What is the One Practice That Will Bring You Wholeness Like Nothing Else?

I honestly thought.  I had heard it all.  After all, even with the best of them, I don’t get shocked by a little hypocrisy.   After all, politicians, like all of us, they’re only human.   But a few weeks ago, what one politician did, shocked me.

Since coming to Congress in 2003, Christian politician, Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, spoke forcefully against abortion.  He had led fight after fight against it in Congress.  Every pro-life group had given him a 100% approval rating.

But last month, a text message became public, one from Murphy’s mistress.  She wrote the following.   “You have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,”  

This anti-abortion congressman was not only having an affair.  He actually asked his mistress to have an abortion.    Now I’ve seen my share of hypocrisy, but that has to rank in my top ten.

Still, when I came down from my high horse, I asked myself some hard questions.  If Christians have been transformed by God’s love, what do examples like Murphy’s say about how real that transformation is?     The atheist philosopher Nietzche said it this way.  “I might believe in the Redeemer, he said, if his followers looked more redeemed.” That critique has a painful truth.  I have to ask myself.  Am I really letting Jesus transform me?   By God’s grace, I haven’t fallen into the sort of mess that Murphy did, but I can’t cast any stones either.   I have my own supply of hidden stuff, failings that I’d don’t want to see in the light of day.   I imagine you might too.  

Are there places in your life where you are stuck, bad habits you cannot break, ugly attitudes that keep coming back.  Do you have things that that you regret doing or saying or thinking yet even so, those regretful things rise up in your life again and again?   How do you become whole there, in those broken places?   How do you become more and more the person that God actually intended you to be?  In these words, God points the way.    Let’s hear what God has to say.

I John 3:1-6

Did you just hear what John said?  He said, “No one who sins has either seen or known Jesus.”  Wow.  If you take John literally, then how could anyone meet that standard?   Only a chapter before, John admitted Christians did sin, saying that if anyone does sin, they have Jesus as their defender.  So clearly, John isn’t being literal here.   But while you don’t need to take John literally, you do need to take him seriously.  

If the presence of Christ has come to live in you, it should redeem you.   It should change you.  But how does that happen?  How do you become transformed?   How does God change you not only on the surface, but all the way through?   In these words, God tells you.   You can’t try your way into transformation.  But you can train your way into it.  The more you train yourself to apply more and more God’s reality to your day to day life, the more transformation will come.

What does it mean to apply God’s reality to your life?  Well, before we go there, let’s unpack why trying doesn’t work.  Trying doesn’t work because trying doesn’t really work anywhere, at least in the long run.  

Several times a week, I do a short run on the treadmill at the gym.   But with those short runs, I can’t run a marathon.   Now, I could try to run a marathon.  But no matter how much I tried, that marathon won’t happen.    Why?  My trying wouldn’t change this simply reality.   My mile and a half runs a few times a week have in no way prepared me for a race that goes over 26 miles.  And no amount of trying on my part will change that fact.  

In pretty much every area of life, trying just won’t get you very far.  Trying has to move into training, into some regular habits that help you get better at whatever it is you’re trying to do.

And religion is no different.  Every religion has certain practices that they expect folks to do.  And every religion says that the more you do these practices, the more transformed you will become.    So, do you want change?   Well, one religion would say meditate more.  Another says keep bowing to Mecca 5 times a day.  Another says eat these things or do these rituals.       

And Christianity has practices too.   And here in what we just read, John points to the central one.   He lays it right out in the third verse when he says.   “And all who have this hope in God, purify themselves just as he (God), is pure.”  

John says.   Do you want to clear out the junk in your life, the stuff that blocks you from becoming who God created you to be?  Well, have this hope in God, and that’ll do it.   It will clear out the junk.  It will purify you just as God is pure.   It will change you utterly from the inside out.  

But how can having this hope in God do that?  Heck, what does that even mean?  It means this.

God brings transformation into your life through the transforming power of truth.  When you hear the truth of the gospel, when you see the reality of what God has done for you, that changes you.  It changes you as nothing else can.

So how does change happen.   It happens as you regularly apply the truth of the gospel to your day to day life.    You see.   Christianity doesn’t just give you things to do.   It actually tells you why you do these things in the first place.

For example, Jesus says forgive.  Forgive not just a few times.  No forgive again and again and again.   But Jesus doesn’t say do this because it’s good or become I told you to.  No Jesus actually tells you why; why you need to forgive.

