How Far Will He Go?

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?  If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
-King David to the Lord God

How far will the Lord go to have us?

The King James translation of the Scripture quoted above uses the word “hell” for “depths,” an accurate translation of the Hebrew word שאול (Sheol).  Sheol means “grave” or “pit” or “the abode of the dead.”  What David is saying here is really scandalous… that no matter where he turns, God is going to be there with him, that no matter where he takes his heart, his God will go with him to that place, only to be with him, only to have him.  (Proof of this is the hell of the Cross that Jesus went through.)

If I really make my bed in the depths of hell, really — meaning, if I really should run as far and as fast in the opposite direction of God and life and freedom and chain myself to soul-whores and lay my heart out on the alter of my idols that steal my life and breath and if I seal my mouth with a death-mask to suffocate myself — will He really still be there, “His right hand to hold me fast?”

The reason this is so obscene is that it shatters our comfy-cozy pictures of God, our flimsy perceptions that melt when the heat gets turned up in our lives.  The God that David sings to here — and no doubt David surely knows what it is to be in the deep, lonely dark of hell on earth — this is a bold-ass God, one with a heart that is merciful, resistless, fierce, and fiercely determined to have our hearts, no matter what we do with them or where we take them.

Imagine the implications of this.  Wherever we are, right now, God is holding fast to us.  God is a blink away, a turn of the head, a imperceptible whisper, a collapse, a stumble, a glance.  Certainly hell is not where God wants us to make our beds, but David knew a God who would reach that far to be with him, to be near him, to bring him back home to His heart.

The direction of our entire lives can change with the subtlest and weakest nod in the direction of life, the faintest heart-cry for rescue.  He knocks at our heart’s door — oh, does He knock!  And throw rocks to our windows and cry out for us to let Him in! — and we only have to muster the strength to turn the knob… and in He rushes, catches us, anchors us, and invites us to a table fellowship, a friendship, to be His companion through it all.

This is astounding.  It is a moonshine-grace so pure as to blind anyone who would dare sip it, and all the while give us eyes to really see the lovesick heart of this pursuing God who will have us, no matter what.

Nothing is beyond Him, including you and me right here, right now.  His life wins us back from death.  This is salvation, being saved by His life (Romans 5:10).

 

A Moment of Grace

Quoted from The Ragamuffing Gospel, p. 92-93:

A story is told about Riorello LaGuardia, who, when he was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the Great Depression and all of World War II, was called by adoring New Yorkers ‘the Little Flower’ because he was only five foot four and always wore a carnation in his lapel.  He was a colorful character who used to ride the New York City fire trucks, raid speakeasies with the police department, take entire orphanages to baseball games, and whenever the New York newspapers were on strike, he would go on the radio and read the Sunday funnies to the kids.

One bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the poorest ward of the city.  LaGuardia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself.  Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread.  She told LaGuardia that her daughter’s husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving.  But the shopkeeper, from whom the bread was stolen, refused to drop the charges.  “It’s a bad neighborhood, your Honor,” the man told the mayor.  “She’s got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson.”

LaGuardia sighed.  he turned to the woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you.  The law makes no exceptions — ten dollars or ten days in jail.”  But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket.  He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous sombrero saying: “Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.  Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.”

So the following day the New  York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a bewildered old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren, fifty cents of that amount being contributed by the red-faced grocery store owner, while some seventy petty criminals, people with traffic violations, and New York City policemen, each of whom had just paid fifty cents for the privilege of doing so, gave the mayor a standing ovation.

 

A Surprising Encounter

I’m big on journaling. It’s a discipline I discovered some years back that helps me process through what God is showing me, that helps me express desires or fears that may be buried beneath the busyness of the day, that helps me engage in prayer with the Lord when the noise outside is too loud.

Lately He is leading me into a more profound and disciplined experience of the Kingdom through a more intense and intentional style of journaling. I’m reading through Leanne Payne’s Listening Prayer, in which the author describes a system of keeping hold of the things God reveals and ways of exploring the depths of His word.

