Читать книгу The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place - Rob Bell - Страница 12
ОглавлениеI was having lunch with a guy who was telling me about a struggle he had been having for a while. He said he knew he was a sinner and that he was fallen and that he would keep committing this one sin, and he knew he was going to keep committing this one sin because he was a sinner and his nature was evil and there was nothing he could do about it because of what a sinner he was . . .
Do I have to go on?
I was so depressed I wanted to bang my head on the table. His question was basically, why do I struggle like this?
And all that was running through my head during his questions was that his system was perfectly designed to achieve the results he was getting.
He’s convinced he is a sinner, he’s convinced he is going to sin, he has no hope against sin, he believes his basic nature is sin, and then he wonders why he keeps sinning.
And what was so startling to me is that he said he had just become a Christian.
It seemed to me that becoming a Christian had given him all sorts of new things to feel guilty about. I wondered if becoming a Christian had made his life not better but actually worse.
And then a little while later I had a similar experience. I was listening to a pastor speak, and his point was that people weren’t reading their Bibles enough and weren’t praying enough and weren’t being spiritual enough. If people would just do more—read their Bibles more and pray more and be more spiritual—basically just more “mores,” then God would be happy with them.
I felt terrible. What was the point of even trying?
It’s not that praying and reading the Bible are bad; it’s just that I wanted to do them less and less the more and more he talked.
It wasn’t so much what he was saying as it was the place he was coming from. The beginning premise seemed that we are bad and don’t do enough, and if we are made to feel guilty enough about it, then we will change our behavior.
I don’t think this is what Jesus had in mind.
His greatest anger was reserved for religious leaders who weighed people down with guilt and shame. He says to a group of Bible scholars and teachers, “You experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”1
A little while later he calls them “sons of hell.”
He goes on to say that it is possible for religious leaders to actually get in the way of people entering into the life of God.2
So what is the message? How should people feel about themselves?
Have you ever heard a Christian say, “I’m just a sinner”? I can’t find one place in the teachings of Jesus, or the Bible for that matter, where we are to identity ourselves first and foremost as sinners. Now this doesn’t mean that we don’t sin; that’s obvious. In the book of James it’s written like this: “We all stumble in many ways.”3 Once again, the greatest truth of the story of Adam and Eve isn’t that it happened, but that it happens. We all make choices to live outside of how God created us to live. We have all come up short.4
Who We Are Now
The first Christians insisted that when we become Christians, a profound change occurs in our fundamental identity. In who we are at the core of our being. In who we are first and foremost, before we are anything else. In our awareness of ourselves. The first Christians were convinced that in identifying with Jesus’s death on the cross, something within us dies. They called this person who died the “old man” or the “old woman.” The person we were before we had a spiritual birth.5
Now this idea of death and rebirth is not a new idea—it has been around in almost every religious tradition since people first started talking about these things. But the first Christians believed that this idea had been lived out in a new and unique way in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Paul put it like this in the book of Colossians: “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”6
So this old nature of mine—the one that was constantly pulling me down and causing me to live in ways I wasn’t created to live—has died. And no matter how many times that old nature raises its ugly head and pretends to be alive, it is dead.
And not only did that old person die, but I have been given a new nature.
Again, Paul writes in Colossians, “You have been raised with Christ.”7 I have this new life, this new identity that has been given to me. I have taken on the identity of Christ.
Paul continues, “You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived.” These first Christians kept insisting that something so transformational was happening in the lives of followers of Jesus that they could refer to their old lives as “the life [we] once lived.”8
It is not that we are perfect now or that we will never have to struggle. Or that the old person won’t come back from time to time. It’s that this new way of life involves a constant, conscious decision to keeping dying to the old so that we can live in the new. Paul describes it as Christ being our lives.
Paul goes so far as to insist in another letter that if we are having this new kind of transforming experience with Christ in which we are taking on a new identity, we are literally now a “new creation.”9
I am being remade.
