Christians marveled at what they saw. “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us,” Tertullian wrote. “‘See how they love one another,’ they say, for they themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, they say, for they themselves will sooner put to death.”

See how they irritate one another.

Paul’s directive to stop grumbling provides a necessary counterpoint that helps us understand the true nature of the love Tertullian’s quote describes. Those early pagans made their observations from the outside. They saw the behavior of Christians after grace and the gospel had done their work. Beyond their vision was the underworking of the flesh that created the occasion for those remarkable acts of love. If they had looked at the same deeds from that perspective, they might just as truthfully have declared, “See how they irritate one another.”

Another clue that the experience of mutual irritation is the field in which the Spirit sows the seeds of Christian love is found in those New Testament commands, which tell believers that they are to “bear with” each other (Eph. 4:2; Col. 3:13; cf. Rom. 15:1). The elegance of this phrase does not do justice to the experience it describes, and it would perhaps be more honest to translate the command “put up with” one another. Such language signals that Christian fellowship is as liable to be an act of endurance as it is a love feast. Indeed, the frequency with which Paul speaks about the church’s relational difficulties in his letters gives one the impression that Christian fellowship is primarily the practice of enduring the company of those who would otherwise be unlikely companions. In his poem The Death of the Hired Hand, Robert Frost defines a home as “the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in,” In the same poem, he also proposes an alternate definition when he says that home is,  “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” It strikes me that we could say the same about the church.

Throughout its history, the church has struggled with two related problems where community standards are concerned. On the one hand, it has often veered in the direction of perfectionism. Perfectionism, in turn, inevitably leads to hyperbole. When I say that the church has veered in the direction of perfectionism, I do not mean that it reaches a state of perfection on this side of eternity or even necessarily makes a serious attempt to do so. Rather, it is a habit of one-sided expectation. We make demands of others that we do not require for ourselves. When the church slips into perfectionism, it falls into a state of mutual disappointment.

We used to call this Pharisaism–the hypocritical practice of expecting more from others than ourselves. According to Jesus, the chief problem with this moral affliction is not merely its failure to meet the standard it sets but its lack of self-awareness (Matt. 23:25). Pharisaism turns us into blind guides who make demands of others but cannot see how we fail to apply the same standards in our own lives.

This lack of self-awareness, in turn, affects the church’s view of its practice of holiness in much the same way that over-realized eschatology does one’s view of the kingdom. That is to say, the church tends to claim too much for itself too soon. The result is a false perception of our own experience supported by exaggerated claims about our performance. “We have a fatal tendency to exaggerate the faults of others and minimize the gravity of our own,” John Stott observed. “We seem to find it impossible, when comparing ourselves with others, to be strictly objective and impartial. On the contrary, we have a rosy view of ourselves and a jaundiced view of others.”

It is easy to see how such a view would lead to grumbling and criticism. The inevitable result is a toxic mixture of self-satisfaction mixed with disappointment. We are pleased with ourselves while being irritated with others, and we fail to understand why they can’t be more like us. The irony, of course, is that they are like us. Or rather, we are like them, and we can’t see it. But is Paul’s message in Philippians 2:14 essentially that Christians are irritating and that we need to just suck it up and put up with the unpleasantness that comes with such an unfortunate condition? Far from it.

The church is not a community that has already arrived at perfection but one in the process of becoming. The apostle’s command implies not only the power of the Spirit to control our innate tendency to grumble and criticize, but it rests on a promise of transformation through the gospel. We are to do everything without grumbling or arguing so that we “may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’” (Phil. 2:14–15). Self-help gurus tell us not to sweat the small things. But it turns out that that it is precisely in the small things where grace is most needed. It is in our small speech and everyday actions, where the reality of our salvation shows up most vividly.

Growing into Salvation

~ John Koessler ~ 1 Comment

Have you ever wished that you were taller or had eyes of a different color? Or maybe you wondered why you were better at basketball than someone else or could play the piano like a virtuoso. Some things are programmed by heredity and DNA. But not everything. There are things we can do to nurture growth and development, or we can hamper it.  

