Grace and Habit

I cannot remember when I first learned what we Presbyterians call "the doctrines of grace."  I only remember that it was a tremendous relief when I did.   The "doctrines of grace" is the knowledge that God loves me just the way I am, that He showed it  by dying on the Cross for me, even when I didn't deserve it. I don't have to prove anything to God for Him to love me--He already does. I don't have to choose Him--He chose me.  I don't have to be good enough to earn His favor--He already is better than good enough for both of us.  His  death on the Cross gave me complete forgiveness for everything I've done wrong, and for those unfortunate,  wayward tendencies which make up so much of my psyche. God is a forgiving Father, who keeps taking me back no matter how much I embarrass Him, or fail His instructions.  He loves me, and that is a good thing.

The doctrines of Grace liberates me from shame and the from the tyranny of perfectionism.  God simultaneously sets the bar of perfection too high for me to reach and acceptance too low for me to miss it.    In this, God is like my wife who loves me even when I act like a jerk and dress like a hobo.  Her love is not  affected by my many failures, and neither is God's.

Yet as satisfying as grace may be, there remains a nagging disquietude.  Deep down, I'm not that good of a guy.  I may be forgiven, but that doesn't make me  right.

The grace, at least as it is sometimes understood, is that it gets at the punishment but not the cause.  Sure we are forgiven, but are we changed?  Suppose I were an alcoholic, and God were to say me " That's okay, son. I forgive you for drinking,"   That would be good, but I can still be a slave to drinking.  Even if my drinking had no direct punishment, it could till wreak havoc on my life.  Forgiveness, however wonderful, is no answer without  change.

This sets up a conundrum. If our relationship with God demands change, that implies there must be a standard of living, a law, that defines the way ought to live.  If there is a law, then I am under it. If I am under it, then I ought to be ashamed and feel guilty when I break it. I cannot be guilty and not guilty at the same time.  How, can grace and the Law coexist?   Yet they do coexist somehow. 

More specifically,  how can I both believe in doing the right thing, and believe I don't have to do the right thing?  How can we  live with God, ourselves and others, seeking to please Him, yet failing at every turn to do it right?

I cannot say that I  have fully grasped intellectually or experientially this paradox, but I can say that may have found a way around it that preserves my freedom and leads me to live a better life

 It lies in the habits of the heart.

Most of what we do in life we never think very little about. We do them automatically by learned instinct. This  ability of human beings to do repetitive tasks or to make repetitive judgments is called habit.  Habits carry the force of momentum in the mind--if we don't make a conscious effort to stop, we just keep doing them.  We act by habit without paying attention.  That is the purpose of habits, to relieve our conscious mind of constant decision making by creating a bank of premade decisions. 

Habits do not always happen by accident. We can make or break habits by the repetition of the same small decision over and over.  Have devotions three or four days in a row, and it starts a habit.  Oversleep for three or four days in a row, and that becomes a habit, too.

 Some habits are positive,  such as kissing your wife good morning, while some are negative, such at overeating,  gambling, or pornography.  Once they are formed, they draw us  like iron to a magnet. 

Habits frequently supersede the intentions of our heart.  They are, like Paul said, another law in our bodies, drawing us to do thing our spirit says we should not do. 

Habits are in many ways are the opposite of laws.

Laws are imposed from outside--habits exist on the inside. Laws are hard to keep--habits are hard not to keep.  Laws are enforced by shame--habits are enforced by momentum. Laws are more of a burden the more we have--habits  are easier to follow the more we have. Laws demand perfection--habits are about inclination.

Habits are like gravity. Whether or not we defy them, they are still there, pulling us in one direction or another. 

Laws can become habits.  For example, we may be in the habit of buckling our seat belts when we get in the car,  when we also know it is the law we do so. Once we get in the habit, we no longer worry about obeying .  Once a law becomes a habit, it no longer becomes a burden. 

The intention of the Law was to help us develop of the right kind of habits.  We my no longer need to be told not to kill, because  we do not want to kill. We no longer need to be told not to steal, because we don't want what other people have.  We  may not be under the threat of punishment, but we still need to make good habits instead of bad ones.

This pursuit of good habits is purely personal.   Failure in habits, at least at first,  is to be expected, but it doesn't need to stop us from trying.  We don't stop trying to develop good eating habits because we overindulged in a meal last week. We just get up and try again.  We don't stop talking to God because missed devotions one morning--we just try again. 

Whether we are trapped in bad habits or failing at good habits, there is no habit which cannot be changed with God's help.  Paul says that there is no sin which is not common to us, but God will with each temptation give us a way of escape, so that we may be able to bear it.  With God's help we can break every binding habit. 

