“Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s Grace. Your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.”—Jerry Bridges
If you’ve ever spent any time at all battling with your sin nature and trying to recover from the aftermath of your spiritual failure as a Christian, then you might know what it’s like to live in, what C.S. Lewis called: The Shadowlands.
In several of his writings, Lewis talks about the concept and the reality of the “Shadowlands” as an analogy for the world we live in. A world filled with sin, pain, guilt, and suffering, all of which, have the tendency to keep us from experiencing the goodness, love and mercy of God in all of their fullness!
“We live in the Shadowlands.” Writes Lewis, A place where “…the sun is always shining somewhere else. Round a bend in the road. Over the bough of a hill.”
Does that describe a place where you’ve been before? Perhaps you’re there, right now?
Fredrick Buechner wrote about this human propensity to battle with the flesh in his novel, Godric that lust is “the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we’re safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there’s no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down.”
The sin nature is that part of a person which functions apart from goodness and apart from God. And it remains in you even after you’ve been saved. It’s the unseen enemy. “We have met the enemy,” as the old saying goes…and He is us!” For some of us, it’s not some external force that we are fighting that’s the problem; it’s the internal battle that’s laying us low. It’s the war within.
The Scripture helps us make sense of this reality for according to the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:17, within every Christian, there’s a battle going on between the sin nature and the Holy Spirit who permanently lives within every believer. He writes…
“…the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other so that you do not do what you want.”
When I first discovered this verse in the New Testament, I can remember hope flooding my heart because it spoke so ardently and so poignantly to my situation and struggle with sin. I love that about the Bible! It’s written so directly and lovingly about the situations we all face in life. I remember thinking, I’m not alone. Others, even Paul the Apostle, had the same experience with the flesh. They too longed to eviscerate and eradicate this thing that lives inside human beings. What hope resides in that! What divine kindness and understanding there is in God, that through the pen of Paul, he speaks to the very heart of our private battles.
Paul, in Romans chapter 7, is even so humble as to admit that even although he was a devoted Christian in love with God; that, this really didn’t rid him of the problem of wanting to sin. It didn’t provide him with the power he needed as a sinner to stop sinning. Again he writes,
“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”
What he discovered about himself was that even though he had every good intention as a redeemed man, desire alone was not enough to curb the lust that gibbered inside him. The Law provided him with a mirror to show him what was good; it rightfully condemned him when he failed to hit the mark of righteousness, but it never provided him with the power; the supernatural ability to do the good he wished to do.
One can almost hear the despair dripping from his pen as he writes: “O, what a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from the body of this death?”
Perhaps this is the address where you’ve been living, as well? You’ve been living in the Shadowlands of your own Romans 7 experience. And perhaps you’ve been wondering, what is the answer to this spiritual conundrum? Well, to answer that we must explore where help may be found, and also where it does not.
Often, when seeking to fix the problem of sinfulness and the power of the flesh, believers mistakenly think that by simply trying harder and adding more good works to their life, they’ll be able to thwart the influence of the sinful nature; and at long last, achieve the victory they’ve so long desired.
The problem is, human effort is an ineffective weapon in our war with the flesh. Human effort can only produce what is referred to as, The Motivation-Condemnation-Rededication cycle.
Or what I would call Rollercoaster Christianity! Allow me to describe it for you:
Motivation = Increased desire to do more in our Christian life to motivate God to accept us. Condemnation = The inevitable sense of guilt when the motivation feeling wears off. Rededication = A recurring attempt to make things right and become more acceptable to God
This cycle begins with the Motivation Phase where we are genuinely motivated by the Spirit to make changes in our life. The problem comes when we think that motivation or good intention, along with human effort will provide us with all we need to become the person we know God wants us to be. However well-intentioned, we ultimately find ourselves failing to measure up to the standard.
This then leads to, the Condemnation Phase where the Law of God and our own conscience condemn us for our failure to measure up. Yet within our despair, instead of resting in grace; and surrendering to the Holy Spirit, we enter the Rededication Phase, by seeking to re-double our efforts and try harder in our own flesh to do better if given a chance.
Behind all of this lurks the misguided but very human belief that given enough time; with enough personal effort, we’ll be able to tame what is by nature untamable.
This Rededication leads us back once again to the Motivation phase to begin the cycle all over again. Having never realized that we have fallen for the classic Rollercoaster scenario, we progress in a downward, repeated spiral which brought even the Apostle Paul to an exhausting defeat. Yet, is this not the very definition of insanity; to do the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?
Steve McVey in his book Grace Walk, relates his own personal struggle with this issue. He writes, “Through the law, God revealed that righteousness cannot come from external regulations. Every person understands this at the time of salvation, but many seem to believe that the rules change after they are saved.
Some who are quick to point out that keeping religious rules won’t cause anybody to become a Christian believe that keeping certain rules will help them grow in the Christian life.