The same is true in the spiritual realm. Those who are in Christ cooperate with the Holy Spirit as they grow in grace and obedience. They may also hinder the process. In 1 Peter 2:2, the apostle tells us to “crave spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.” The Greek text literally says that we grow “into” our salvation. It almost sounds as if there is a mold, and spiritual growth is the experience of being poured into it. In a way, this is true. The shape of spiritual growth in its final form has already been determined for us. It is not a list of behaviors but a person. We are growing into “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

But the process of growth is not automatic. There are some Christians who seem to be stalled in their spiritual development while others grow more quickly. What makes the difference? Is there a secret to spiritual growth? The primary means that God uses to nurture our growth is the word of God. Peter describes it as “pure spiritual milk” and tells us that we should “crave” it. This command is a little surprising. It implies that we have a responsibility to be disciplined in our intake and cultivate our hunger. In a way, Peter tells us to develop a taste for God’s word.

Spiritual growth is not automatic.

When it comes to ordinary food, we develop a craving by tasting it. This is also true of God’s word. But many Christians find that the taste for God’s word does not come automatically. They may begin to read Scripture and find that parts of it are hard to understand. There are many stories in the Bible, and they don’t understand the background. Or maybe they don’t enjoy reading. So they begin but quickly lay the Bible aside.

Acquiring a taste for the Bible begins with a conviction about the Bible itself. We read it because it is more than a book. It is the word of God. Our belief about the Scriptures is the same as the Thessalonians, who “accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God,” which is at work in those who believe (1 Thess. 2:13). The truths of the Bible not only work on us. They work in us. God’s word transforms those who crave it.

Prayer is another practice that contributes to our spiritual development. There is more to spiritual growth than learning to perform a series of spiritual tasks. It is growth in our relationship with God. If Bible is the primary means that God uses to speak to us, prayer is how we talk to God. When we pray, we not only make requests, we also worship, unburden our hearts, and spend time in God’s presence. Prayer is not conversation so much as it is communion.

We do not need to go to great lengths to get God’s attention when we pray. Nor do we need to make clever arguments. Jesus assures us that God not only hears our prayers but also says that “your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8). “He is neither ignorant, so that we need to instruct him, nor hesitant, so that we need to persuade him,” John Stott observes. “He is our Father–a Father who loves his children and knows all about their needs.

In most cases, spiritual growth is not something we experience in isolation. God has designed the spiritual life so that it flourishes best when it takes place within a community of believers. The Bible’s name for that community is church. Ephesians 4 says that Christ has gifted the church with individuals whose ministry is “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph. 4:12). Those that he lists include pastors and teachers who exercise a ministry of God’s word. They proclaim the gospel and teach the truths of Scripture. Those who are trained by their teaching implement what they have learned by building up the body of Christ.

We do not experience spiritual growth in isolation.

We often talk about the church as if it were a location. We think of church as a place we go to worship. But the Bible speaks differently. On the one hand, in 1 Corinthians 11:18, the apostle Paul describes how the Corinthian believers “come together as church.” According to this, church is something we do. It is the act of coming together as those who worship and follow Jesus Christ.  On the other hand, the apostle also speaks of church as an identity. Church is what we are. It is a community of those who belong to Christ.

Christians come together as church to experience the reality of God’s presence through worship. Another reason the church gathers is to hear the word of God taught. When Acts 2:43 gives a snapshot of the life of the early church, it says that the first disciples “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” Christians meet together to study God’s word to know how to be the church when they go their separate ways. A church is a community bound together by what Jesus Christ has done and what it has been taught.

In the natural realm, eating and exercise go together. Food provides fuel for growth and activity. The same principle holds in the spiritual realm. Spiritual development comes when we combine spiritual nourishment with obedience to what we have learned. Ultimately, however, it is God who makes us grow. God has given both the word and those who teach it. His Spirit grants us understanding and empowers us to obey. Spiritual growth is not an accomplishment for which we can take credit or feel pride. Like everything else in the Christian life, it springs from grace. Those who grow spiritually “grow in grace” (2 Pet. 3:18). Just as God is the source of our spiritual life, He is the secret behind our spiritual growth.