I am grateful for God's universal forgiveness in my life. I am also grateful that He can help me develop positive change though positive habits .   The struggle for  sanctification is a struggle to develop new habits. Change our habits and we change ourselves.

On Being Judgmental, Part 3

Sometimes I wonder if extreme judgmentalism should not be classified as a kind of personality disorder. We are all judgmental at times, but there is an impulse to judge that goes beyond the normal in some people. Being judgmental creates an illusion of being in control. If we cannot control what goes on around us, we reach for the false security of being able to make sense of it. If we can label the things around us as good or bad, we have simplified things into two camps. That makes us feel slightly more secure in our place in life. It also leaves us with a feeling of usperiority over others. Passing judgment gives us a feeling of the moral highground. This is odd, because people who have the same vices still feel somewhat more moral if they can judge others to be sinners for doing the same things that they know they are doing.


This brings up the greatest challenge for the judgmental--self judgment. If we do not judge others or judge God, we still may judge ourselves.

Paul must have suffered from self judgment, judging by what he said in 1 Cor 4:3-5

3 I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself . 4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. 5 Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes.

Paul's conscience is clear because he is forgiven, not because he is perfect. God has taken away from him the penalty for sin.

That was not always true for Paul. When he was a Pharisee, under the law, Paul spent a lot of time in self-judgment. Self-judgment was (and still is) viewed by many as a good thing, a trait that will get us on the road to self perfection. But self-perfection is a dead-end street. We will never get there until we are reborn in the new kingdom of God without the stain of original sin. Until then, we will make errors, mistakes, and even wllful sins.

Most Christians show signs of extreme judgmentalism. Why do I say that? It isn't because they necessarily express their judgment of others. Some do, but most have learned to keep judging to themselves. "Judge not, that you will not be judged." No, I believe Christians struggle with judmentalism because of the misery in their lives. Christians ought to be a happy people, a joyful people. But when we look at Christians honestly, we recognize that most of them are not. That is because inside they still beat themselves up for being bad people. Most of us are more keenly aware of our own sins than we are of others.

Self judgment is basically the same as the judgment we pass on others. All judgment is a desire to feel superior. If we judge others, we are trying to feel superior to them. If we judge circumstances, we are basically telling God what to do. And if we judge ourselves, we are really judging the One who made us.

If you struggle with self-esteem issues, I'm not trying to put you down. Neither am I telling you to stop judgment. Then we would be judging ourselves on how judgmental we are! Instead, I would suggest some readjustment of perception of the way things are, that's all. If we see God more clearly in His relationship to us, then we will also see ourselves the way He sees us.

Here are a few things that God thinks about us.

1. We are fantastically beautiful in the eyes of God. We are the epitome of creation, and the most beautiful thing to Him in the whole world. He did not say of squirrels and monkeys that they were made in His own image. He did not look at turtles and chickens and say "This is very good." He did not die for dogs. He died for us. We are to God as fantastically beautiful as our children were when we first held them in our arms.

2. He is generous with our faults. Sometimes we stress that God is perfection, and that we are all imperfect and sin-stained. But God has a relationshiop with us nevertheless. He talks to us, and comforts us. This is in spite of the fact that our sins are far more numerous and serious than we think they are. The sins we notice are like a spot of mud on a pigs nose--we see them as great, but if we could really see the rest of us, we would know that they are really small compared with the sins we don't see. Our good deeds are are like the collar on a dog. They may be the only clothing we have, but it sure doesn't cover much. God could care less. He loves us, not because of what we do right, but in spite of what we do wrong. He is more generous to us than we are to ourselves.

3. He is passionate about forgiving us. If the value an object is proven by what we are willing to pay for it, then our forgiveness must be the most valuable thing in the world. God paid the price of the cross for us. How, then can we call it of no account? Why do we insist upon holding onto the guilt of past sins when in fact God has paid the ultimate price for it?

4. He wants to walk beside us always. Whenever I am tempted to hold a grudge against a person, one of the questions I have to ask myself is how much that grudge is worth. Is it worth disrupting my life for it? Is it worth changing jobs to avoid seeing them, or changing churches? Is it worth splitting up a family or ruining a friendship? Most of the time, I conclude that grudges are just too expensive.

Self grudges are highly expensive, too. They cause us to avoid confronting ourselves. When we don't like ourselves, we resort to all kinds of diversions and amusements to keep from dealing with genuine issues. We avoid uncomfortable realities, hide from ourselves uncomfortable facts, and think that, if we never think about it, our guilt will go away. We can make it go away for a time, but it is really still there, and the cost of avoidance becomes bigger every day.

