Do the Word

In a guest column for the Christian Post cleverly titled Cheap Law,  Tullian Tchividjian warns:

In Matthew 5, Jesus shows unambiguously that the greatest obstacle to getting the gospel is not “cheap grace” but “cheap law” – the idea that God accepts anything less than the perfect righteousness of Jesus…

But, there are some who seek to escape their need for grace and deceive us by lowering the cost of God’s righteousness. They preach a cheap law that sells indulgences to those who pay with the appearance of sanctification.

Problem is, Tchividjian’s stern rebuke ultimately convicts a null set. His concern is for those who, having received salvation solely as the gift of God, are tempted to “trust in some personal display of good fruit to save [their] seat.” He refers to such individuals as “self-sanctifying little sovereigns” who “let the flesh pervert sanctification into the process of needing grace less and less.”

Here, though, a study of the Scriptures indicates that Tchividjian’s concern is misplaced. When Paul, for example, castigates the Galatians for “turning back to those weak and miserable forces” (Galatians 4:9), he portrays this not as a sanctification problem but rather as a justification problem, i.e., they didn’t embrace the gospel of grace in the first place, or they betrayed and abandoned the gospel because they failed to understand it. Witness his passionate exclamation in Galatians 4:19, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…”

Translation: When you see someone misunderstanding and manhandling their sanctification, you actually have a justification problem–a “first principles” issue. The problem isn’t that cheap law has crept in to bespoil sanctification. It’s that (Calvinist version) grace never really supplanted sin in the first place or (Arminian version) somebody’s been backsliding. So it’s back to childbirth we go.

And that’s why Tchividjian ultimately succeeds in binding the straw man, not the strong man. Ask yourself: Have you ever met anyone who really embraced and understood and vibrantly lived the justifying gospel according to the Scriptures who viewed sanctification as a process of divesting himself of the need for grace? Talk to such a person and it will quickly become apparent to you both that he failed to fully grasp or put into practice or preserve what you taught him about salvation, and you’d best be bent over double in childbirth on his behalf until Christ is actually and genuinely formed in him.

But all of this is phrased negatively (which, in my view, is one of the problems with Tchividjian’s post and other posts of this type). Let’s flip it around positively and call it “The Justification/Sanctification Postulate”:

When justification by grace occurs in response to a proclamation of the gospel according to the Scriptures, a healthy and biblical practice of sanctification by grace will flow as a matter of course from a healthy and biblical practice of  justification by grace.

When I was saved in my late teens, I turned to the person who had just led me through the sinner’s prayer and asked, “So what do I do now?” My guide responded (as Tchividjian does here), “Well, that’s the great thing: You don’t need to do anything.”

That response is true, but trivially so. If I had been asking, “What do I need to do now to maintain my salvation?”, the guide’s response would have been brilliant. But that is not what I was asking. I fully understood that I did not now need to earn what ninety seconds earlier I had clearly received as a gift. What I was asking was, “Now that I have given my life to Christ, how then do I live?”

In response to that question, the guide was seriously unhelpful. I wasn’t seeking to “be a replacement for his Beloved Son,” in Tchividjian’s terminology. Instead, I was simply taking seriously the gift of new life I had just received and wanting to live by it.

Want to avoid an errant practice of sanctification? Then avoid imparting an errant or incomplete understanding of justification. That’s the strong man that really does need to be bound: many churches today don’t know how to proclaim the gospel according to the Scriptures. They conflate the gospel with a testimony, a plan of salvation, or a fire insurance policy, or they prize justification over sanctification, viewing one as necessary and the other as optional. They do not know or embrace or place equal emphasis on each elements of the tripartite formula:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

This month we’ll be talking about proclaiming the gospel according to the Scriptures. In so doing we’ll be removing the bifurcation too often placed between justification and sanctification. That they are distinct theological processes is undeniable. That you can get one right and yet wildly mess up the other is one of the grave errors of our modern church age.

It’s not hard to figure out when you’re searching for something against the Google grain.

When you type “How To Heal Others When You Are Sick,” for example, you get hits like:

• How to Heal the Sick
• How To Send Healing Over A Distance
• Divine Healing – It IS God’s will to heal you! Find out how to receive it!

Google “prayers by the sick” and you’ll end up with dozens of sites focused on prayers for the sick.

Sum it up and say: There is an understandable tendency for us to fold up on ourselves like broken lawn chairs when we are sick. When we are sick, we want to get well. We want others (including God) to help us get well. We have little time to focus on anything else but our illness.

But in this concluding post for this month of focusing on the Work of Mercy of healing and comforting it is important to affirm that Christianity does go against the Google grain: Ours is the religion that claims with Isaiah,

But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.

So the Savior did his saving through his wounds. And we do not believe that he suffered so that we don’t have to. We believe that when we understand his suffering we will willingly choose to suffer also, in his name, for his sake, taking up our crosses daily. We say with the Apostle Paul that we are

always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

This doesn’t mean that we neglect or ignore our own health and illness. Of course not. We’re stewarding his body, after all–it doesn’t belong to us in the first place. But just as care for our own family does not preclude care for others, care for our own body does not preclude healing and praying for others who are sick when we are sick. In fact, the two are far more interconnected than we typically recognize.

