More Jesus; Less You

The Christian life is a constant struggle. You are constantly fighting against your old, sinful flesh. The devil and the world are allies of your old self, and together they form an unholy trinity, the real axis of evil, to conspire against you, to lure you away from Jesus. When we pray in the 6th Petition of the Lord’s Prayer “Lead us not into temptation,” we are praying “that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world and our sinful flesh may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice.”

Do you see your life that way, as a constant struggle, a fighting against your own sinful flesh? St. Paul did. “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:15, 18, 19, 24, 25)

On June 24, we celebrated the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, or, the birthday of John the Baptist. The Church is not in the birthday business. She celebrates two days in the lives of her saints, her children: their baptismal birthdays (their re-birthdays) and their death days (their heavenly birthdays). But there on June 24 every year is the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Why? Because John is the Forerunner of Jesus, the one who prepared the way for the coming of the Lord, the one whose entire life points to Jesus.

John preached about Jesus “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” He also preached against himself relative to Jesus, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”

That’s the solution to the constant struggle against our sinful flesh: He must increase, and we must decrease. More Jesus, less you.

The more Jesus fills you with Himself, as He does in the Lord’s Supper, the less room there is for you. The more He covers you with His righteousness, as He did in Holy Baptism, the less you can cover yourself with sin. The more Jesus drives away sin and temptation in Holy Absolution, the less room there is for you to embrace sin and temptation. The more Jesus fills your ears with His Word, the less room there is for you to fill them with self-worship and the filth of the world. Jesus Word and Sacraments, His means of delivering His grace to you, are the victory over sin and temptation. Through these means, God holds the head of the Old Adam, your old sinful flesh under the waters of Holy Baptism.

And God gives you means, not through which to merit grace or earn forgiveness, but through which you can fight against your sinful flesh. These means have traditionally been called spiritual disciplines. Through disciplines of prayer, study, meditation, fasting, tithing, almsgiving, works of mercy, among others. None of these things earns any of God’s favor. Some of them are aimed at your sinful flesh, putting him to death and following after Jesus. Some are aimed at your neighbor, showing him mercy at the expense of yourself.

Most important in the struggle against your sinful flesh is hearing the Word of Christ. He sees beyond the veil of today to see things as they really are. He sees your sinful flesh really dead and done with. He sees you wearing perfectly and completely His righteousness. And the word He speaks about you is truer than anything you can see. Following Jesus is learning to believe your ears over your eyes. Jesus says you are forgiven, set free from your bondage to sin, completely sin-free, a perfect saint. Because He whose very words create and change reality says it, it’s true. He must increase, and I must decrease.

More Jesus, less you.

Luther On Trinity 22

Do Christians still sin? Yes. But do they hate their sin? Yes. And they want to be rid of it. The person who loves his sin, who persists in it, cannot be considered a Christian.

Luther:

We also hear about this wicked servant that, after he had experienced grace at the hand of the king, he became proud and obstinate, stirring up the king's wrath once more. That's the way the godless world is which horribly misuses this doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. Some refuse to admit their sins; even though they are wallowing in sin over their heads, yet they refuse to admit that they are sinners. For such people there is not forgiveness; for as we said earlier, If there is no sin, neither can there be any forgiveness. Some keep right on sinning after receiving forgiveness, believing that the gospel allows everyone to do just as he pleases. But the gospel is a message for the depressed, for the people with a guilty conscience, not for those who keep on defensing their sins, nor is it for those who deliberately sin against a gracious God.

Right thinking or thinking rightly?

Ladies, when your husband tells you you're beautiful, he's not lying, even if you think he is. In his eyes, you are beautiful. Why is that so hard to believe? Because you see yourself differently from how he sees you. Marriage means learning to believe your husband and to see yourself as he does.

That's the ideal. Sure, there are wicked husbands whose eyes make comparisons and haughty wives who consider themselves more highly than they ought. But the ideal comes from the Ideal Marriage, between Christ and His Bride, the Church.

In His eyes, there is none more beautiful. He should know, after all, since He has made her peerless in beauty, removing the filth of her sinfulness and clothing her in the beauty of His righteousness.

There's little practical difference between Oprah's positive thinking and the Word-Faith movement, except one claims to take the majority of its inspiration from Scripture. Both exhort you to get your thinking in order so that good things will follow. And both are wrong (and, neither is contained in Scripture).

But what you think does matter. Your thinking doesn't determine reality, but reality determines your thinking.

Here's the reality: those who are "in Christ" are free from sin and its condemnation. God knows this. He declares it, and so it is. This is justification, being made righteous before God.

Sanctification is learning to believe what God knows to be true about you. From your perspective, though, you don't seem that sinless. You seem to embody what St. Paul describes in Romans 7, the life-long conflict between your old sinful self and your new sin-free self. But God who sees and knows all things, and who has declared you righteous for the sake of Jesus, doesn't see it like you see it.

Who's right? God is. And yet, for the time being, so are you. And you still struggle against sin. The problem is that the reality God knows, where your sins are completely taken away and given to Jesus and His righteousness completely imparted to you, is hidden to your eyes.

The Christian life, growing in grace and holiness, is not a matter of getting better. It's a matter of learning to believe about yourself what God knows and has declared to be true. In Jesus, you are sinless. You have no sins; they belong to Him. He is, after all, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.