Approaching one of the stickiest wickets in American Christendom, Steve Brown, with candid experience and humor, brings us back to the inner-pharisee that is almost always conjured in talk about sanctification. I may not be so prone as Steve Brown to say that our neighbor’s baggage is as shocking as he lets on, only because we so often have the same baggage, but he is only using that as a device to point to the bigger (or deeper) picture: that when we get into the scorekeeping game, it inherently becomes a cover-up game. He then describes a sanctification that happens as life makes you “old as dirt”–but that this often goes unnoticed–and that it’s better that way. This comes from Three Free Sins, chapter heading, “When Getting Better Doesn’t Matter.”
There is always something going on in every life that others don’t know about. After listening to confessions for most of my professional life, I have a couple of reactions to those confessions. The first is an awareness that the people to whom I listened were just like me. The second reaction is always: “I didn’t know that about you and never would have known if you had not told me.”
In fact, if you’re reading this book and want to have some good friendships among believers, want to go to our parties and share in our fun but can’t buy into all the stuff about Jesus. I can help. First, if you’re reading this book, you’re out of your mind. And second, you can learn to fake it so that nobody will know. I can teach you a few words that you must use, I can help you look the way you ought to look, and I can show you the minefields to avoid and the places to affirm. In fact, I can show you how to be so phony that nobody will ever know.
One time Mr. and Mrs. Billy Graham were in church together, and Mr. Graham, by mistake, put a twenty-dollar bill in the collection plate when he meant to give a ten. He reached for the twenty-dollar bill, and Mrs. Graham slapped his hand. “I meant,” he whispered, “to put a ten-dollar bill in the offering.”
“In God’s eyes,” Mrs. Graham quietly assured him, “it’s a ten.”
…Goodness is easy to fake, and when people affirm your apparent goodness, two things happen. First, the feeling you have about your own righteousness will establish a pattern that will spiral upward (or downward) to cause the false mask you wear to be even more real than who you are. And second, God will notice.
…Think of the most obedient, wonderful, faithful, and holy Christian you know in your church. Now listen. If he got drunk at a Christian party and confessed his deepest and darkest secrets, you would be shocked. Now look around your community on the streets that run by the church. If you picked someone at random and looked into his or her heart, you might substitute that person for the “saint” you just lost in church.
…One of the questions asked of those being ordained in the Methodist Church (I was ordained a Methodist minister) is this: are you moving on to perfection?
When I was asked that question, I thought about it and decided that I might not be a very good and spiritual person, but I was, after all, being ordained and that made me somewhat better than most others. I figured that I was “moving on to perfection”…at least sort of. So I answered yes.
I was very young and now I’m old as dirt. Over the years, God has granted me the severe mercy of failure, pain, and an awareness of how I’m about as messed up as anybody I know. If I were asked that question again (the question of getting better), I would have to answer that I hoped maybe I was getting better. “But frankly,” I would have to say, “who the hell knows?”
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13 responses to ““Getting Better Doesn’t Matter?” Steve Brown, Billy Graham, and God’s Silent Sanctification”
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I’d say there is a very thin line, if any at all, between sanctification and sanctimony. Justification and forgiveness is way more central than most churchy people want to admit. Most pastors in my experience are just more willing to blur that line about themselves in their own minds than others. It sure is nice to lay that burden down! It’s nice to see people a little down in life still seeing grace as beautiful! The focus on sanctification really is an overflowing crock of stinky poo, all the way through.
This is perhaps the best comment in the history of comments.
The more I get to know me, the less impressed I am. The more I try to improve, the more things I find that need improving. The more I focus on my failure, the less I care to enter into the fight. This is the demonic formula for defeating Christians.
Grace however meets me in my failure and in mybrokenness. The more I get to know Jesus, the more impressed I become. The more I focus on His righteousness (which has been given to me) the more freedom I experience from the slavery of self-improvement. To stop trying to “improve” is the starting point for real change.
I remember hearing that Luther once said: “Justification is the roast, while sanctification is the parsley that garnishes it.”
Thanks for posting this, Ethan.
And JZ, that’s a great quote!
“Getting better” is not used in the Bible.
The paradigm is death…and new life.
God isn’t trying to make us better, for heaven’s sake, He is trying to kill us off.
That is what Romans 6 is all about.
Thanks.
I too, like that Luther quote.
I also like Ford’s quote that “sanctification is forgetting about yourself”.
That should be (of course ) ‘Forde’…
not Ford (either Gerald or Henry, or even Fred).
Ethan….you have done well, although it does not really matter because He approves of you regardless….I am so thrill you have taken the time to expose Steve Brown…he is one of the few that has the guts to keep the gospel clean and period….Steve, Forde, Paul Zahl, Rosenbladt are the only ones to introduce to the world…wrong, they must read Fitz Anger, Fear and God.
Way to go Ethan….love it….I would give anything to have Steve Brown and Paul Zahl to be the speakers at a Mockingbird major conference…I know I am right…see, I have about 7 Phd in failing to be the good man I am suppose to be…and Paul and Steve are the only ones who know the exisential relevance of the gospel…just as Luther did…..I am done….thanks Ethan
Would someone explain the paragraph about the the “most obedient, wonderful, faithful, and holy Christian you know in your church……” I just don’t get the last part about substituting that person for the “saint”….
Thanks.
It means that when you peel away the veneer, you will find the same person more or less.
yes yes and yes
I knew I wasn’t crazy when I first became gripped in God’s grace 23 yrs ago, but through wrong teaching I let go of his grace and jumped on the ban wagon of ‘getting better’, it was gradual BUT FINALLY after 17 yrs, I am resting in his grace once again. It was a HUGE pendulum back to grace for which I cannot thank God enough!
My heart just sings with thanksgiving!