In a comment to yesterday’s post, Tammy made this confession:

Until I was desperate for HIM, He was just Savior, not Lord.

“Just Savior, not Lord.” That’s a sad but accurate and common description of Jesus for many of us. It’s also a terrible distortion of Jesus’ message as recorded for us in the Bible.

Nowhere in the Bible will you hear Jesus giving instructions on how to get into heaven or avoid hell. You won’t hear much from him in the way of instructions for salvation — at least not salvation as it’s come to be understood today.

What you will hear him talk a lot about is our need to enter and live in the kingdom of God. He understood that it’s in our best interests to follow his lead, rather than be led by our own misguided passions or (worse) some other fallen person’s agenda.

In other words, Jesus’ command was “Follow Me!” Salvation was understood to be a byproduct of that — a means to that end but not the end in itself.

This is, in my opinion, where we got off track: Presenting salvation as the goal allowed us to bypass any notion of actually doing what Jesus would have us do.

So, if you could put yourself inside the skin of a Christian who trusts Jesus as their Savior but not their Leader, what would your life be like?

We’ve spent the past couple of months going back over the basics of salvation. We began with God, of course, and how he created everything perfectly. We saw how the poor choices of the first two people in the Bible opened the door for sin and death. We saw how God’s holiness, love and justice demanded action, but we also saw how our sin had rendered us incapable of doing anything to save ourselves. So, God sent his Son, Jesus, to live a perfectly sinless life (thus defeating sin’s power) and to die a sacrificial death on our behalf (thus paying sin’s price).

But what good is a dead savior?

If death had been the end of the line for Jesus, it would be “Game Over” for the human race. You’d live. You’d sin. You’d die. That’s it.

Thankfully, what comes next in the story begins with my two favorite words: But God….

But God was not content to see Jesus left in the tomb. Nor was he content to leave us without hope in this world. Nor was he content to allow sin and death to have the last words.

So, three days after his death, God brought Jesus back to life, vindicating him, condemning those who rejected him and opening a way for all of those who would place their trust in him to have access to their Heavenly Father who loves them more than they can ever begin to imagine.

Needless to say, this is the part of the story that changes absolutely everything. If a man can come back to life, after having been dead for three days, simply because God’s favor rests upon him…well…then anything is truly possible. By defeating both sin and death — humanity’s most powerful enemies — Jesus gave us more than hope. He gave us a way to be reconciled to God once and for all.

Forget Hemingway or Tolstoy. Forget Dan Brown or John Grisham. Forget Spielberg or Scorsese. This is the greatest, most powerful, most redemptive, most promising, most inspiring story of all time.

But until we respond to it — until we take it personally — that’s all it is: a story.

The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Will you continue to ask God to play a part in your story, or will you submit to the idea that God has graciously invited you to play a role in His Story?

God handed us a perfectly good world, and we broke it. We’ve made a mess of our humanity and racked up quite a bill (which we have no means of ever paying).

While it is true that God loves us, it is also true that his holiness won’t let him pretend nothing’s happened. Somebody’s got to clean it all up. Someone’s got to pay for the damages.

Sin doesn’t just separate us from God; it earns us death. Someone sins? Someone dies. Those are the rules.

So, why aren’t we all toast?

Because Jesus did more than just defeat sin — facing it squarely on its home turf, refusing to give in to temptation, living a perfect sinless life and, thus, qualifying himself as the bridge builder between a perfect God and sinful people. No, as if that weren’t enough, Jesus also paid the price for our sin.

The Apostle Paul put it this way, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus, the only completely innocent person to ever live on planet earth, had the sins of everyone placed on his shoulders. Every last ounce of God’s justified wrath — wrath earned by us because of every sin we’ve ever committed — was poured out on him. Jesus was betrayed, abandoned, mocked, ridiculed, tortured, and killed for all the bad things we’ve done.

God’s justice demanded payment in full.

Jesus paid it all.

Since moving back from California we’ve been attending a church really close to our house called Stonecreek Church. I’ve joked before that I think most new churches (aka “cool churches”) have very few variations on names. I think they take four or five prefixes (Stone, River, North, Rock) and four or five (Bridge, Point, Creek, Park) suffixes. Then they cast lots or spin the wheel or throw dice or something.

Stonebridge. Riverpoint. Northcreek. Rockpark.