I am not who I was.
I am a new creation.
I am “in Christ.”
When God looks at me, God sees Christ, because I’m “in” him.
God’s view of me is Christ.
And Christ is perfect.10
This is why Paul goes on to say, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved . . . ”11
Did you catch that word in the middle?
Holy.
Not “going to be holy someday.” Not “wouldn’t it be nice if you were holy, but instead you’re a mess.” But “holy.”
Holy means pure, without blemish, unstained.
In these passages we’re being told who we are, now.
The issue then isn’t my beating myself up over all of the things I am not doing or the things I am doing poorly; the issue is my learning who this person is who God keeps insisting I already am.
Notice these words from the letter to the Philippians: “Let us live up to what we have already attained.”12
There is this person who we already are in God’s eyes. And we are learning to live like it is true.
This is an issue of identity. It is letting what God says about us shape what we believe about ourselves. This is why shame has no place whatsoever in the Christian experience. It is simply against all that Jesus is for. As the writer to the Romans put it, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”13
None.
No shame.
No list of what is being held against us.
No record of wrongs.
It has simply been done away with.
It is no longer an issue.
Bringing it up is pointless.
Beating myself up is pointless.
Beating others up about who and what they are not is going the wrong direction. It is working against the purposes of God. God is not interested in shaming people; God wants people to see who they really are.
“Let us live up to what we have already attained.”
I am not who I was.
You are not who you were.
Old person going away, new person here, now.
Reborn, rebirthed, remade, reconciled, renewed.
Jesus put it this way: “You are in me and I am in you.”14
So when the first Christians went all over the Roman Empire telling people the Jesus message, they spent most of their time explaining who people are from God’s perspective. Who we already are. They insisted that people can live a new life, counting ourselves “dead to sin but alive to God.”15
When we stumble and fall back into old patterns, we call them what they are: old patterns. Old ways. Old habits of the old person.
Something new is happening inside us.
Jesus said that as this new reality takes over our hearts and lives and minds and actions, we are crossing over “from death to life.”16 He called this new kind of life “eternal life.” For Jesus, eternal life wasn’t a state of being for the future that we would enter into somewhere else; it is a quality of life that starts now.
Eternal life then is a certain kind of life I am living more and more now and will go on forever.17 I am living more and more in connection with God, and I will live connected with God forever.
This has huge implications for when I do stumble, when I sin and the old person comes back from the dead for a few moments.
I admit it.
I confess it.
I thank God I am forgiven.
I make amends with anyone who has been affected by my actions.
And then I move on.
Not because sin isn’t serious, but because I am taking seriously who God says I am. The point isn’t my failure; it is God’s success in remaking me into the person he originally intended me to be.
God’s strength, not mine.
God’s power, not mine.
So what does this mean for the Christian life? To begin, Christians are people learning who they are in Christ. We are being taught about our new identity. Do you see how deeply this new identity affects the life of a community? I heard a teacher say that if people were taught more about who they are, they wouldn’t have to be told what to do.18 It would come naturally. When we see religious communities spending most of their time trying to convince people not to sin, we are seeing a community that has missed the point. The point isn’t sin management.19 The point is who we are now.
Often communities of believers in the New Testament are identified as “saints.” The word saints is a translation of the Greek word hagios, which means “holy or set apart ones.” Those who are “in Christ.” Not because of what they have done, but because of what God has done. There is nothing we can do, and there is nothing we ever could have done, to earn God’s favor. We already have it.
Jesus tells a parable about a young son who leaves home, hits bottom, and returns in shame. His father sees him from far off, runs to him, embraces him, and announces a party in honor of his homecoming.
In this story, God is the God who stands in the driveway, waiting for his kids to come home.
So the party starts and everybody is celebrating, and the older brother comes in from the field mad. He wants to know why his brother gets a party and he doesn’t. The parable ends with the father telling the older son, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” The father wants the older son to know that everything he wants he has always had; there is nothing he could ever do to earn it. The elder son’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t have anything; it’s that he has had it all along but refused to trust that it was really true.20
We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.