Us Miserable Offenders

~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Those who recite the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer, up until the 2019 edition, have traditionally prayed these words:  “O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.” The Litany or General Supplication employs similar language and in the prayer it contains the church addresses each member of the Trinity, asking God to have mercy on them for several specific sins. Evil, mischief, blindness of heart, pride, vain-glory, hypocrisy, envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness– they are the sort of things that might raise eyebrows in ordinary conversation. But in this context, we are not only undisturbed by such an admission, to hear the congregation recite it in unison offers a kind of comfort.

Of course, not everyone observes the rite. Many evangelical congregations, perhaps most, worship in the low-church tradition. They do not follow the order of the prayer book. For them, the admission of sin is something that is handled by the individual. Each one prays to themselves. Or perhaps they seek out the pastor after the service and ask for counsel and prayer. When I first began attending church, it was common to invite people to come to the “altar” at the end of the service and pray. There was no actual altar, only a stage or raised platform with boxes of tissue strategically placed at each end. Those of us who came forward in response wept quietly over our sins. Usually, the same ones we shed tears over the previous week. We were miserable sinners, but not for long. After a few minutes, we dried our eyes and made our way back into the world.

Despite the language of the prayer book, us miserable sinners aren’t always unhappy in our sin. We do not pine away about it the way the monastic fathers and the Puritans did. We have come to terms with our condition, which is just another way of saying that we tend to live our lives in a state of denial. But the fact that we do not always feel miserable does not make us any less miserable, at least not in the original sense of the word. The Latin root from which the word miserable comes is one that meant “pitiable.” In his essay entitled “Miserable Offenders: An Interpretation of Prayer Book Language,” C. S. Lewis observes, “I do not think whether we are feeling miserable or not matters. I think it is using the word miserable in the old sense–meaning an object of pity.” When the Book of Common Prayer calls us miserable sinners, it is both a recognition of what we are and a reminder of God’s response. Specifically, it tells us that we are those whose moral condition is so deplorable that the only remedy is the goodness and mercy of God, no matter how we may feel.

Lewis is probably right to say that our emotional state is not the most crucial point. But that doesn’t mean that it is good to feel nonchalant about our sin, only that the emotions we usually associate with misery are not always proof of the genuineness of one’s repentance. Esau’s tears spoke more of his grief over losing the blessing he had sold for a pittance than they did of any remorse he had for his disregard of the God who gave it (Heb. 12:16–17). Judas felt remorse, but only enough to cause him to regret his betrayal of Christ. Instead of looking to God for mercy, Judas acted as his own judge and executioner when he carried out upon himself the punishment he felt he deserved (Matt. 27:3–6). Sometimes we mistakenly think that misery is what God requires of us in return for forgiveness. We wonder if we have felt bad enough or been miserable long enough to warrant the mercy we seek. Others may confuse this misery with repentance itself. They conflate misery with repentance, seeing the two as synonymous. The result is a kind of Protestant penance, where miserable feeling relieves us of our guilt and makes us feel like we have handled the problem.

It isn’t wrong to feel bad about our sins. Sorrow for sin is an element of Christian repentance but only one of its features. Feeling, by itself, secures nothing. In order to qualify as true repentance, feeling must be combined with our agreement with God’s assessment of our condition. That is, the sorrow of repentance is more than regret. It is a recognition of our guilt. True repentance also involves a turning. When we repent, we turn from our sin to God whose Son is the only true remedy for sin. Forgiveness does not come because we have agonized over our sin but because Christ suffered for them in our stead.

The nature of forgiveness is such that it can only come to us from the outside. We know this is true in human relationships. The essence of apology includes an admission of guilt. But the mere fact that we apologize does not guarantee the aggrieved one will automatically accept and reconcile with us. “No restoration or redress is possible unless the guilty person call his sin by its true name,” theologian Josef Pieper explains. “But that having been said, the person impaired by the sin must respond as well, or the relationship will never be restored.” In other words, forgiveness is never earned. It can only be given. No matter how badly we may feel after we have offended, it remains in the hands of the one against whom we have committed the offense to absolve us. We cannot compel their forgiveness

Where God is concerned, forgiveness depends upon both His willingness and His ability to extend mercy. Whatever debt we owe to those we have hurt, our ultimate culpability is to God. “All sin has first and finally a Godward force,” theologian Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. explains. Plantinga defines sin as “a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.” This means that every sin is an offense against two worlds. One world is the realm of human relationships. Each time we sin, we violate both ourselves and our neighbor. The other world is the realm of God’s dominion. As Plantinga puts it, sin is an act of vandalism against God’s peace. Sin, by its nature, is always a rejection of the rule of God. These two “worlds” also correspond to the two “tablets” of the Law and the two great commandments. But sin’s ultimate reference point is to God.