So how can we heal others when we are sick? We begin by focusing on praying for the healing of others when we are healthy, employing all of the disciplines of prayer and giving and service in relation to others that we’ve been talking about this month.

Then we continue to keep up those spiritual disciplines and Christ-mirroring focus even when we face small ailments–headaches, colds, sore backs, upset stomachs. These are the minor irritants that tempt us to curl inward at the edges. When we do that in the face of small ailments, of course we’ll fold like lawn chairs in the face of bigger ones.

But faithfulness with a little–in this case, interceding for the healing of others and visiting the sick even when we are sick (though hopefully not contagious!)–is what yields the ability to be faithful in a lot, as we saw in the story of Shery Lim in a blog post earlier this week.

Here again I want to commend you getting a good personal prayer book with prayers that you can grow into as you pray. You will be remarkably uncreative and Sudafed-groggy when you don’t feel well, so having a prayer book to keep your prayers for others bigger than the size of your Alka Seltzer tablets will be a real help. I use several from different traditions, and they tend to be easy to find on amazon.

And one last great resource for you this month: check out this article on Praying Beyond the Sick List. If your prayers for the sick essentially consist of saying “Be with _______,” this article will help you understand what God normally likes to talk about when it comes to illness.

Generally when financial giving is mentioned in the context of healing, it is mentioned in the most deplorable way, namely, that televangelical way of encouraging people watching at home to send in their money today as the necessary and sufficient sign of their faith that God is going to heal them.

But in spite of such widespread abuses, there is a fascinating connection between healing and finances. You can see it in the story of Shery Lim, a 56 year old who is a two-time cancer survivor (including a survivor of fourth stage breast cancer). About the second bout she says,

“At that time, I couldn’t lift my handbag, I could not carry a one-month-old baby, and I couldn’t even lift a glass of water to my lips,” Lim says.

Even bathing was an excruciating experience. “When I showered, droplets of water will hit my breastbone and it was very painful. I couldn’t bathe standing up because I would be very tired.

“For one and a half years, I sat on a small stool with a ladle and a pail of warm water beside me every time I bathe, and poured the water slowly to control the flow,” she says.

“I took very long to bathe, but I had no choice. Now, I still cry whenever I am in the bathroom because I remember the experience. However, now it is not so much tears of sorrow, but rather, tears of thankfulness.”

On top of that, chemotherapy and radiotherapy had left her with nine ulcers in the mouth and she was on six painkillers a day. Even then, the pain due to the tumour caused her to scream and yell at night, and she was forced to ask her husband to sleep in a separate room to avoid disturbing him.

A devout Christian, Lim felt it would be wrong to give up on hope and give in to despair. But even more remarkably, notice her philosophy on healing:

“From the moment I was diagnosed with fourth-stage cancer, I told God that I didn’t want to die, and I want to believe that he will heal me. But if I’m going to get healing, it should not be for me only.

“I feel that when I am healed, I don’t want to live a life for myself. I want to live a life for others by reaching out to others,” she says.

There is an understandable tendency when we are ill to curve inward, but the Spirit of God within us will not permit it. His life within us is geared toward pouring out his life in the midst of suffering. It is when he does his best work, both personally and through us.

With that aspiration in mind, Lim went on to write a faith-based book titled There is Hope even when she was undergoing treatment. The book, launched in June 2007, chronicles Lim’s personal journey through cancer and provides information about cancer along with tips for caregivers of cancer patients.

“There are some testimonials of other patients as well. It is a book of encouragement and comfort,” Lim says.

One month later, Lim set up the Elpizo (the Greek word for hope) cancer support group. “We share our experiences, and we will invite professional doctors to give talks about topics like ‘cancer and diet’ or ‘how to fight depression’,” she says.

“We also have pastors coming in to give us a word of encouragement for healing,” she added.

In between her treatments and support group sessions, Lim visited cancer patients in the hospital to cheer them up.

How did Shery use her money while ill? To create a healing environment for others. She learned this, she says, from Proverbs 11:25:

“When I focused on others and helped them, the pain started to disappear and the tumour started to become smaller. This year in February, although the tumour was as small as a hazelnut, it was still not free from cancer. But in August, this hazelnut-sized tumour was pronounced as residual fibriotic tissue. It is no longer cancerous!” she beams.

“Little did I know that when I was encouraging others and delivering hope to them, healing actually occurred within me.

“That’s why God says that ‘those who comfort others, he himself will be comforted. Those who refresh others, he himself will be refreshed.’ That is the energy that has kept me going!” she says.

Now, someone may read a story like this and think, “Ah, so when I bless others, God is on the hook to bless me.” But re-read Shery’s words, above: “Little did I know…” In other words, she did not use her money to heal others so that she would be healed. Instead, she discovered that moving beyond self-preoccupation is always wise because we need not be obsessed with ourselves and our needs for God to be maximally good to us. It is simply his nature. And when we mirror his nature, we become maximally good to others even in the midst of our own suffering.

Like Jesus.

Last word to Shery as we contemplate how to overcome the self-obsessed nature of our finances in order to expose others to the healing and comforting of Christ:

“I used to do a lot of shopping but now I don’t shop. I used to buy expensive clothes because I needed them for work, but now I buy simple T-shirts and still look good. It is a matter of adjusting and humbling yourself,” she says.

“You have to ask yourself, what is the point of gaining the whole world but lose your soul or lose your life?” she says.