Let’s take this further. As one writer puts it, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”21 While we were unable to do anything about our condition, while we were helpless, while we were unaware of just how bad the situation was, Jesus died.
And when Jesus died on the cross, he died for everybody.
Everybody.
Everywhere.
Every tribe, every nation, every tongue, every people group.22
Jesus said that when he was lifted up, he would draw all people to himself.23
All people. Everywhere.
Everybody’s sins on the cross with Jesus.
So this reality, this forgiveness, this reconciliation, is true for everybody. Paul insisted that when Jesus died on the cross, he was reconciling “all things, in heaven and on earth, to God.”24 All things, everywhere.
This reality then isn’t something we make true about ourselves by doing something. It is already true. Our choice is to live in this new reality or cling to a reality of our own making.
God is retelling each of our stories in Jesus. All of the bad parts and the ugly parts and the parts we want to pretend never happened are redeemed. They seemed pointless and they were painful at the time, but God retells our story and they become the moments when God’s grace is most on display. We find ourselves asking, am I really forgiven of that? The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true. Our choice becomes this: We can trust his retelling of the story, or we can trust our telling of our story. It is a choice we make every day about the reality we are going to live in.
And this reality extends beyond this life.
Heaven is full of forgiven people.
Hell is full of forgiven people.
Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for.
Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for.
The difference is how we choose to live, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust.
Ours or God’s.
When we choose God’s vision of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever. This is the life of heaven, here and now. And as we live this life, in harmony with God’s intentions for us, the life of heaven becomes more and more present in our lives. Heaven comes to earth. This is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” There is this place, this realm, heaven, where things are as God desires them to be. As we live this way, heaven comes here. To this place, this world, the one we’re living in.
Two Realms
Now if there is a life of heaven, and we can choose it, then there’s also another way. A way of living out of sync with how God created us to live. The word for this is hell: a way, a place, a realm absent of how God desires things to be. We can bring heaven to earth; we can bring hell to earth.
For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one because he understood that the life beyond this one is a continuation of the kinds of choices we make here and now.
For Jesus, the question wasn’t, “How do I get into heaven?” but “How do I bring heaven here?”
The question wasn’t, “How do I get in there?” but “How do I get there here?”
I was in Rwanda two years ago doing research on the AIDS crisis. It had been almost ten years since the massacre of 1994 when over 800,000 Rwandans were killed by their fellow countrymen. Yet driving down the street, we passed person after person missing an arm or a leg. Children who had been struck with a sword were now high school students walking along with a crutch or sitting in a wheelchair.
If you do any reading on what happened in Rwanda, the word that you’ll read most often used to describe it is hell.
A hell on earth.
When people use the word hell, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter—they are all hell on earth.
Jesus’s desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth.
What’s disturbing then is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth. Poverty, injustice, suffering—they are all hells on earth, and as Christians we oppose them with all our energies. Jesus told us to.
Jesus tells a parable about the kind of people who will live with God forever. It is a story of judgment, of God evaluating the kind of lives people have lived. First he deals with the “righteous,” who gave food to the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoner. These are the kind of people who spend forever with God. Jesus measures their eternal standings in terms of not what they said or believed but how they lived, specifically in regard to the hell around them.
The judge then condemns a group of people because they didn’t take care of the needy and naked and hurting in their midst. They chose hell instead of heaven, and God gives them what they wanted.25
For Jesus, this new kind of life in him is not about escaping this world but about making it a better place, here and now. The goal for Jesus isn’t to get into heaven. The goal is to get heaven here.
Jesus tells another story about a rich man and a beggar who lies outside the rich man’s gates. The rich man dies and goes to hell, while the beggar dies and goes to “Abraham’s side,” a Jewish way of describing heaven. This is the one story Jesus tells in which somebody is actually in hell after they have died. What is the reason? According to the details of the story, the rich man refused to be generous with the poor man, letting him live a hell on earth right outside his front door.