We can see this in David’s great sin. His act of adultery was more than an offense against Bathsheba. It was a sin against Uriah as well. When David ordered Joab to arrange Uriah’s death by warfare, he extended the reach of his transgression to his commander-in-chief, making Joab complicit in the crime (2 Sam. 11:15). David’s adultery eventually brought calamity to his whole family, when David’s son Absalom’s political ambitions compelled him to lie with David’s wives “in broad daylight” (2 Sam. 12:11; 16:22). This is always the way with sin. The cascading nature of transgression compounds its destructive effect. Yet when David eventually admitted his guilt to God, He said, “Against you, you only, have I sinned,” (Ps. 51:4).

To call ourselves miserable offenders is to admit that God’s pity, shown to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ, is the only thing that can save us from our sin. To confess this together is a needed reality check for those who, by nature, are prone to denial. Speaking this truth about ourselves is an act of resistance against the self-congratulatory culture in which we are immersed. It is also a kind of posture. When we admit that we are miserable offenders who have broken God’s laws by failing to do the things we ought to have done and doing things we ought not to have done, we position ourselves for grace. The point here is not that we would all be better off if we used the Book of Prayer in its old form, though it probably wouldn’t hurt us if we did. Whether we recite it together in polite unison as a part of the liturgy or weep in silent anguish at the altar, we must eventually recognize this fundamental truth: mercy begins with God and comes only to those who are miserable offenders. Jesus said it Himself when the religious professionals asked how He could stand to eat in the company of thieves and sinners. Jesus replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32).

God, Be Merciful to Me

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

I am a sinner. I don’t deny it. But most of the time I don’t think much about it either. I don’t seem to obsess about sin the way the ancients used to, at least not about my own sins. I  don’t punish myself or go to extreme measures to fight sin off. Most of the time, my sin feels more like a low-grade fever more than it does a raging fire. Its presence is an ongoing irritation that may hinder me from being my best, but it doesn’t keep me from functioning. Sin doesn’t bother me that much either. If anything, the fact that I am a sinner serves as a kind of escape clause when things go badly. “What did you think would happen?” I want to say. “I am a fallen person living in a fallen world. Of course, I went off the rails.”

The fact that we are sinners is one of the few religious concepts that a majority of people agree upon. Most people identify with the label sinner. I think we actually derive a measure of comfort from the assertion. We are strangely comforted by sin’s universal presence. For some of us, the comfort we take in knowing that we all sin is the kind that a bad student might take from the class curve. We reason that if sin is normal, then we are normal. Even if there is something wrong with us, we can at least say that it is only your average, garden variety of wrong. Everybody suffers from it. Surely God won’t penalize everybody?

The ancients weren’t as sanguine about the subject. The early Christian monastics went into the wilderness not only to pursue holiness but to make a study of their sinfulness. Those early Christians analyzed sin and categorized the many ways it manifests itself. They were interested not only in identifying the specific acts that should be regarded as sinful but wanted to understand the internal dynamics which shaped sinful behavior.

Why do we think so differently? One reason is that we have very different notions about virtue. Most moderns don’t think much about virtue at all. The word seems too out of date. Virtue sounds more like something our Victorian great-grandparents would have been concerned about. The notion of virtue is indeed an ancient one. The Greek philosopher Aristotle saw virtue as the pattern of right behavior that characterized a person. Virtue is a habit of life that moves in the right direction. Vice is the same, only moving in the opposite direction.

But even if the term seems archaic, the idea of virtue is not as old fashioned as we might think. Not if we understand virtue as a preferred pattern of life. We may have dropped the philosophical language as a culture, but we still have strong feelings about the way people should live. Theologian James K. A. Smith captures this when he defines virtue as “an ultimate vision of the good life.”

