It occurred to me today that there are many things that vary by degrees.
Three students take a test in a class. The first students fails the test with a 58%. The second student gets a D- by scoring at a 62%. The third student gets a 74%, which earns them the mark of a straight C.
Should that student –the one with the straight C– be proud of themselves? I don’t think I would be proud of a C. But, maybe one hundred students have taken this same test, and only thirteen of those one hundred were even able to pass the test; what then? Imagine if the top score of all one hundred of the students to have taken the test is that 74%. Should they be proud then?
What if the proctor is expecting only As? What if every score that isn’t an A (90% or higher) is determined to be a failure?
That’s a pretty high bar.
Or imagine it this way –> three men have problems with looking at women with lust on their minds. The first man looks at just about every woman that he sees with lust on his mind. The second man does it once or twice a day. The third man does it a couple of times a week. Is one of these three doing a better job than the others? On the one hand, you’d be tempted to say that these men are various in their level of depravity; on the other hand, though, they’ve each got a bit of a problem.
What if the expectation is that a man should never look lustfully at a woman –except his own wife, perhaps– ever in his whole life?
Imagine three children come in from playing in the backyard. One of them has dirt all over their hands. The second has dirt all over their hands and face. The third is covered from forehead to feet with clumps of drying mud and caked-on dirt. Would you say that one of them is dirtier? You probably would, and you’d be right. But, that doesn’t make the other two not dirty. All three of these children are dirty, and they vary by degrees, but they ought to EACH be defined as filthy –> because they are.
Or are they? I can hear you thinking it –because I’m thinking it, too– that the kid with just the dirty hands isn’t filthy, per se. And I’d have to agree with you, if we’re going to compare that kid to his two peers. But, what it we are going to compare that kid with the dirty hands to a fourth child, one who is freshly out of the shower, who is as squeaky clean as they are ever likely to be? Then, that kid with the dirty hands starts to feel a little more filthy.
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I’m becoming more and more disgusted with some of the tendencies that I see in American Christianity. Of course, if you know me, you know that I’m a Christian, and you know that I’m an American, so a statement like this doesn’t roll easily off of my tongue. Nevertheless, my conviction is growing that we are getting a lot of what we’re doing completely wrong.
One of the things that I think we are messing up is our attitude of self-righteousness.
Ten is larger than six, and six is larger than four, but is ten big? How about when we compare than ten with one billion?
Am I better than my neighbor because I go to church and they don’t? Are my neighbors better than the axe murderer rotting in a federal prison? Are any of us ‘good’?
Nope. Especially when you think about where the bar is.
Isaiah 64 has a great verse on this concept. In verse 6, it says that all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Or, if your a New Testament kind of a person, look at Romans 3. Verses 10 through 12 say that there is not even one good person on the planet.
And here’s the problem with filthy rags. The unsaved, unchurched, lost sheep in the world, the lost sheep wandering around in the yard outside of the American Christian church, they are all wearing filthy rags. But, here’s the thing:
So is the American Christian church.
The only difference –besides the forgiveness and mercy and grace of God– is that the lost sheep aren’t feeling better about themselves and their behavior than they ought. American Christians who’ve forgotten that they are in need of a savior repel the lost sheep by pretending that they aren’t still wayward sheep, most of the time –> filthy sheep themselves.
No one is good; there is not even one.
Ten is only four more than six, and it’s only six more than four, but ten is also nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety short of one billion.
That’s what American Christians would do best to keep in mind. We fall short. SO VERY VERY SHORT. The bar is so high that we couldn’t get over it driving the shiniest Cadillac to the prettiest church on every Sunday of every year for our entire lives.
And what we lose by pretending that we are better than we are is that we end up distancing ourselves from the people around us who need the same mercy and grace and forgiveness that we’ve found at the foot of the Cross, not because of how cool we are or how well we know the Bible, but because we heard the message. How can we tell people about the message that we’ve heard when we’ve built walls between them and us, walls built out of our own self-righteous non-sense? There isn’t a person on the planet who wants to approach their friend or neighbor to discuss the things that they are struggling with, when that neighbor or that friend has forgotten that they’re a sinner as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that I am filthy. And so are you. And so are your friends –the self-righteous ones and the wallowing heathens, alike. Heaven isn’t going to one day be full of people who mastered appropriate human behavior.
Ten really isn’t that much closer to a billion than six or four is. God forgives the ten for not being a billion, and the six, and the four.
There are two kinds of filthy sheep in the world –> forgiven filthy sheep and lost filthy sheep. There aren’t any clean sheep. And if you’re a filthy sheep that’s looking around and thinking, “Hey, look at how clean I am!”…
It Occurred To Me Today 