It’s not tips or techniques that I am after; it is a broader experience of the life of God through the spiritual disciplines. I’ve become rutted a bit as of late, and I sense Christ leading me into more.

Take this morning’s prayer time, for example…

I usually make the most of my 40-minute commute to work in the morning by praying. My sort of “first prayer” or “waking prayer” of my day is fairly liturgical; I have a list of what I know I need to bring to God, including myself and my family and then friends, coworkers, and my students, in consecration, petition, intercession, resistance against the Evil One, and the like. It’s critical for me to come to Christ this way as early in my morning as possible and receive His counsel for what He will lead me into through the day. As important as it is, it has lately become a bit… stagnant. It’s routine, which doesn’t necessarily in itself mean dry, except that it is beginning to feel pretty stuffy. It’s not very enlivening or surprising or even conversational anymore, at least not this first prayer of the day.

I’ve been trying to figure out lately what to do about this. There are things on my heart I know I need to pray through. Not knowing what needed to change, I’ve continued in the routine but hoping for something fresh, like working through a hot day waiting for a cloud or a cool breeze.

This morning the Lord God brought me something different, something more beautiful than I could have expected, and something I could not have planned for. It was all His initiative. It came by way of a song.

“Be Thou My Vision” is my favorite hymn, and in fact may well be my favorite piece of literature and liturgy ever written. I used to hold it close and pray it often, but somehow the words got lost in the shuffle of my life. A contemporary artist a few years back released an album containing this song, complete with contemplative music accompanying the lyrics. I can’t say what brought me to listen to it, but I found it on my iPod and started listening.

By the time I left for work, I knew that I needed to begin praying through my day, but something kept drawing me back to the song. It felt like the tug of a little child on your shirt asking for your attention. I couldn’t step away from it. I replayed it. Again. Then again. When I started feeling the pressure to turn it off, I heard the voice of the Spirit in my heart say, “No, listen to it. Play it again. This will serve as your prayer to me this morning. Sing along with the full expression of passion within you.”

On the same album, I found a rendition of the Keith Green song, “Lord You’re Beautiful,” and echoed with the words praise to God. For forty minutes I let these two songs carry me into a worship and prayer with this Lover and Life-giver that blew the dust off of my morning liturgies and opened me up again to beauty and the joy of surprise and delight I find in expressing myself to the Lord, and of hearing Him respond.

I pulled up to work, parked the truck, and sang aloud, “Lord You’re beautiful, Your face is all I seek, for when Your eyes are on this child, Your grace abounds to me…” Shutting the truck off, I looked up and noticed the car parked across from had written on the windshield in white shoepolish the words, “You’re beautiful.” Yeah! I was singing this to God and here even inanimate objects were joining with me! And immediately then I recognized that this was God speaking back to me. I heard, “You are beautiful, my son. Nothing is more compelling than your delight in me. You conquer me with your love.”

I could not have made all of this happen. I can’t even say for sure why now. I mean, why was it this morning that I was able to have such an intimate time with the Lord when weeks have gone where our interactions have felt stifled? Perhaps I was desperate enough to hear Him. Maybe I was just quiet enough to hear Him, “my house now being still” and all of that. Or, maybe He was just ready to speak, to bring something new and fresh to me.

Whatever the reason, it was beautiful, and I am taken all over again by this brush with the Living One. He disciplines us, and we take our place in the relationship by offering Him our hearts and minds and lives as timber, but it is the Presence we must encounter if we are to have the Fire. This is His part, His promise, to “be with us” (John 14:16, Romans 16:20, 2 Corinthians 3:11, 2 Thessalonians 3:18, Hebrews 13:25). I am getting the feeling that when Jesus says He will be with us, He really means to be with us, in ways that newlyweds on their wedding night are “with” one another, only moreso. He means to have us.