We may not talk about virtue much, but we believe in it. If you doubt this, spend a few hours reading through the opinions expressed on your favorite social media feed. What is all that outrage about? More often than not, it is about virtue or the failure of virtue. We may not all agree on the standard but our vision of “the good life” is clear enough that we regularly criticize those who don’t measure up to that vision. Contemporary interest in virtue seems to be primarily negative. Our ideas about what is good do not necessarily serve as a basis for self-examination and personal improvement. Often they merely provide the grounds for carping against others we perceive to have fallen short.

Others of us treat sin the same way we do high cholesterol or obesity. We know that if we ignore it, things will go badly for us. But our hope is that if we take certain basic measures, we can keep sin under control. This approach takes two primary forms, one is medical, and the other is athletic. The medical model sees sin as a kind of disease. The athletic model approaches sin like a weakness that can be remedied through discipline. Either view makes sin seem manageable. If sin is a sickness, it can be cured through treatment. If it is a weakness, that weakness can be eliminated with training.

One of the appeals of the medical model of sin is that it alleviates the moral pressure that comes with an awareness of sin. So far, I have had two major illnesses in my life. When I was a child, I contracted polio. As an adult, I was diagnosed with a form of cancer. I felt bad on each occasion, but I did not feel responsible. I knew that something was wrong with me, but I did not think that I was at fault. Even Jesus seemed to give credence to the medical model when, after being criticized for eating with tax collectors and sinners, He observed, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Matthew 9:12). But the Bible also says that sin has a moral quality. Every sin is an act of rebellion. This is because sin’s ultimate reference point is God. As theologian Cornelius Plantinga explains, “All sin has first and finally a Godward force.” Plantinga defines sin as an act (any thought, desire, emotion, or deed) that displeases God and is worthy of His blame. This is what makes sin different from disease. Sin always comes with guilt, and that guilt is deserved.

The appeal of the athletic model of sin is that it makes me my own savior. If sin is a matter of weakness, then all I need to do to fix the problem is to find the right program or the right guru. I need a spiritual gym and a trainer. With a few disciplines and a little determination, I can lick this sin thing. But if you’ve ever known anybody who has tried this approach, you know that success inevitably gives way to intolerance. The “good” can’t understand why the rest of us can’t seem to “get it together” like them. The rest of us recognize such thinking for the pride that it is. But the virtuous are so fixated on their improvement that they are no longer able to see their sin.

According to Romans 7, sin is more than the absence of positive qualities in our character. It as a living force that resides within us. In that New Testament chapter, the apostle even gives sin’s location. It dwells “in my flesh” (v. 18). Flesh, in this case, is not a physiological term. It is not the skin that covers our bones. Sin is not organic in that sense. Rather, it is organic in an altogether different way. Sin is a force that is integrated into our nature. As New Testament scholar H. C. G. Moule so vividly puts it, “the intruder has occupied the whole dwelling, and every part of it is infected.”

There is no medicine that will cure me of this problem. There is no training program strong enough to counter sin’s own strength. But there is a remedy. It is the remedy that is echoed in the sinner’s prayer in Jesus’ parable: “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). It is not the prayer that is the solution. It is the one to whom the prayer is addressed. God’s mercy, shown to us in Jesus Christ, is the only solution when it comes to sin.

We cannot reason our way out. We cannot work our way out. We can only look to Christ to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Jesus alone is sin’s answer. He is the only antidote to its poison. Sin is far more serious than we could have imagined, and God’s answer to sin is far greater than we know. Indeed, this may be the worst effect of all when it comes to our downgraded view of sin. Because we fail to understand the depth of our sin, we cannot see the magnitude of Christ’s salvation. Jesus was right. It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. A sinner like me needs a savior.

Clean

~ John Koessler ~ 1 Comment

According to family legend, my great grandfather was the first one to drive the twenty-mule team out of Death Valley loaded with borax. I have no idea whether this is actually true or not. Like most family legends, I suspect that it is a work of fiction. But I liked to recount this story to my friends when I was growing up since the twenty-mule team was featured in commercials on the popular television show Death Valley Days. It made me feel just short of famous.

