What Do We Have To Offer?

I remember as a child trying to ponder the question of why, if you needed to have Jesus in your heart to be good, other families seemed to look good on the outside. I concluded that they must just be putting up a facade - that really, when nobody was looking, perhaps the parents beat their children.

The question remains a bugger, though. I believe that Jesus-God incarnate-provides the only way to God. That mankind is fundamentally flawed, rebellious, evil. That we "all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God." And yet I wonder - some people look pretty good, pretty solid. How, then do I reconcile belief in the fundamental errors in people that are worthy of eternal damnation with a world that seems pretty okay?

Perhaps it is because the examples touted as evil in the world, while they are everyday people, are taken from their ordinariness by endless hype, and the rest of us are able to sit back and condemn those that do such things, those evil people, without pausing to reflect on the same evil within us.

Perhaps it is because church is often reduced to pragmatism - how to have a successful marriage, as I heard about last week. Because we lose sight of the eternal for the temporal, albeit with heavenly goals in mind - holiness, love, purity. But to set up laws to make it easier to attain holiness is a very dangerous path. For example - hearing as I did for so long that prnography is bad because it can spoil your (future) relationship with your wife now drives me in the opposite direction as it did before. In our eagerness to explain sexuality as a wonderful thing that needs to be expressed in the proper context, since I have given up hope of finding a wife I have trouble finding good reasons not to surf the Internet to find other ways of meeting my needs.

It is worthwhile to go back and see the standard, to be reminded of God's standards. To look at a woman with lust, to be angry with your brother, these are offenses that populate hell itself. Not just those who rape children, or those who engage in genocide. "I tell you the truth, if you look at a woman to lust for her, you have already committed adultery with her in your heart... therefore if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, for it is better to enter paradise maimed than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Hyperbolic overstatement? Sure. But do not back down from realizing the truth coming through - that these small offenses are evil, offenses against a holy God with no room for error.

We are all broken. We are all weak. Every man, woman, and child alive imperfect and unworthy of God. This is what the church has to offer. We should not forget that everyone has fallen and no man among us can stand up alone. When you enter a church you should look around and see broken people, needy people, those who come to God for forgiveness. Anything more is a facade.

What I missed as a child was that the thing tha makes us difference is not substantively about the face we present to the world. Anyone can serve the poor, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless. In fact, we have the opposite. We have those who have seen the vilest evils in the world within their own hearts, who agree with God that we all stand condemned.

What we have to offer first is not our wholeness, but our lack. Not our composure but our brokenness. Not our piety but our vileness. That we come, filthy, broken, unworthy enemies of a holy God. And receive forgiveness. Anything else, everything else, must come from that point. "While we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more than that, because we have now been declared righteous by his blood, we will be saved through him from God's wrath. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, how much more, since we have been reconciled will we be saved by his life?"