 

Conversatio Morum

NEWS?

originally uploaded by holgarolga

All of us have hang-ups when it comes to praying. Sometimes we get tripped up and stumble around for awhile trying to figure out how to pray. Some of us at various times wonder if we should pray. At other times, we know we can, we know we should, and we even know how, but we simply do not have the desire to pray. Some of us have been stuck in dry, empty routine for some time. Others have completely given up on the hope to really connect with their Creator in any meaningful way.

Books have been written on this subject for hundreds of years. And a few that I’ve read are very good! (Wow, what an arrogant statement.) I have neither the calling nor the wisdom to offer more now on the subject, except for a bit of personal experience that I bet most of us can relate to.

Looking back over the last few months, I’ve discovered a certain theme in regard to the ways I’m approaching God through prayer. I rarely begin where I am. Rather, I always feel like I have to crawl to some certain place to where God is before I can set out to really share my heart with the Lord or hear from Him. Like I have to ascend a mountain or climb to some spiritual level to reach Him. It’s not penance. I don’t mean that I feel like I have committed a certain sin that keeps me from His presence. I mean, rather, that I feel as though I have to earn His ear, like I have to clamor for His attention. Do something fantastic, even if it’s reaching some level of humility so that I can come before Him (forgetting that I immediately become proud of my humble attainment anyway).

The feeling, if I were to put it into words, goes something like this: “I am not worthy of God. He’s really busy. He’s not that interested in me or my life. So I’ll just be really cautious in the way I approach Him.” Translation: “I am not worth anything to God. He is limited in power and limited in love. I will be faithless and godless and only pretend to be holy so that I can feel better about myself.”

My devotions have become routine. Communion with God has been replaced with assumptions (“I think this is what God thinks about this or that”). Obedience has become guesswork (“I guess God would want me to do this or that”). And the zeal and zest for life, that expectancy that Paul spoke of when he said he approaches God with an anticipation of “What’s next, Papa?” has been usurped with dull and drab predictability. “I wonder what’s next” is spoken aloud to no one in particular.

It’s all certainly a step away from “fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace” found in Hebrews.

I’ve noticed this for a few weeks now. I’ve been paying attention to the way in which I approach God, or don’t. And why. I had conversation with a friend and afterwards wondered why I wasn’t asking Jesus in that moment how to encourage him or what I was to take from our time. I have decisions to make at work. Have I consulted God about them? There are hundreds of men gathered on a mountain right now to meet God, and I have been called in to intercede for their time. Am I asking Jesus how to do so? What of my own heart? Am I coming to Him with the ache and confusion and hope — eyes wet with tears or fists raised to the sky, whatever the moment calls for — or am I biting my lip and putting on a smile and faking my way through?

How I’ve gotten here isn’t so important as the question of what I am to do with this reality. What do you do with that? It can be a bit despairing, actually. Okay, so I’m blowing it in a big way. Great. Whew, that’s a relief. Glad to hear it.

The options are pretty few, actually. As I see it, I can either 1) continue with what I’m doing now, or 2) recognize what I see as less than what I want and move toward change. Given those two choices, I’d think the second is the most appealing. The problem is, though, I’ve tried this. I’ve tried to get up earlier to pray more. I’ve tried to read more Scripture. I’ve opened a couple of those books I mentioned on prayer. Nothing seemed to make any lasting change, though.

The reason none of them worked is because in doing them, I’m still living in the first option. It’s the same thing. I’m not going to God. I’m trying to get myself together, get to a better place of prayer, but I’m not actually praying at all. I’m doing it on my own. Which was the source of the problem to begin with. So this is what I finally decided to do. A few days ago, I asked Jesus something very simple, “Stir in me the desire to seek You.” That’s it. Nothing profound. I can’t even say it was particularly heartfelt. I didn’t wait until it “felt” good at all, or until I “felt” passionate desire for it. I’d wait forever and never approach Him if that were the case.