Borax is a “detergent booster.” Apparently, it is used in a lot of other things too. Fertilizer, rocket fuel, and automobile windshields, just to name a few. But I always thought of it as soap. The same people who made Borax also made Boraxo, the hand detergent that promised to make hands “soft, smooth, and really clean.”

Looking back on it, cleanliness seemed to be the driving concern of most of the commercials we watched in those days. They fretted about clean clothes, clean floors, and clear complexions. What did this say about us as a culture? Were we especially dirty? Maybe we were just fastidious. Perhaps it was a little of both.

At points, the Bible seems similarly obsessed. The Old Testament, in particular, appears to be especially concerned about matters of cleanness and uncleanness with its detailed regulations about food, clothing, and its peculiar stipulations regarding spots and blemishes. When we read through these laws we do not get the impression that what is at issue is primarily a matter of hygiene. Indeed, some of the measures prescribed do not seem hygienic at all, especially when the “cleansing” agent is blood. Something else is going on.

The New Testament writer of Hebrews admits as much by calling such measures a “shadow” that can never perfect those who repeat them year after year. Instead of being a remedy, they were a reminder of sin (Hebrews 10:1-3). In a way, so is Jesus’ sixth beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). The Greek word that is translated “pure” means clean. No other assertion shatters our illusion that these beatitudes are some kind of moral yardstick quite like this one.

What Jesus describes is a cleanness that originates on the inside and works its way out. Every other kind of cleansing with which we are familiar works the other way around. Jesus is not talking about getting clean but being clean. When we read his statement, we know instinctively that this is not what we are. If we do not know this, it can only be because we do not really know ourselves. We cannot hear Jesus’ assertion without wondering how it is possible for anyone to see God.

Like the others that precede it, we must take this beatitude as a promise. What Jesus gives us here is not a rod by which to measure our lives but a final portrait of what those lives will look like when Christ is finished with them. Purity of heart is not the condition we must meet in order to gain access into the Kingdom of God.  Instead, it is the final destination for those who enter that kingdom through the gate of Christ. He is the only hope we have of being pure in heart. “You can start trying to clean your heart, but at the end of your life it will be as black as it was at the beginning, perhaps blacker” Martyn Lloyd-Jones warns. “No! It is God alone who can do it, and, thank God, He has promised to do it.” Only the blessed can be pure in heart. They will see God.

The Quality of Mercy

~ John Koessler ~ 3 Comments

Not long after I started driving I had to go to court over an automobile accident. It wasn’t a big one, just a fender bender really. But it was my fault. I hit a patch of ice and slid into an oncoming vehicle. There were no injuries and the damage to both cars was repairable. Still, the driver of the other car was angry. As the police officer wrote me a ticket and told me that I needed to appear in court, the other driver assured me that he would be there to make certain that I received the highest penalty.

I was terrified as the date approached. I’d never been to court before and wondered what the punishment might be. Looking back on it now, I suspect it would have been minimal. The judge certainly wouldn’t have given me jail time for a dent. But to me, it felt like a major offense. The worst part of it was that I knew I was the one at fault. I had misjudged the curve. I was driving too fast for the conditions. What verdict could the judge render on my behalf other than guilty? I felt ashamed.

When my father asked me how I was going to plea, I told him that I planned to admit my guilt. “I am a Christian,” I said. “I can’t lie about it.” He was furious. “You stand there and you tell the judge you are innocent” he demanded. When I told him I couldn’t do such a thing in good conscience, he swore and walked away, muttering something about my faith.

When my court date arrived, I took my place on an uncomfortable wood bench and waited for my name to be called. I felt torn between the demands of my conscience and the desire to please my father. As I listened to the other cases, I noticed that most of them were like mine, minor accidents that were a result of bad weather. I also noticed that many of the defendants didn’t admit to either guilt or innocence. When asked for a plea, they simply stood silent. “Do you stand mute?” the judge asked? When they answered yes, the judge told them that a plea of not guilty would be entered on their behalf.

At last, my turn came. I stood before the judge’s raised bench and shook as he reviewed the details of my case.“How do you plead?” he asked. “I stand mute” I replied. “Is the driver of the other vehicle present?” he asked. Nobody answered. “Is the officer who wrote the ticket in the courtroom?” the judge asked. He was not. “Case dismissed” the judge curtly declared.