These folks spend great amounts of time trying to improve their spiritual performance…For many years I thought that God accepted me more for what I was able to do for him than merely for the fact of his Grace. I knew that He always loved me but felt that He probably didn’t really like me at times. I pictured God sitting in heaven keeping His patience under control like a parent whose anger is about to explode if the child’s conduct does not improve.
When I was in the motivation phase, I would do as much as possible to gain His approval! Sometimes I would fast and pray for hours. Once I spent three days in my office without coming out. At the end of my ‘time with God,’ I was starving and dirty, but didn’t feel any closer to God!” [1]
At this, we can all relate. At this, the problem still remains and is compounded by the fact that we aren’t any closer to victory; to success than we were when we started. And further, the joy we had in our first toddling with God as a new believer flees from us like the sea from land in the approach of an ocean tsunami.
And we begin to wonder, “Is this all there is to the Christian life? Is there nothing but this endless, joyless, drudgery, effort, and failure? Where has my joy gone? What is wrong me? Is there an answer to this spiritual conundrum?”
With joy, I can tell you, there is! The answer is Grace! The grace of God found in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The answer is found in living by grace. Grace is the answer to our failure and sin. Grace is the answer to our future success; it’s the answer to the whole dilemma! For, as Corrie ten Boom used to say, “There is no pit so deep that the love of God is not deeper still.”
As Paul will attest,
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
This verse has been for me, a tremendous source of comfort. For in the despair that inevitably results when we fail to live up to what we know we should be, there again can we find Christ standing in the gap between what we want to be and what we are not.
We can find great contentment in the fact that when we fail to measure up to what we ought to be, Christ is what we are not! And not only this but through his death, burial and resurrection he has forgiven you to begin again. You can find in Jesus not only great hope; but grace. Abundant, life-giving, life-changing; ever available grace. Abounding grace that can enable you to leave your failures in the past with God; to accept the abundance of his love in the present; and by so doing, allow him to give you the strength, hope, and power to press on toward an uncertain future of great usefulness for him.
The answer is to live by grace! But what does that really mean? Several things…
Living by Grace means living by faith!
When you seek to solve the problem of the flesh through means of a determined resolve to do better in the future; this reveals that your reliance is upon self and your own misguided faith in your abilities. It’s because secretly underneath, you doubt that God can do for you, what you cannot do for yourself.
Instead, your faith must rest in Jesus who is the author and the completer of our faith; for without him you can do nothing.
To be successful over your sin nature requires a spiritual understanding then of positional truth. And positional truth is inverted from the way most people think.
For often, we begin from the point of our failure. We look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “I am not what I should be, and I feel bad about it! I’ll work harder to be a better person.” The problem with that is where we begin; we begin with what we are not, which naturally leads to a renewed exertion of human effort to be better. But…
To live according to what you are not will only end in despair and failure.
Instead, the Bible teaches us to begin with what Christ has already made us by faith. I challenge you, dear reader, survey the New Testament and underline every phrase, “in him” or “in Christ”. For what is described there refers to everything God has made you by virtue of grace through faith in Jesus. In doing so, you will finally recognize that success in your battle with sin and the flesh only happens when you begin with faith in what God says you are.
So, if you are battling with a particular pet sin, don’t focus on your failure and what you did; but focus on Jesus and what he has already done for you. For according to the Scripture a believer is…
- No longer dead in sin but alive in Christ.
- No longer a slave to sin but a beloved son or daughter of God
- No longer condemned by the law but justified by God through redemption
And on and on the list goes…
Living by Grace means resting in your position!
Remarkably, when you activate your faith by reckoning what God says is true; in response to your faith and submission to the work the Holy Spirit, you’ll find yourself inexplicably being able to accomplish what was before unattainable. You’ll find victory over sin.
The reason for this is because when you believe, it’s not you who’s affecting the change…it’s God…it’s Jesus through the power of his resurrection. When we trust him, his resurrection power is brought to bear upon the effects of the sin nature. And as a result, at that moment, the works of the sinful nature are put to death by the cross. For this is the only way the sin nature can be defeated…the flesh cannot be reformed, only put to death…only crucified!
“In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus…” Romans 6:11
So when feeling condemned, unworthy of mercy or forgiveness for my recent sinful failure; instead of hawking a ride on the endless spiritual rollercoaster of empty promises, human effort, defeat and misery, the joy of what God has made me by grace frees me to believe and to live in the light of what God says that I am. Sin is no longer the master…Jesus is!
So, like Lewis and Clark after their arduous journey through the wilderness; who, spying the ocean for the very first time, I can say, as William Clark did…
“O, the joy!”
[1] Steve McVey Grace Walk. Copywrite 1995 by Harvest House Publishers: Eugene, OR. Pp.19-20