Free to Descend
I’ve been reflecting lately on competition. Even though the election is not until next year the fervent buzz of competition has already begun. It’s somewhat ironic when you think about it that the thing that brings us all together to think about the future of our country is a competition…a knockdown, drag out fight where my guy or gal tries to beat the snot out of your gal or guy. It is the best way we know how to further the cause of humanity…this competitive democratic process…and competition is certainly a characteristic of humanity. It covers almost every aspect of our lives: Politics, business, economics, sibling rivalries, and of course sports. Super Bowl Sunday is this weekend after all. . .I’m cheering for the Chiefs since my Steelers are sitting at home thinking about next year. . .love you, Kenny Pickett! We like competition and some of us really love it. I have to confess I am in that “love it” crowd. I love to compete. I remember all the way back to when I was in fifth grade playing in the YMCA basketball league. . .every Friday night before our Saturday morning game, my buddy Brad and I would have a sleep over and we would get ourselves pumped for the game by watching Hoosiers, the greatest sports movie of all time. Every Friday during the season for three years of YBL and then well into our junior high B-ball days. It was our ritual, and it worked every time. We’d watch Jimmy Chitwood sink that final shot and we’d go crazy. We couldn’t wait for the next day when we would do our best to relive the drama and win. I loved it. It was so much fun.
It’s the way we think life works. We think it’s about winning. Survival of the fittest. It’s all one big competition. We may not be trying to be the next President or win the Super Bowl or be the next Jimmy Chitwood, we don’t think that we can compete or be the best in every arena, but there are certain things we’re good at and we try to excel in those. It may even be more on the subconscious level, but it’s there. We want to be good at something and that is usually judged against the performance of another. To get there, to get to the realm of excellence we believe we have to work hard, practice, practice, practice, so that we can improve so that we can excel and eventually win. It is the quest for glory, to be “the best of the best of the best, sir” (thank you Men In Black). This is how we think life works and this is how we think things work with God. It is the most common view of sanctification, which means the process of being made holy or good. We think it is about climbing that Stairway to Heaven to borrow from the greatest band of all time, that’s Led Zeppelin if you weren’t sure. Life is about working hard, giving it our all to constantly improve and climb that stairway until we ascend all the way up to where God is – to holiness.
But we run into a problem with Jesus. We run into a problem with grace. Grace is fundamentally different from that view of sanctification. Grace is not about ascending, it is about descending. Grace blows up our paradigm. Which creates a real problem for us. We are so bent toward results-based living, toward climbing that stairway, that we are essentially allergic to any kind of grace paradigm for life. Grace does not make sense to us. It does not compute as real or true to us. Receiving the benefits of a gift that we did not earn is truly difficult for us. We want to compete and prove that we’re the best, we want to ascend, but really only in the things that we think we’re good at, I keep pointing that out to show how selective we are in our view of holiness and goodness. When we say “holiness” we do not mean the same thing as God’s definition of holiness. We mean being pretty darn good in a lot of ways and working hard to get better, but God means absolute perfection right now – that’s what holiness means. There’s no gray area with holiness.
This is why, in God’s economy, sanctification must be about descending. If it were about ascending we’d never make it. But in chapter 3 of Luke’s gospel we read about Jesus’ baptism, and we see this offensive thing play out in real life. We see Jesus continue his descent into our lives, into the muck and the mire of our everyday. We heard the beginning of this a few weeks ago at Christmas. Everything about him shows us a different picture from what we would expect from a king and not just a king, but the King of kings, God himself. Jesus is born into a manger, a feeding trough for livestock to a couple of peasant teenagers. From the very beginning Jesus shows us he is all about entering into the low place, entering into the place of suffering. As my brilliant wife, Kate, has said, there is a direct line between the feeding trough and the cross. His life is consistently about taking the low position, about descending. And his baptism is the same. It is right on that same line.
Jesus gets baptized by John the Baptist and in so doing says that he will take our place. He will align himself with us and will stand in for us in life. He took the place of the sinner needing to be baptized, needing to be cleansed of sin in order to be free. Jesus submits himself willingly to this for our benefit. He descends again for our sake under the water, as our representative, as the one who would make the way straight for us, the one who would die and rise again. And as he does this the heavens open, the Holy Spirit in the bodily form of a dove descends upon Jesus, and the voice of God the Father is heard saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (v. 22). God gives his audible approval of Jesus for our benefit. This is the guy who is going to stand in for us: God’s own Son with whom he is already well pleased.