The wave of relief that swept over me was palpable. It felt like mercy but it was not. My case was dismissed on a technicality. The judge could not declare me guilty because there was nobody there to testify against me. Mercy is something else. Mercy only belongs to the guilty. For the Christian, mercy is not a verdict, it is a person. God declares me innocent because Jesus took my guilt and the punishment as His own. For this reason, the word that the Bible uses to describe God’s verdict is not mercy but justice. By sending Jesus to stand in my place, God was able to be both “just” and “the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).

It is only through this lens that we can understand the fifth beatitude: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy” (Matthew 5:7). We are tempted to read this as a moral imperative. We think of it as a condition. If you want to be shown mercy, you’ve got to show mercy. In reality, it is a reminder. Mercy is not a warm feeling. It is not a determination to see the good in others despite their actions. It is a decision to absorb the offense and take it upon ourselves. There is only one sort of person to whom mercy can be shown and that is someone who does not deserve it. The Bible has a word for this sort of mercy. It’s called grace.

Empty is Enough

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

I have reached the age where a large percentage of the articles that show up on my social media feed offer suggestions about retirement. They appeal to a combination of greed and fear. Apparently, your retirement savings need to be at least a million (if not more). Social security won’t be enough to cover your expenses. You need a steady stream of income from stocks or bonds or annuities, which are luckily being sold by whoever has posted the article in the first place. No matter the source, the message is almost always the same. Whatever you have, it probably isn’t enough. The aim is to make me nervous. It often works.

For people like me who by nature and long experience have learned to want more, Jesus’ blessing in Matthew 5:3 seems jarring and maybe even nonsensical: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Nobody really believes that less is more, least of all the poor. Those who want to view this remarkable saying as a statement about the genteel virtues of poverty are really saying that Jesus was merely a sentimentalist and of the worst possible sort. They imply that He was a naïve sentimentalist. “We should not think that Jesus merely wanted to give us a few maxims of practical wisdom, that he merely intended to talk about the blessing of suffering and poverty and console us by telling us that suffering would make us more mature” theologian Helmut Thielicke warns. “Jesus knew all too well that it can turn out just the opposite, that a man can break down under suffering, that it can drive us into cursing instead of prayer, and that its ultimate effect will perhaps be bitter complaining and accusing of God for his injustice.”

Yet the qualifying phrase “in spirit” hardly removes the scandal of Jesus’ pronounced blessing. In Christ’s day as in our own, one’s spiritual standing was considered to be a function of accumulated merits. This is true of all salvation systems save one. The world’s religions all operate on the same basic economy that we employ with our finances. More is always better. You can never have enough. And if you want to acquire it, you’ve got to earn it. There is no other way.

Jesus’ words are a diagnosis as much as they are a promise. Only the poor in spirit can be blessed because there is no other category for us when it comes to righteousness. This is what sets Jesus’ message apart from all others. Those who look to their own reserves to calculate whether they have enough holiness to find acceptance with God will inevitably come up short. If you want it, you must take it as a gift or not at all. This is what the Bible calls grace. Where grace is concerned, only empty is enough.

But this rule only makes sense in light of the second half of Jesus’ beatitude. His point isn’t about the inherent virtue of poverty, whether it is economic or spiritual. It is about access. According to Jesus, emptiness is the necessary precondition to entering what He calls “the kingdom.” Actually, Jesus doesn’t employ the language of entering here, even though He does elsewhere. Jesus uses the language of ownership. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the empty. Only they can claim it as their own because they alone know that they cannot buy it. They do not obtain it by natural right or by personal effort. If they are to receive the kingdom it must be delivered over to them by Christ Himself.

This is the first principle for any who wish to experience the blessedness that Jesus describes in the beatitudes. You must come to Christ as you are. You must come to Him empty and without anything to recommend you. All that you need will be given to you upon entry into His realm. You cannot store it up in advance. You cannot bring it with you as you cross the threshold. You can only come to Christ as a beggar and receive. There is no other way.