Anyway, we attend Stonecreek (after having helped plant Riverpark and doing all that consulting at Northpoint), and yesterday we arrived to find a sizable above-ground pool in the auditorium — where the first five or six rows of chairs usually are set up. About 60 folks had asked to be baptized, but Steven Gibbs (Sr. Pastor) surprised some folks by suggesting that you could be baptized even if you weren’t signed up. In fact, he went through a list of common objections he anticipated people might have (using the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 as an example) of someone spontaneously choosing to be baptized.

In the end, I’m sure we had about 60 baptisms in the first service alone. I haven’t heard the final reports, but Stonecreek may have baptized 100 people yesterday — more than most churches will baptize this year!

Needless to say, with three inquisitive kids living at our house, this generated some good, healthy conversations. Here’s how I explained it to the girls. Imagine you’re on one side of a big cliff, and God is on the other side. You really want to be close to him, and he really wants to be close to you, but there’s this big gap (with one of the girls I said a river you could never swim across– with another I said a canyon you could never jump across).

This river/canyon (which is probably the name of some cool church out there somewhere) is made of our sins. And every time we sin, the gap gets wider and wider and wider. That’s my kid-friendly word picture for Isaiah 59:1-2.

When Jesus came to earth, he built a bridge so we could get back to God. Being baptized is like walking across that bridge.

Theologically speaking, this explanation is not very precise (though I think it explained the gist of things well enough for my kids to “get it”). Jesus did far more than building a bridge across the gap created by our sins. In some cosmic sort of way, he actually defeated sin. He paid the price for our sin because God’s holiness means he can’t just pretend nothing happened. He conquered death, which is the ultimate consequence of sin.

What else did Jesus accomplish on the cross? And how would you explain the significance of baptism in language a child could understand?

Humanity has gone bad and — like all things gone bad — it cannot make itself good again — not anymore than a dead person can bring himself back to life.

Because of all the bad stuff we’ve done we’ve all caught this terminal disease called sin. Symptoms of this disease include turning your back on God, doing exactly what he’s asked you not to do and ruining his perfect plan for your life and the world. Untreated, of course, you will surely Die.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Because of who he is and how he is, God can’t just turn off his holiness or his sense of justice. Our bad condition and his moral purity prevent us from being compatible. We can’t get close to God anymore.

Except for this one thing — this crazy little thing called love.

If that doesn’t fry your brain — at least a little — you may not be totally understanding what it all means.

God loves us with a crazy kind of love. I don’t mean “crazy” like “mentally deranged” or even “foolish”. I mean “crazy” as in “appearing absurdly out of place” and “extremely enthusiastic”.

God’s love for us is absurd — it doesn’t make any sense. Look at us. It’s not like we’ve done anything to make ourselves more lovely or lovable. If anything, we deserve to be unloved because of what we’ve done. Take your nature vs. nurture arguments elsewhere and talk to your therapist about how your parents are responsible for all your bad choices — I’m not buying it. You’ve done wrong. I’ve done wrong. And we all knew we were doing wrong when we did it.

And still God loves us. And because he loves us with such a crazy love, he provides a cure for our disease. It’s crazy expensive, but God’s crazy love drove him to pay our bill himself. Perhaps the most famous words in the Bible put it this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

It’s as if Jesus said, “I would rather die than live without you.”

That’s a crazy little thing called love.

If you’ve been tracking with the blog here, you’ll know that I’ve been talking a lot about what’s wrong with the human race. In a word, the problem is sin, and sin is everywhere. It’s in us and around us. It comes out of us at an alarming rate. It’s inescapable and undeniable.

Sin is a problem, and it creates more problems.

One of the primary problems is the way we handle the aftermath of sin. See, we tend to think the remedy for sin is the opposite of sin. We’ve done something bad; let’s do something good. It kind of evens things out that way.

So, what was the bad thing we did? What was our sin? Did we tell a lie? Okay, tell the truth now. Clear your conscience. Come clean. That makes up for it, right? Did we steal something? Give something away. Practice the virtue of generosity for a while. That balances the scales, doesn’t it?

Well…um…no. It doesn’t quite work that way.

What if I kill someone? Do I have to go find a dead person to re-animate? If I hit someone, and then I let someone hit me back…that just hurts us both. You don’t have to play this scenario out for very long before you realize it’s a fool’s errand to try and undo the bad things by papering over them with good things.

The real problem is deeper than our behavior. We haven’t just done bad things. In some strange way, we’ve become bad. We’ve gone bad, and when something’s gone bad it can’t be made good again. Think about milk that’s past its expiration date by a month or so. You can’t put good milk in with the bad and mix it up, expecting positive results. You don’t take old, rotten meat and figure that if you add enough Montreal Steak Seasoning it’ll be alright.

