Free to Live: The Utter Relief of Holiness (8 page)

What God did
for
you and
in
you through Jesus Christ gives you an option. As his life takes deeper hold of us, as we walk more fully in all that has been accomplished, we can know for ourselves the utter relief of holiness. It begins by accepting the truth.

Chapter Nine

Choosing the Way of Holiness

We’ve lived in Colorado now for more than twenty years, but I’ve never really learned to snowboard. I mean, I’ve tried. But it was always a messy, hazardous, hesitant affair. Like a dog on roller skates. There wasn’t a lot of joy in it for me. I was tense, apprehensive. My basic problem was this: I couldn’t get myself to commit, to lean into it. You have to lean forward; you have to lean down slope. If you fight that, you end up constantly battling gravity and balance and the downward pull of things. The good riders just go for it—they commit, they lean into it, and off they go. Then comes the joy. I’ve never known that joy.

I’ve watched friends who are surfers, and it’s the same dynamic. There is a moment when you have to commit; you have to go with the wave or not. Yes, there is some paddling on your part, but when the wave picks you up, your choice is to let it, to go with it, to accept its power and let it hurl you forward. You don’t create the wave; the power is utterly beyond you. Once it has you in its mighty grip, your part is to
cooperate
. Then the beauty comes.

Holiness works the same way.

What I mean is this: The power is not ours. The power comes from God, from the presence of the living Jesus Christ inside us. He is the wave. If we think we have to paddle fast enough to create the entire experience, we will end up frustrated and exhausted from all the striving. The name for that is Religion. God offers something far better: “Let me be the wave.”

God is working within you in order to make this possible. With that in mind, I want to describe to you how you can “cooperate.” There
is
a process, and you do have a role. It is a process in which we can cooperate, one that needs our cooperation. But you have to begin with the perspective that this is a process that God is committed to. Before I describe some of the process, let me say that nothing beats this simple prayer:

That’s what it’s all about. In the day to day, when I need it most, this is what I find myself praying:
Jesus, give me your holiness
. Friends, he
wants
to give you his holiness. Receiving it begins with
asking
for it. There’s more to it than that, but it’s never
other
than that. Our journey to holiness is the process whereby we receive more and more of the holiness of Jesus Christ, into more and more of our being.

Let me offer a few thoughts in the direction of experiencing the power of his work for you. There are some simple practices that will enable you to receive it more fully. For one thing, you will want to read through the scriptures I listed in the last chapter—often. Sometimes daily; certainly weekly. Whenever I start a new journal, I paste those scriptures at the beginning, so that they are always with me. Sure, I forget, and I wander, and then I get desperate, and return to them. The crucial thing is for the truth of this to take deep root in our being. For as Jesus explained,

The Greek word used here for “stick with this” is
meno
. It means to remain, to abide; to tarry; not to depart; to continue to be present. Most Westerners have an approach to understanding that goes something like this: We hear an insight explained, we hear a fact, and we acknowledge it as it passes through our minds. Then we move on. It is an approach that has been shaped profoundly by the evening news: we watch, we move on. That is the
opposite
of what Jesus is explaining here. The idea of “continuing” in his word is a deep abiding. It implies far more than, “Sure, I read that. It was awesome.” “If you stick with this,” he says, “if you continue, tarry, abide in, linger with” the truth, then—and
only
then—it will set you free.

So, you’ll want to “hang out” with these truths, marinate in them. Read them once a day for a month.

Then comes the process of
embracing
the Work of Christ. (By the way, this is how most of the New Testament epistles are laid out: First the truth is given, explained, and illustrated. Then, in the second half of the book, the application is laid out. You’ve got to know the truth and understand it before you can experience it.)

I long to embrace the work of Christ more fully. I long to let it have its full intended effect in me. After all, God set about my restoration in Jesus Christ, so I want to receive it as fully as possible and let it have its restoring effect in me. Therefore this is a portion of what I pray every morning (as in, every single day of the week):

What a fabulous way to begin the day. As you make a practice of this—or something like it—the work of Christ becomes more and more a part of you. From there, you can begin to experience it.

Personally, I find one of the most startling things Jesus says tucked away at the end of the fourteenth chapter of John. He is preparing his closest friends (and soon-to-be-successors) for his departure. They still don’t believe or don’t
want
to believe he’s leaving. Here is what Jesus says to them (and to us):

Wait—do not
let
your heart be troubled? I thought to myself,
We have a choice? We
let
our hearts be troubled?
I’ve always assumed it was the other way around—that trouble strikes in some form or other, and our hearts simply respond by being troubled. I’ll bet this is how you look at it, too. Trouble descends upon you: your house is robbed, your daughter gets pregnant, you lose your job. In that moment are you thinking,
This doesn’t have to take me out. I’m not going to let my heart be troubled
. No way. We think “troubled heart” is unavoidable, appropriate even. But Jesus is talking about his coming torture, his death, and, following that, his departure from them. On a scale of personal crises, this is a ten. Yet he says, don’t let your hearts be troubled.

Friends, this is important.

You have a say in what your heart gives way to.

How much truer this is when it comes to choosing goodness. You have a say in what your heart gives way to. Having been struck with the idea that it is up to
me
whether I let my heart be troubled or not, I started flipping through other passages talking about what we do with our inner life, the life of our heart. I was stunned at the number of scriptures urging us to shepherd the life of our heart:

And I thought,
Dang—we love to rejoice. We don’t get to indulge this?

But how subtle this is; when you get a good payday or a windfall, doesn’t something in you say,
Now we’re okay; now we’re gonna be fine.
This is wrong?

Okay, fellas, this is
huge
: I know beauty is powerful, I know it rings all kinds of bells inside you. But you can choose not to let it in. You don’t have to let lust into your heart. It is not inevitable.

I repeat this because most of you think “troubled heart” equals “natural and human response to my world.” Apparently not. You actually have a say in worry, fear, anxiety, and their cousins. This is huge because these things almost always lead to some kind of false
comforte
r/a
ddiction
/u
nbelief
/me
dication
/sc
rambling
.

As in right now: something in you doesn’t like the idea of having to shepherd your heart. Life is easier, so we think, when we just “let” ourselves react to life.

The point I want to make is this: God seems to think we have a choice. The Big Lie of sin is that it is
inevitable
. This feels especially true with habitual sins. When that anger sweeps over you, when that fear/lust/anxiety/rage/envy/deceitfulness/idolatry comes rushing in, it feels like it is going to have its way. And as soon as you make that agreement—
this is inevitable
—you are going to fall prey to it. But it is not inevitable. Not necessarily.
Now we have an option
, because of all Christ has done for us, and because God is at work within us. What I love about these passages is the assumption that we can shepherd our hearts; we can choose what we let in and what we don’t let in; we can choose what we “go with” and what we don’t “go with.”