In one story, Jesus explained it this way.   A certain king had a servant who owed him an astronomical amount of money.  This servant owed so much, that if he worked for 10,000 years, he couldn’t even begin to pay it off.    But the king forgives that debt.   The king writes the whole thing off.  But then as soon as this happens, this same servant goes out and runs into a fellow servant who owes him a hundred bucks.   And do you know what he does, he throws this fellow servant into prison until he can pay the debt.    When the king hears of this, he goes ballistic.   He tells his soldiers.   Find this guy who owed me all this money, and throw him into prison.  I tell you.  He won’t get out until he has paid every last penny.

Do you what Jesus is telling you?   Jesus is saying.   Why do you forgive again and again?   You forgive because God has forgiven you for far, far more than whatever wrong anyone has ever done to you.   And whatever you think your lack of forgiveness does to the one who wronged you, it actually does far worse to you.   That person doesn’t become the prisoner.  You become the prisoner.  That’s why the writer Malachy McCourt once said.   Holding a resentment (in other words not forgiving someone.) is like you drinking poison, and expecting the other person to die. 

So, when you struggle to forgive, what do you do?  You apply the truth of the gospel, the reality of what God had done for you, to your life.   Then you think.   How can I not forgive, after all the forgiveness God has showered on me?

Do you see how this works?      

In my life, I can get tripped up by a certain attitude that leads me to all sorts of bad places.  You could sum up my attitude in this one phrase: I do and I do for you, and this is the thanks I get?  When this attitude takes hold of me, it makes me self-righteous and resentful.   And it will lead me into some bad behaviors of my own, because it makes me think I have an excuse.   After all I do all these good things, shouldn’t I get a little something too, shouldn’t I get cut a little slack?

But when I think about the reality of the gospel, this attitude gets blown away.  Yes, I’ve done for others sure.   But I have not come close to doing what God has done for me.   God has given me in Jesus his very life.   And I’m copping an attitude over a few good deeds.  Gi’me a break.                     

The more you apply the truth of the gospel to your life, the more through that truth, God will change your life.    And if you don’t apply that truth, it opens you up to the sort of ugliness that Congressman Murphy finds himself in now. 

Years ago, I heard a preacher talk about a colleague of his in ministry who had crashed and burned.  He had been caught out in some actions that had destroyed his ministry and deeply wounded his family.   So, this preacher sat down, and asked him.   How did this happen?   It looked like your ministry was going great. 

The colleague just looked at him, opened his Bible and said this.   I used to preach like this. And the colleague put his hand from the Bible to his heart and then out like he was giving something out.   But then I started to preach like this.   And this time, his hand went to the Bible, but it didn’t go near his heart.  No, it just went out.   When this pastor stopped applying the truth to his own heart, it opened the door for his own fall.   

And here’s the truth.   By God’s grace, you hopefully will not end up where that pastor or Tim Murphy did.   But at some point, you will likely face something you regret.  You will find yourself caught up in your own painful place.   What do you do then?  You apply the reality of the gospel to your life, the reality that John so powerfully lays out here.

Lately our son, Patrick, has begun testing the boundaries a bit, seeing just how far he can push his mom and dad.   And yes, he has found out, that his actions have consequences, and those consequences aren’t always good.   But more crucially, he has found out this.   No matter how much he tries our patience or pushes our boundaries, we will always love him.   He will always, always be our child.  

And John tells you that same thing about God.   If Congressman Murphy came across my path that would be the truth that I would apply to him, that first verse that we read.  “See what love that the Father has given us that we should be called children of God.”   That’s the love that God has given Tim Murphy, has given you; has given me.   God has called you his child.   And that means, no matter how far you fall, you will never fall so far that God’s love cannot reach you.

The writer Corrie Ten Boom survived the Nazi death camps, but her sister Betsie did not, but before she died Betsie said something that Corrie has shared again and again, something I have never forgotten.  Betsie was talking about the evil of others done to her, but it applies as well to the evil we might author ourselves, the pits we put ourselves in.  Ten Boom said.   “There is no pit so deep, that God is not deeper still.”  

And when you know that truth, it changes you.  It frees you from getting paralyzed by your own failings.  It frees you to freely give grace when others fail you.    And it leads you to become more and more that child of God that God has destined you to be, a being purified inside and out; someone made holy, or what that word truly means, someone made completely whole, a wholeness that will one day be so complete that you cannot even conceive of how wondrous it will be. 

Do you want that change?   Do you want to not only be called a child of God but to actually become one inside and out?  Then let the truth of the gospel live in your heart.   Let Jesus change you as only Jesus can.