And then yesterday a friend shared his story of having conversation with God. It was over something really simple, something so small, in fact, that I thought, “You can’t do that. Can you? I mean, God doesn’t care about something like that. Does He?” Turns out, God did care. And He showed my friend that He cared. And He honored my friend by his coming to God about it in prayer. He met him, right where he was. This friend of mine was the first to admit that it wasn’t a particularly nice place he was in. He was irritated and selfish. But he came to God anyway. And God honored him for it with friendship.

Well, this story pierced me. And anytime something pierces me I always assume that it’s God’s doing. Most of the time, anyway. Certainly this time I felt it was, since I just asked God for help. Then there were two more things that happened. First, after I heard that I asked Jesus if there was anything that was keeping me from hearing His voice. (In John 10, Jesus promises that we would hear His voice.) I listened, and I heard His reply. He said, “only you.” In other words, only my refusal to come “boldly” into His presence. That’s it. Not my sinfulness, not my selfishness, not my irritability, not my weariness, not my insolence. It’s not a matter of time or attention or spiritual warfare. It’s a matter of trust. Do I believe Him when He says that I really can have intimacy with Him, that I can commune with Him on matters of the heart?

The second thing that happened is that I read somewhere that all the things that keep us from praying are not important. “Never mind them,” the author said, and I received it as confirmation for what Jesus told me. Nothing can keep us from Him.

And so, there’s this subtle change that is taking place in my heart. It is a shift of orientation. (“Orientation,” by the way, comes from the word “orient,” which means “to face toward the east.”) It’s a small shift, but the effects of it are great. Therapists call this change “generative,” meaning a small change on one level has momentous effects on another. Thinkers and writers of old had a phrase for this kind of change — conversatio morum. Death to the status quo. Richard Foster explains its meaning as “constant change, constant conversion, constant openness to the movings of the Spirit.”

I’m re-opening myself to these “movings of the Spirit.” It’s been a combination of my desire to be done with the status quo and the Lord’s kindness that has led me back into His presence. It’s a cliché to say this, I know, but the truth of it is so profound: God is always present. He is here and available to us now. “The sheep listen to his voice and heed it; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them.” This is the promise of Scripture.

We must begin here, with simply coming to our Shepherd as sheep in need. Maybe again and again. Everyday, maybe. Or maybe just for the first few seconds of prayer, a kind of recognition that we come into the throne room of grace by grace. Not because we’ve ascended to where it is, but because God has condescended to us in Jesus. Anything else would be unbelief, a refusal to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. And from that place, from a conversation already happening, then we can grow in intimacy with our Lord. But it must begin with recognizing that He’s come to us. I can’t remember who said it, but I remember hearing once that every other religion is man’s attempt to get to God. Only in Christianity has God come all the way to man. All the way. We start there. The easy fellowship and light burden of walking with God must begin with our response to His invitation to draw near now.

 

Letting Go of Guilt

Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance? -Romans 2:4

Guilt, originally uploaded by Grenen.

A friend, Joe, and I were recently discussing the prominent role that guilt seems to play in many people’s lives. In particular, Joe told me how much he’s lived his Christian life holding onto guilt like Charlie Brown’s friend Linus does his blanket. He had been told in church all his life that he was a sinner, and the message to him was that he was saved but he needed to cling to guilt. It became a kind of litmus test for those in his

fellowship: they knew they were “saved” as long as they felt guilty. If ever they questioned their salvation, they would only have to reflect a bit. As long as they discovered that they had a nagging sense of transcendental guilt clutching at their soul, weighing on them with its claws and talons sunk deep into their flesh, they knew they were safe.

I have often seen how we handle this in Christian circles, and I think that at core it comes down to a distrust in the heart of God. In some of these circles — not all, but some — we keep coming back again and again and again to the feet of Jesus to ask forgiveness for the very same sins. This return to seek forgiveness for the very same sins over and again seems to suggest that forgiveness is either all that is offered, or all that we receive. There is no deep, inner change or transformation that makes us able to live and not fall into the same patter of adultery against God’s heart.

