By George “Chip” Hammond
In his autobiography Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis writes:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly did not desire to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed, perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.
Not all Christians have the same story, but every Christian I have known (including myself) who has been a Christian for any length of time has a similar one: my understanding of, commitment to, and embracing of the reconciliation that God offers in Jesus Christ was initially poor, but God reconciled me to himself nonetheless. Yet God does not want me to remain impoverished in my understanding of, commitment to, and embrace of being reconciled to him. He wants me (and you) to grow in it.
Whatever brought you to Jesus, part of it had to be a recognition of your sin for what it was. Perhaps you had a gnawing sense of it for a long time prior. Perhaps in a moment – through a sermon, or the witness of a friend, or your own conscience – you came to the horrid realization, “I am undone! I’m not who or what I thought I was.” The gospel is the answer to this reality and realization. It is the good news of a God ready to forgive, who sent his Son not only to announce that forgiveness, but to secure it by dying for us so that we could die to our sins in him, and who rose so that in him we could walk in new life. In Jesus “we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace” (Ephesians 1:7).
“The forgiveness of sins” – what do you think of when you hear that phrase? Most people think of forgiveness as being freed from obligation, guilt, or punishment. Certainly, the word carries that idea. Most people when they come to Christ do so because they sense the weight of their guilt, their shame, their liability, and Christ promises you freedom from those, promises that you can be free from guilt, free from shame, and free from the liability of your sins.
If you were to stop there, though, you would be very truncated in what Christ has come to achieve in your life. The root of our sin is self-focus, self-interest. Our sin has about it the unmistakable air of self-consciousness, of focus on self. It is this that we must be delivered from.
Pride, so condemned in the Bible, is nothing but protection and promotion of self. What is humility? False humility has a person confessing and lamenting to everyone who will listen what a great sinner he or she is. It is pride in disguise. False humility is self-deprecating. But note the focus still – self.
True humility is shown in forgetting self. The truly humble person will not look like “the religiously humble.” He will look like someone who is normally happy, content, rolls with life’s joys and disappointments, and generally never gives much thought to himself. As one writer put it, “Humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it’s thinking of ourselves less.”
Growing into what Jesus came to accomplish in us, when considering our sin, we come to think of it less in terms of how if affects us (guilt, liability), and more how it has affected others. In other words, the focus shifts away from self.
There’s another dimension to the meaning of the word “forgiveness” as we find it in the New Testament: the act of freeing and liberating from something that confines. To grow in forgiveness, we must be released not only from the debt and obligation of our sin; we must be liberated from its restraints. Sin restrains us from truly loving.
God is very gracious and when people first come to him through Christ, most of us want only to “get out of” the consequences we know our sins deserve. I know this was the case for me when I first came to Christ. God graciously receives us because it’s a start. It would be a mistake, though, to think it’s the end or where we should stay. To do so would be to remain focused on self, to persist in the inability love, and in the end (we will have discovered) to have never really come to him at all.
The end and goal for which Christ redeemed us is beginning to come into view in our lives when we want not merely to be forgiven of our sins in the sense of having their penalty taken away, but when we earnestly long to be free from them, and long for the harm they’ve done to others to be undone. This is when we really begin to show the viability of the eternal life we claim is in us.
I divide my sins into two kinds, little sins and big sins. My little sins are little, not because they carry a lesser liability, but because they are sins that I can do something about. If I’ve spoken an unkind word, I cannot undo it, but I can apologize and acknowledge my fault. If I have left some obligation to another undone, I can rouse myself and do it.
Big sins I define as those sins which have come about by my careless and persistent self-focus over a long period of time, which have taken on a life of their own, and I can do nothing about. It is not in my power to fix it. The harm is no longer dependent on me, it lives by itself. I am powerless. I can long for God to fix it in some extraordinary way because it is now beyond my ability to do anything about it.
As we move beyond self, we more and more long to be freed, not merely from the liability of our sins, but for others to be freed from the damage our sins have done to them.
In Revelation 7:17 we read, “For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." What do you picture when you read those words? Do you picture the tears from your own eyes being wiped away? We are making progress to the place that God is bringing us when we read words like these and come to think reflexively that they refer not only to the tears that I cry, but to the tears that I have caused others to cry. When that happens we’re beginning to move beyond self to become the people God redeemed us to be.