You don’t try to make bad milk good. You go get new milk. You don’t try to make bad steak good. You go get new steak.

The opposite of bad isn’t always “good”. Sometimes the opposite of bad is “new”.

But once I’ve gone bad, how do I make myself new so I can be good again? Can I ever find myself good and new again?

The sad truth about this whole “sin” thing is that we’ve all got it. We’ve all sinned because we’re sinners, and we’re all sinners because we’ve sinned. It’s a vicious cycle.

And, to make matters worse, this “sin” thing is fatal. The Bible says it plainly, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 3:23). You sin, you die. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Put these two paragraphs together and you understand why everybody dies. No one is surprised by it (though we are still more than a little squeamish about it). Death has become an established fact of life.

I have two Facebook friends who have both died recently, and it’s rather strange to visit their homepage and click through photographs of them, to read old status updates. Their walls have become sort of memorial pages. I don’t feel right about “unfriending” them. Clearly, their spouses don’t feel right about deleting their account.

Death, though it is ubiquitous enough, gives us all a collective case of the heebie-jeebies.

Ah, but I once had a professor who has helped me frame this conversation in a wonderful way. He said that since there are two parts of each of us (a physical part and a non-physical, or spiritual, part), there are also two kinds of death (a physical death and a spiritual death) and two kinds of life (physical life and spiritual life).

To distinguish between these two different kinds of life and death, he suggested that physical life and death should have lower-case letters. Spiritual Life and Death, however, should be capitalized.

Now, if you merely have life (and not Life), when you die, then you really Die. But if you experience Life while you have life then, though you will certainly die, you will never really Die.

By the same token, it’s possible to experience Death while you still have life. If that’s your situation, you can go through your whole life without ever really Living.

Got it?

See, there are lots of bad things we can say about sin, but the worst may be that it puts us all at risk. Because of the presence of sin in our lives, we’re all poised to experience Death with a capital “D”.

That rhymes with “T”, and that stands for “Trouble”.

It could also stand for “turmoil” or “torture” or a whole host of other words we normally associate with “hell”. We’ll talk more about hell later, but for today I want to know how to escape this capital “D” death. If I realize that all I’ve got is life, but my life is shrouded in Death, well, how do I get Life to conquer my Death?

Christianity has as a fundamental tenet the idea that God is a good God who, after creating everything, stepped back and said, “That’s all good. In fact, that’s all very good.”

Needless to say, no one would look at the state of the world now and declare it “very good”. Just a cursory glance at Headline News reveals a mixed up, messed up world. Sure, there’s still good in the world, but it’s mixed up with all sorts of bad, too. War. Poverty. Disease. Deception. Anyone willing to say that’s all very good?

But that begs a question. If it all began so well, how have we ended up in the mess we’re in?

The answer to that question comes in the third chapter of the Bible — Genesis 3. As far as we know, God’s original plan contained only one rule: Don’t eat from this one tree. If you eat from that one tree (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), you’ll die. That’s it. Not 10 Commandments. Not 631 laws. Just one thing: Don’t eat from this one tree.

Avoid that one thing, and you get to live forever, explore every square inch of a magnificent garden, play with all the animals and hang out with God himself.

Easy, right?

Well, the trouble got started with a trash-talking serpent called The Devil. Strange as it seems, The Devil, apparently, hung out in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve disguised as a snake. One day he said something along the lines of, “What’s up with all these rules? God’s got you guys on a pretty short leash. He’s probably hiding something. I wouldn’t trust him if I were you.”

That was enough to plant doubt in Eve’s mind. She sidled up to the tree and took a good long look at the fruit. It looked pretty good to her. And she wondered what she might gain from eating it. Before she knew what she was doing, the fruit was in her hand and in her mouth and she was giving some to her husband (who was standing right there going along with the whole thing).

That was the beginning of the end. Using the free will God had given them, they chose to disobey him, and — in the process — the opened the door for sin and death to enter the world.

God’s plan was for people to live forever, but that was for sinless humans. The plan had to be scrapped now.

There is good news in this, though. There’s mercy and grace even in Genesis 3. See, God could have killed them immediately. He could have wiped them off the face of the earth and started over completely. But he didn’t. Instead of punishing them like that, God did something unpredictable. God made a promise.

Beginning all the way back in Genesis 3 — before sin and death and their consequences had even taken hold — we see the end God has in mind.