But there may even be something deeper. I have often wondered if we receive forgiveness and even a measure of holiness from the Lord God, only to continue to clutch tightly our feelings of guilt, because we are somehow convinced that at least our guilt will keep us close to the heart of God. Right? If I’m miserable in my constant guilt, at least that misery will take me to the cross. Repeatedly. But what happens when we do not leave the guilt there and receive the life that Jesus offers in exchange? And is guilt the same thing as conviction, that deep work of the Holy Spirit to bring us back into the life of the Trinity? Are they one and the same? Does God condemn ?

Over the last couple of months, I have been in a journey of repentance, of returning back to the heart of God and His life in subtle ways, of re-orienting my heart back to Him. A re-consecration of my whole being to Him. I have often gone to the Lord to ask for forgiveness for not following Him “better,” for not being a better disciple. Well, recently God addressed this. Pointedly. Strongly. To the degree that I get the feeling He is very passionate about this.

Very plainly, He said to me, “Enough. I have forgiven you. You are holding onto your guilt thinking that it will keep you close to me. It will not. You must now let that go and follow Me. Come to me now for Me, and trust Me, not guilt, to be your Savior.”

Now what do I do with that? I realized at that moment that I cling to guilt because it is safe. To let it go means that I would be free. And freedom is a weighty thing. As Dallas Willard has said, “We are creatures given such diverse possibilities that they can actually lead us to heaven or to hell,” and our choices are constantly edging us closer to one or the other of those realities.

Friends, that is what we need God for. Oh yes, we need His mercy and forgiveness. Desperately. But we need that not as an end in itself, but as means back into His confidence. Back into the “sacred circle” of Love. And we need there so that God will be our constant guide and companion through this life, because if we are to find the “narrow way” that leads to life, it will not be by our cleverness or technological advances or religious dabbling, but rather by the very present and wise God speaking to us. Our hearts need the rescue that God has given us through Jesus, so that we may “reign in life” as He does (Romans 5:17). Our sin separates us from that life; God gives us the dignity of restoration back into it.

 

Riffraff

Our church sponsors a home in Cambodia that brings in homeless children from the streets and provides for them shelter, education, Christian influence — a home life, essentially. It’s not an orphanage exactly, in that these children are not adopted out to families. This is their family. The “parents” are American missionaries. The children are mostly riff-raff, literally, in that they are considered a socially lower class of people whose parents have abandoned them for various reasons. (The parents commonly name the children “Raff” or “unwanted.”) Or, more likely, they were sold to the streets, expected to sell their bodies to a perverted culture. (Often, sickeningly, it is foreigners who make them into prostitutes, using them for sexual acts. Foreigners to Cambodians means Westerners. Often Americans.)

So the church has this home there, rescuing these children from the streets and giving them a place to live, a place to be children, a place to grow up in safety and an environment of love. They eventually call the missionaries who take care of them “Mom” and “Dad” — expressions of an attachment many of them have never had. One of the coolest things they do is give the children back their names, typically by giving them new names, from “Raff” to something good, unique, something expressing their new identities from “unwanted” to “loved.”

Recently, the sponsors found out about a 15-year-old boy and his 5-year-old brother both living on the streets. They came to them and invited them in. Because “foreigners” are often dangerous, the ones who abuse them in horrific ways, they are understandably wary and frightened. Eventually, though, the 15-year-old comes into the home. His brother has not. At five years of age he is still taking care of himself alone on the streets.

When the 15-year-old came in, he had wounds on his feet, sores that were infected and oozing. He was a mess, dirty and grimey from his days and nights in the alleyways and God knows where. The missionaries cleaned him up and fed him. The first night, they loved on him, and he welcomed it with surprising hunger, his fear melting into the delight of being the center of someone’s kind and generous attention. For the first night in a long time, he was no longer an orphan, but someone’s child.