The result of this, of Jesus willingly standing in for us and being baptized, is that our paradigm completely shifts. Where in our human nature we think everything is based on competition and performance, in light of Jesus, because of what he does for us, because of him descending, all value and all acceptance is given despite any performance you can muster. God’s words to Jesus now become words to us. God says to us, because of his grace given in Jesus Christ, “You are my beloved children; with you I am well pleased.” We are valued first and our whole paradigm blows up. The earner in us, the doer in us is deeply offended. “This can’t be right. You can’t be pleased with me. . .I haven’t done anything. In fact, if I’ve done anything I’ve probably done something to displease you. You can’t be pleased with me. This can’t be true.”
But this is the truth. God is not mad at you. He is not displeased with you. He is not sitting far away in the sky on a cloud looking down on you waiting for you to ascend to him. He is pleased with you, well pleased. He loves you! He loves you so much that He sent His Son to save you to live for you. . .as a GIFT! Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit, the triune God are completely united in their love for you. Jesus willingly submits to a sinner’s baptism for you, he willingly says I will go for them. I will be counted with them. I will give myself for them…and he does. And we see in this moment God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit reveal the fact that this is God’s will – to overturn the constant demand for performance from you. To destroy the results-based living that keeps us in a state of rejection, a state of worthlessness unless we can work and strive and prove ourselves worthy. To silence the voice that constantly says, “You’re not good enough. You’re a disappointment.” That’s all that awaits us at the end of the competition driven life, at the end of the results-based life. “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t enough.” This is what it means that Jesus has the winnowing fork in his hand to clear his threshing floor gathering the wheat into his barn and the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. He is removing everything in your life that is killing you – that very notion that you should be able to earn it…to live by results…that is what he is burning up, that idea of being self-sufficient, or winning the competition of life.
With Jesus the game is over before we can even begin. Because He has entered into our world, descended to be with us and to live for us and because he has fulfilled any requirement that could ever be placed upon us, our starting point is that God is well pleased with us. He loves us just as we are. There is nothing we can say or do or neglect to say or do that can change that. We are valuable to Him, which means we are valuable full stop. It is inherent to who we are. It is our new state. Instead of being in a state of rejection and a state of worthlessness, we are in a state of acceptance, in a state of value, in a state of love. We are holy in Jesus Christ. We can try to resist it, and we will. We will try to continually return to the results-based life. . .back to the chaff, we will continually try to return to proving ourselves as better than others, but we will always be brought back to Jesus and his cross where performance dies and the new life of freedom always begins. That’s where our holiness lies. . .in him.
SO, as I said sanctification then is about descending. It’s not the stairway to heaven model, it’s not the world’s model of striving, practicing and performing and ascending our way to God. Sanctification is consistent with Jesus. It is about descending. Sanctification is really about knowing our need for Jesus. It is about knowing the fact that we are not holy and cannot make ourselves holy. It is about knowing that He is the only way for us. Jesus is the only way that we can be free from our sin. Sanctification is full dependence on him, on what he has done for us and on the fact that he is with us in our low position. He is with us in the feeding trough of our lives, in the painful place, the shameful place. He is with us and for us in the brokenness.
Instead of life looking like us trying harder and harder to distance ourselves from sin (essentially trying to erase our need) because of Jesus and his descent to us we can actually, maybe for the first time, look at our sin for what it actually is. We can descend into the brokenness of our own lives and face it for the first time because we know Jesus has already been there and has dealt with it, and he is the one leading us into it to face it, to stop running in fear and denial. He is using his winnowing fork to separate the wheat from the chaff. He stops all our efforts to not need him, to prove we’re worthy. Instead, he says, “I have made you worthy, you are my child with whom I am well pleased. Come with me into this dark place where you are hurting so much, and I will set you free from it.” You don’t have to work anymore to please him. You don’t have to pretend that things are not as bad as they really are anymore because he already knows. That’s why he came to go to our low places, and now we are free to go there too, not to revel in them, not to have our faces rubbed in them, but to have them healed. To find him there already saying, “I love you here. I love you here. I love you here. Don’t be afraid. Depend on me. I won’t let you go. I have removed this and thrown it into the fire forever.” Sanctification looks like us coming to grips with the truth of our pain, or our sin, to be set free. This is the new life, a life aware of our need for Jesus, depending on him, completely loved and completely holy in Him.
We won’t stop telling you this, and I pray you won’t stop telling us whenever we meet. No matter where we may be we can never hear it enough, and it is the difference of the Christian life, it is the genesis of new life for us right now and forever. I need to hear it every day. I need to hear it every time I mess up, every time I slip, every time I disappoint, every time no matter what… “You are my child; with you I am well pleased.” Amen.
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