Same Story, Different Players

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to the Bible, does it ever feel like you are reading the same story over and over again? In his book The Art of Biblical Narrative, author Robert Alter observes that one of the most common features of the narratives in the Old Testament is their use of repetition. He sees this as an indication of “literary purposefulness” on the part of the authors. Alter writes,“The most crucial case in point is the perplexing fact that in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances.”

No doubt he is correct. But I think there may be an additional reason. It is because people do the same dumb things. Any pastor can tell you this. Not only do different people do the same stupid things but people often make the same mistakes repeatedly. Actually, you don’t have to be a pastor to spot this. If you’ve attended more than one church, you’ve probably already noticed that it seems like the same story is unfolding with different faces. “Really?” we are tempted to say.  “You did that too?”

It’s a comfort, in a way. There is a certain warm familiarity in driving past the same broken down barn every day. The wreckage is a landmark, part of what makes the landscape feel like home to us. The same is often true of our lives. Over here is the secret drunk. Over there is the important man, whose voice must always be heard. And there is the queen of the kitchen, who likes to tell everyone else how things are done. But after a while, it starts to feel like a cliché. We grow weary of the storyline. This is especially true once we spot ourselves among the cast of characters. “Really?” we want to say to ourselves. “You did that again? Will you ever learn?”

In view of the Bible’s Old Testament narratives, the answer might actually be no. But if this is the case, the point is not our own stupidity. The message is something else altogether. This repetition is intended to draw our attention to the other main character who shows up again and again. It seems that the story was not about us after all, but about God. He does not always rescue us from the consequences of what we have done. Sometimes, He lets us complete the narrative arc of our foolish choices. He does not show up at the last minute to save the day. Instead, when He enters the story, it is to save us.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Forest Gump’s momma said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Well, we all does stupid sometimes. I probably feel stupid more often than I deserve. But I deserve it often enough. Everybody has moments of stupid that haunt them, sometimes for the rest of their lives. A college friend once told me how he would lie in bed at night and relive an unfortunate incident from high school. It only took a moment for all the shame and embarrassment to come rushing back. He would lie rigid in his bed and moan out loud. He told me that more than thirty years ago. I suspect he still thinks about it at night.

I could make a list. Indeed, I do make a list. It’s one of the main things I dwell on in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. It’s either death or stupid. I worry about both. As it turns out, I can’t do much about either. Reason tells me that I ought to ignore what I can’t do anything about. But it never seems to work out that way. The sense of helplessness only increases my anxiety.

In his book Spiritual Depression, Martyn Lloyd Jones writes about those who are overcome with regret over “that one sin.”  This is the case of “those who are miserable Christians or who are suffering from spiritual depression because of their past–either because of some particular sin in their past, or because of the particular form which sin happened to take in their case.” Sin is stupid but stupid isn’t necessarily sin. Still, the language Lloyd Jones uses helps me to at least diagnose my symptoms. Sometimes the distress I feel is over a particular act of stupidity or because of the particular form that stupidity happened to take.

The feeling I experience in these instances is not just shame and horror, ultimately it is regret. I want to turn back the clock and do things differently. I want to change my past and thereby change my future.  I won’t ask the question. I won’t attend the meeting. I will leave the country and go into exile. My whole life will be different after that. And I will live happily ever after.

Now here is what is really interesting about these things that I regret. Most everyone else has forgotten them. Some of the people involved are dead. They probably noticed when the thing occurred, whatever it was. But I doubt that they thought about it much afterward. If they did it is likely that they only shook their heads. While I relived the moment in my mind that night, rewriting the dialogue to give me the advantage and make myself the hero, they were resting in their beds. Or else they were lying awake dwelling on their own version of stupid. The point is they weren’t even thinking about me.

It’s probably not as bad as you think. Even if it is, it won’t last forever. You might think about it for a long time but you will probably be the only one. I suppose I should leave you with three steps for forgetting about all the stupid things you’ve done. If I knew what they were, I’d be practicing them myself. What I can tell you is that as you lie there in bed dwelling on the past, like an old dog worrying a favorite bone, Jesus waits up with you. He is quiet. He does not lecture. He does not try to talk you out of it. He is simply there with you, aware of your pain and your regret. The good news is that Jesus forgives sin. He forgives stupid too.