God could act the same way to us, but He doesn’t. He would rather overlook our faults, and forgive our tresspasses than to break our friendship. God does not abandon us. It is we that run away from Him, usually because we do not think He can handle our sinfulness. Rest assured, God can.

The biggest argument I can make against judgmentalism is that it is a waste of time and energy. We waste time thinking about oughts and shoulds and have no time left to deal with what is and isn't. Judging self is no more useful than judging God and others.

Nevertheless, judgments do have its uses, which we will talk about in our next installment.

The Seventh Lover

How could a woman come to have five husbands in Jesus’ time? It wasn’t easy. It was easier for a man to have five wives than a woman to have five husbands. Divorce was not easy for a woman. Her husband was abusive or unfaithful, she would have to prove it. Otherwise, they assumed that she needed a beating. If a woman divorced a man, she would be on her own, without resources or ability to live. So how did this woman come to have five husbands? She must have started early—about thirteen or fourteen. She would have married a man at least twice her age. She was beautiful—she had to be beautiful to attract so many men. What did she do to displease him? Maybe she was not a good cook. Or maybe she was a nag. Those were grounds for divorce in those days. Maybe she refused her husband. Maybe her husband just got tired of her. A woman had no rights except to obey her husband. Whatever it was, her first husband dropped her quickly and she went back to her family in disgrace. Imagine this rejection for a little girl. She was damaged good, and she was still in her teens. In spite of this, though, she married again. What kind of a man would he have been? He probably seemed to be a gentle man. When a woman has been hurt, she looks for someone who will not hurt her. She looks for some white knight, riding to the rescue. Then one day, a white knight appears, and she is more than happy to get on the back of his horse. But things do not go well. The white knight has tarnished armor. After a few years, he showed his true nature. Maybe he was abusive, or maybe he enjoyed rescuing fair maidens more than living with them. But in the end, he dumped. He divorced her, and put the blame on her. So here she was, a twice married woman—probably with a child or two. Her family is skittish about taking her in. People in town think there must be something wrong with her. The first time, they may blame the man, but the second, they start to turn on her. They question whether she should be living in a good town like that. Righteous little villages have a way of pushing out people with bad reputation. Now, though, she is desperate and alone, with children to feed. So she trades the only commodity she has for survival--her body. She is willing to marry any man who can get her out of that town, give her a place to live, and put food on her table. That’s where husbands three, four, and five come in. She married a man, thought things would be perfect for a while, and then he dumped her again. She was a woman to be used up an d discarded. There may have been relocations. With every husband, she moved somewhere else and started over, trying to be a respectable wife. But Samaria is a small country. Her reputation followed her wherever she went. This Samaritan woman had been beautiful. But if she were a rose, she was a fading rose. As her looks faded, so did her ability to attract and keep a man. Love based on physical beauty is doomed to fail. A woman needs to be treated with affection and respect even when beauty had faded. And this woman was seeing her beauty fade. For the fifth time, this woman was divorced (assuming one or more of her husbands did not die on her.). What could she do for a living? Eventually, she finds a small measure of security and affection in the arms of a man who does not respect her. He will live with her, but he will not marry her. All he gives her are false compliments and sex. Nevertheless, after five other husbands, this sixth lover is better than nothing. He will do until she can find someone who can offer her some security.. Then one day, this woman went to the well to draw water, and there is this man, sitting there alone. He is a foreigner—a Jew. Ordinarily, the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans. What is he doing there, all alone in the middle of the day? Women come to the well. Maybe he is looking for a woman. Then she thinks this could be an opportunity. This man could be heaven-sent. He could take her with him, to where she could really have a new life—in the country of the Jews, away from the whispering gossips of Samaria. Maybe they treat their women better in Judea. . This stranger could be her ticket out of here. She could have hung back until the man left, but she didn’t. She have waited until someone else came to the well. Instead she went up to the well, and up to the stranger. He spoke first “give me something to drink.” She was coy, and sassy “How is is that you a Jew ask me a Samaritan for a drink?” "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." If this was a flirtation, it was a strange one! What could he possibly mean by living water? Nevertheless, she decides to play along. Vs 11-15 "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?" There was a playfulness in what she said. She really has no way of thinking that he is anyone great. She is just carrying on a conversation a potential next lover. But then things got even stranger. Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." She understood nothing. Living water! Running water? Is he saying he has some kind of magic spigot, she can get water whenever he wanted? What does he mean by “eternal life?” Maybe he’s saying that he wanted her eternally—take care of her for the rest of his life. Maybe he was just joking. I am a romantic in many ways, but I am not fond of romance as a substitute for God. We think our lovers will solve our problems—that they will give us self-esteem or confidence and take care of all our ills. Lovers never do that. That’s God’s business. Eternal life cannot be found in a lover’s eyes. Nor will anyone give us by themselves a new quality of life. This had been this woman’s mistake all along—she thought she could find salvation in a lover’s arms. If she could just find the right man, everything would be fine. But this man had something else in mind entirely. She played along. "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." Is it a legitimate request or water? Or is it a double entendre. Is she really talking about water, or is she talking about men? Could she be saying—are you the kind of man who can satisfy me, so that I would never have to go looking among strangers for another? If there was a double meaning un what she said, the next words crushed it. Vs. 16 "Go, call your husband and come back." I cannot imagine a thing that would destroy a woman who thought she was being flirtatious more completely. Call her husband? How could he say that? Clearly, she had misread him. Maybe she is misreading him. Maybe he just wanted to know if she was available. “I have no husband.” She replied Then he answered, "You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true." She was truly astounded. How could he know this? Had he been spying? That was impossible. No one in the village knew her whole story. How could he know about all five husbands? Then she realized the truth. This was no potential lover at all. This was a prophet. See verse 19 "I can see that you are a prophet. What is a prophet? It is not, as we often think a person who foretells the future. A prophet by their understanding was someone who spoke for God. So this is God standing before her and telling her that he knows her past and her background, and he doesn’t care. The course of the conversation abruptly changed from a light flirtation to a religious discussion. Much to our surprise, she is not that disappointed. What does a woman want more in a lover? First she wants someone who understands her. When we meet a new person, the first thing we tell them is our history. Then, as we come to trust them, we tell them our secrets. We first reveal a little of ourselves, then eventually et them know about the secrets we keep locked away in our hearts. What we seek from them is acceptance and forgiveness. We want to know that whatever we have done doesn’t matter--that they love us as we are today. Jesus did love her, though not in an earthly sense. He knows about our former lovers, our deepest mistakes, and he doesn’t care. He is not in love with our past, but our present. He does not care about where we’ve been, but where we are going. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were much like many religious people today. They cannot get over a person’s past. If a person had committed adultery, or been divorced, or once used drugs, then fat chance getting their acceptance! In some cases, even if your parents were sinners, they don’t like you. Some writers have suggested that Jesus’ statement was a kind of rebuke. He was pointing out her six lovers because he wanted her to know he disapproved. It was just the opposite. This was no rebuke. It was a release.. Then the conversation takes another strange term. All of a sudden, this woman wants to kow about theology—verses :20-24 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." The oddest thing about this discussion is that they are having it at all. Why is she of all people interested in theological matters? It tells us a little about her background. At one time, she studied about God. But time had stripped God away from her. Being abused by men, she came to believe that God was also an abuser. Her curiosity about Him ended. But deep down, she still craved to be close to God. People are born with an interested in their creator. Sin and the abuse of this world takes it out. Just like people are born with appetite, but the emotional trauma of the world can make us into anorexics, we are born with a hunger for God, but abusive religious people kill our appetite for Him. So what’s her theological question? Can I worship God on this mountain? You Jews claim I’m in the wrong place. Will he meet me where I am, on this mountain, or do I have to go to Jerusalem to speak to him? It doesn’t matter what ground we stand upon, where life has taken us, we an always worship Him. If we stop looking at our surroundings and start looking at our loving and accepting God, we can have hope. It doesn’t matter where you are now in live. It only matters where you want to be. Do you want to worship God in spirit and in truth? Then you can. Now, lets look at one more thing Jesus tells in verses 25-26 The woman said, "I know that Messiah" (called Christ) "is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us." Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am he." What does “messiah” mean? We always think of it as “king” or Lord. But the concept of a king is to distant to adequately explain what Jesus is. A woman in those days called her husband “lord” as well. So Messiah, Christ, Jesus was saying he wasn’t her lover in a physical sense, but he was her Lord. He was her husband. He would te the ont to protect, her comfort her, guide her, as a husband loves and protects his wife. He wa not only her lord, of course. He was the lord of the whole world. But for her personally, he would be her husband—her seventh and final lover. God did not send Jesus in the world to judge you or condemn you. He sent Him to love you, save you, lead you. He sent him to be your Lord and savior. Will you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior? He is the only lover who will never let you down.