Sadly, I fear this post may offend some of my readers. The words “free will” have become dirty words to many of my Calvinist friends. Historically, no one questioned a human’s ability to make real and consequential choices until Augustine developed a deterministic concept of God late in his life (c. 417-430). Church fathers Tertullian, Novatian of Rome, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa may not have agreed on everything, but they were unanimous in their support of our ability and responsibility to choose wisely when it comes to accepting God’s offer of forgiveness and mercy. In fact, the last three made tremendous arguments that this was an indispensable part of what it means to have been created “in the image of God”.

So, it is with some trepidation but no apologies that I move forward from yesterday’s post on God’s holiness to discuss the dilemma presented to humans. As I said yesterday, God is holy, and we’re not. God’s holiness prevents him from having a relationship with anything not perfectly holy (that would be each one of us and all of us collectively). This, in turn, hinders the flow of generosity and kindness he wants to bestow upon us and threatens to subject us to his eventual wrath.

If that’s the case, why didn’t God remove the potential for sin in the original design of the first humans? Why not just take sin out of the mix from the start so there wouldn’t be anything to worry about?

Well, he could have done that. One of the advantages to being the Creator is that you get to choose what features end up in the final product. He could have created us so that we all break out into the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” every hour on the hour if he’d wanted to. He didn’t, and thank him he didn’t!

He could have programmed us so that we had no choice but to do whatever he said without thinking, but he didn’t. God’s a person (I got in trouble for saying that once in a church in northern California, but it’s true), and — as a person — he wants to be in a personal relationship with the persons he personally creates. A personal relationship is not possible without options, without choice, without risking rejection.

The negative side to free will is obvious: Being free to choose embracing God and obeying him means also being free to choose to ignore God and disobey him. God is holy. We are not. And as much as we may want to point the finger at someone else — our parents, our teachers, Adam and Eve — we have no one to blame but ourselves.

But there’s an upside to free will, too. Isn’t there? What are the positives you can think of?

Everything about salvation, the Bible and Christianity begins with God. In fact, some writers have suggested that the real meat of the Bible is just the first four words; everything after that is merely commentary.

The goal of the Bible is not to get you to live a different life; the goal of the Bible is to reveal the character and nature of God — with the understanding that this God’s character and nature will inspire you and draw you into a different kind of life. That’s why, around here, we practice a theocentric hermeneutic. That’s a fancy way of saying that, when we read the Bible, our first thought isn’t how we should apply this verse to our own lives but what this verse teaches us about God. Only after we answer that are we in a position to apply the verse to our own lives by asking ourselves one simple question: How can I be more like him?

Well, this leads to a problem.

See, you can’t swing a stick in the Bible without hitting a verse that talks about how holy God is. It’s everywhere. In fact, some verses don’t just say, “God is holy,” they say, “God is holy, holy, holy.”

Holy times three. Holy cubed.

Now, when you begin trying to apply that verse to your life, you’re headed for some serious frustration — because we’re not holy. Holy isn’t within reach for us. It doesn’t come in degrees (“I’m just not feeling as holy as usual today”), and it’s not a vague sort of compliment (“You sure look holy today, God”).

God’s holiness means he can’t have anything to do with impurity. It’s not that God is religiously fussy or uptight — like he gets uncomfortable and has to leave the room when something sinful happens. It’s that God and sin are mutually exclusive — like light and dark. Where one exists, the other is absent.

God can’t have anything to do with impurity on account of his holiness. But we’re shot through with impurities — impure actions, thoughts, motives, you name it. So, you can see how this might be a problem, right?

Now, here’s where I think we often get off track in explaining what Christianity is and what Christians believe.

We understand that God is holy, but he’s not only holy. He’s other things, too. The characteristics of God we choose to focus on after his holiness lead us to present this need for salvation in a particular way.

For example, if we move from God’s holiness to God’s wrath (because God is holy, he gets angry at impurities), well, we’re likely to say that salvation is being spared from God’s wrath which will be poured upon people in hell.

If, however, we move from God’s holiness to God’s love (because God is holy, he longs to love us but cannot because we’ve separated ourselves from him), well, we’re likely to say that salvation is being saved from that separation, bringing us into a relationship where God can lavish his love upon us.

If we move from God’s holiness to God’s power, we’re likely to say that salvation is being saved from our own helplessness and empowered to live with a whole new operating system.

You can see how this has implications. God’s character is multifaceted. The characteristics we choose to focus on most will determine the way we present the need for salvation and its implications.

Question: Why do so many focus on his wrath but not his mercy? On the other hand, why do some folks tend to soft-sell his wrath? Which characteristic do you think should follow holiness?