One of the nurses was going through a bucket of medicines the house had received and was labeling them. One in particular she was unfamiliar with, and put it aside to look up later. She then turned her attention to the boy’s feet, and decided he must have ringworm. She looked up the treatment in her physician’s desk reference and discovered, to her delight, that the medicine she had put aside was the proper treatment for his infection.

My wife and I were listening to all of this testimony from friends that just returned from visiting the place, and she turned to me and said, “That’s a Psalm.” She started looking it up and found the Scripture. It says, “The Lord builds up Jerusalem and gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). Amazing. This is what God does for us, for exiles of Israel.

Digging further into this Psalm, we discovered something else really incredible. It concerns the law of God. The psalmist continues, “The Lord sustains the humble” (v. 6). He then expounds on the vastness of God’s artistry and power: “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit” (v. 4). “He covers the sky with clouds; he supplies the earth with rain and makes grass grow on the hills. He provides food for the cattle and for the young ravens when they call” (v. 8-9). The author continues praising the qualities of God’s heart, now entering into the arena of His love and desire. “His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man; the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love” (v. 10-11, emphasis mine).

This is certainly good news. God’s heart is good, and He is for us. On and on the psalmist continues in this way, until he ends with the simple statement that is easily missed, “He has done this for no other nation; they do not know his laws” (v. 20, emphasis mine). He is suggesting that all of these amazing, praiseworthy characteristics of God’s nature are expressed by His laws. God’s laws enable us to know Him, to know our place with Him, and to know the reality of all things. This is life for us (see John 17:3). Essentially, God’s law, which is “perfect” (Psalm 19:7), is, in the words of Dallas Wilard, “one of the greatest gifts of grace that God has ever conveyed to the human race… It provides a picture of reality: of how things are with God and his creation… There is nothing lacking in it for its intended purpose. It therefore converts or restores the soul of those who seek it and receive it.” (This is why the “blessed man” of Psalm 1 “delights in the law of the Lord.” See The Forbidden Discipline of Spiritual Reading for more.)

Of course, the law became “weak and useless” (Hebrews 7:18) because of our sin, and so God sent a “better hope… by which we draw near to God” (v. 19)… that is, Jesus.

Psalm 147 paints a picture of what this better hope does for us, out of undying love, unfailing love. He brings us in. He binds up our wounds. He heals our hearts broken by being unloved, abused, neglected, homeless. He gives us new names. No longer will we be called Deserted; now we will be called Sought After. (Isaiah 62:12).

 

How Good is the News?

You are worse off than you ever dared to imagine, but God loves you more than you ever dared to hope.

-Manhattan church planter Tim Keller

I’ve been taking a look a bit at the life of Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous serial killer who many of us know of as the murderer who cannibalized his victims. For years on end, Dahmer committed horrendous and gruesome crimes against people in an effort, he would later say, to be sexually gratified and feel “one” with them.

Stone Phillips of NBC news interviewed Dahmer in 1994, his first and only national interview before he was beaten to death in prison. In that interview, Dahmer confessed that he had come to Christ and repented of his sins. He explained that he had all his life believed that evolution and atheism were true, and if that were the case, what would be the point of altering your behavior since there was no God to be accountable to. That changed for him after his conviction when he began reading Christian literature and eventually gave himself over to his God.

Let me just say now that there was no advantage for Dahmer in making that confession. He was not treated any differently in prison. He was not earning any sympathy or support. As far as anyone could see, there was no reason for him to make that confession of faith… except that he had experienced a genuine encounter with the Lord God.

What do we make of all of that? My wife and I watched the interview together holding back tears, tears for the victims and their families, tears for Dahmer’s mom and dad who were interviewed and still, years after their son was exposed as precipitating such evil, questioned whether or not they were to blame for his madness, and tears for Dahmer himself.