On another occasion, Jesus is asked to mediate in a monetary dispute between two brothers. Jesus uses the moment to tell a story about a man whose crops do well and who becomes rich. He then decides not to share the bounty but to build bigger barns for storage and then take it easy for the rest of his days. Jesus told this story at a time when many of his countrymen were losing family land and having trouble feeding their families. Being hungry was a very real issue for a lot of people. In the story, God is so offended by the man’s selfish actions that his very life is taken from him that night. It is one of the only places in all of Jesus’s teachings where someone does something so horrible in Jesus’s eyes that they deserve to die right away. And what is this horrible thing the man did? He refused to be generous. He brought hell to earth.
Jesus wants his followers to bring heaven, not hell, to earth. This has been God’s intention for people since the beginning. Jesus is not teaching anything new for his day. God walked in the garden, looking for Adam and Eve.26 God told the Israelites to build a tabernacle so he could live in their midst.27 King Solomon built a temple, God’s house, so God could live permanently among his people. And when Jesus comes, he’s referred to as God “taking on flesh and dwelling among us.” Another translation of this verse is, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”28
The entire movement of the Bible is of a God who wants to be here, with his people. The church is described later as being the temple of God.29 And how does the Bible end? With God “coming down” and taking up residence here on earth.30
True spirituality then is not about escaping this world to some other place where we will be forever. A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.
The goal isn’t escaping this world but making this world the kind of place God can come to. And God is remaking us into the kind of people who can do this kind of work.
T’shuva
The remaking of this world is why Jesus’s first messages began with “T’shuva, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”31
The Hebrew word t’shuva means “to return.” Return to the people we were originally created to be. The people God is remaking us into.
God makes us in his image. We reflect the beauty and creativity and wonder of the God who made us. And Jesus calls us to return to our true selves. The pure, whole people God originally intended us to be, before we veered off course.
Somewhere in you is the you whom you were made to be.
We need you to be you.
We don’t need a second anybody. We need the first you.
The problem is that the image of God is deeply scarred in each of us, and we lose trust in God’s version of our story. It seems too good to be true. And so we go searching for identity. We achieve and we push and we perform and we shop and we work out and we accomplish great things, longing to repair the image. Longing to find an identity that feels right.
Longing to be comfortable in our own skin.
But the thing we are searching for is not somewhere else. It is right here. And we can only find it when we give up the search, when we surrender, when we trust. Trust that God is already putting us back together.
Trust that through dying to the old, the new can give birth.
Trust that Jesus can repair the scarred and broken image.
It is trusting that I am loved. That I always have been. That I always will be. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to prove anything or achieve anything or accomplish one more thing. That exactly as I am, I am totally accepted, forgiven, and there is nothing I could ever do to lose this acceptance.32
God knew exactly what he was doing when he made you. There are no accidents. We need you to embrace your true identity, who you are in Christ, letting this new awareness transform your life.
That is what Jesus has in mind.
That is what brings heaven to earth.
I was having breakfast with my dad and my younger son at the Real Food Café on Eastern Avenue just south of Alger in Grand Rapids. We were finishing our meal when I noticed that the waitress brought our check and then took it away and then brought it back again. She placed it on the table, smiled, and said, “Somebody in the restaurant paid for your meal. You’re all set.” And then she walked away.
I had the strangest feeling sitting there. The feeling was helplessness. There was nothing I could do. It had been taken care of. To insist on paying would have been pointless. All I could do was trust that what she said was true was actually true and then live in that. Which meant getting up and leaving the restaurant. My acceptance of what she said gave me a choice: to live like it was true or to create my own reality in which the bill was not paid.
This is our invitation. To trust that we don’t owe anything. To trust that something is already true about us, something has already been done, something has been there all along.
To trust that grace pays the bill.