There are two things that I commonly see folks do with the news of his crimes and his later repentance and return to Christ. First, several try to analyze him, to make sense of his crime, and to place him in some category that distances themselves from him, things like: It was his raising; It was a genetic predisposition toward that perversion; He had schizophrenia, and the like. I understand that approach. His parents were doing the same thing. Even Dahmer himself stated he didn’t know why he did what he did, except that he didn’t have to answer to anyone, so he thought. But that approach hints of fear, fear that tries to place Dahmer and others who commit such evil into a category that differentiates him from us just to make us feel better. “He was insane. I’m not.” And that may very well be true, no doubt.

The other approach is to balk at the possibility that he could come to Christ and that Christ would be able to forgive him, to be skeptical about the whole thing. “How could God forgive such evil?” I understand that approach, too.

But Christ, I think, compels us to take another look and examine it in light of the Fall and Redemption.

As perhaps a more digestible approach let me give an analogy. Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel tells of his alcoholism and the common question to him of how he, after following Jesus for so long, could become an alcoholic. He tells of a sign that hangs in the AA room that reads, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” His point is that we are much more fragile than we think, and that the grace of God and the grace of God alone holds us and keeps us in the light. Were God to let go of us, we would be blown to bits. Brennan’s friend Rich Mullins sang, “We are not as strong as we think we are,” insisting that only God’s strength holds us together.

With that being said, perhaps the only distinction between Dahmer at the time when he committed his crimes and us is that we of the faith have Christ as our light and life. We need nothing else. Our compulsions, our fantasies, our propensity toward evil… all of them are washed away by our appropriation of His shed blood for us. His life is our light. We literally breathe as He gives us breath. That’s what it means to be sustained by His life.

And now, what differences is there between Dahmer and believers? Well, assuming you believe his repentance was genuine, and assuming you believe the gospel of grace, there is no difference. None. God found and rescued Jeffrey Dahmer. Thirteen years ago, during the NBC interview, he admitted that he still fights against the fantasies, and so there is evidence that much healing from God needed to take place within him. Like Paul, he would need the grace to forget much of his past. But, when we enter into paradise, he will greet us and possibly show us around a bit. If that is distasteful for you, well, you’ll have to square that up with the God who rescued you.

In the Beatitudes (Matthew 5), Jesus indicated that there’s no difference from murder and hating your brother. Essentially, if you have hate for someone in your heart, you are in danger of the same judgment as if you murdered him. The same need of grace.

This is all a lot to take in, really. But the people of the early church had to deal with the same issue concerning Paul. Remember that Paul, or Saul at the time, persecuted the church, insanely thinking he was doing it for God. We say “persecuted,” but what we really mean is he murdered people. Gruesomely. I’ve seen a video of a modern-day stoning of a lady in Afghanistan. It’s horrible. It’s torturous. I hid my eyes from most of the video, thinking, “How could people do such a thing?!” Those are the kinds of acts Saul committed long before the Acts we generally know him for.

When Jesus came, he began a revolution of love, exchanging his life for ours when we were still sinners – murderers, rapists, traitors. Don’t paint that over with religious language to distance yourself from it. We were detestable in the evil we committed against God’s heart. But his love was great, enough to exchange Jesus’ life to have us back. Jesus stated by his revolutionary love unequivocally that nothing would separate us from His love, not even our sin.

If that is not true, we are all doomed. But if it is true, then it’s the most glorious news ever heard, especially for the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, Paul of Tarsus, and those of us who know we are dirt without God. I often want to skip the Fall and rush into the Redemption, but we must remember that we fell, and we fell far. That may be explanation enough for the likes of Dahmer and the evil that the human heart detached from Christ is still capable of. But the heart redeemed… ah, that’s a beautiful thing. No longer bent toward evil, but toward good.

Enter into the revolution. It’s the only possibility we have to “live as we were meant to live” (Acts 16:31, The Message)