Concerning Sex

This post is not explicit, but it does speak on a topic that some readers may find offensive.  It is recommended for mature readers only.  Please use discretion.

Foolish Galatians

"You foolish Galatians!  Who has bewitched you?...Are you so foolish?  After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?"

-Galatians 3:1 & 3(NIV)

So begins the third chapter of Paul's letter to the church in Galatia.  The Greek believers there were falling under the influence a group of believing Jews who claimed that, in order to be saved and followe Christ, the Greeks needed to submit themselves to ancient Jewish law, including the ordinance of circumcision.  Today, we shake our heads and maybe chuckle a little.  "You tell it to 'em, Paul," we say in the back of our minds.  "Silly Galatians!"  Of course 2,000 years later, we've gotten over such folly.  We all know that the ordinances of the Old Testiment law are passé: Christ fulfilled the law on the cross and (thankfully), no Christian is required to undergo circumcision in order to be saved.

But we are not all so enlightened today as we would like to think.  True, there aren't cults and groups going around claiming that salvation can only be attained by circumcision any more, but there are other works that are often claimed to be necessary.  Baptism is a popular one.  Many Bible verses are cited in defence of this doctrine--while verses stating that salvation is a gift given by the grace of God and received by faith (without works) and examples of believers who attained salvation without baptism (such as Abraham and the thief on the cross) are conveniently ignored.  Some groups add membership in their church (because the church died for your sins, not Jesus--I say with dripping sarcasm).  Others stack on all sorts of works: attendence of services, completion of chruch rituals, evangelism, prayer, and Bible reading.  Do all this, they say, and you'll be saved...maybe.  Needless to say, all of these doctrined are just as foolish and unbiblical as the heresies being passed off on the Galatians 2,000 years ago.

Still, surely we who believe in the free gift of God and have accepted it are not so foolish as that.  We at least know that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone.  We, at least, aren't like the foolish Galatians.

Or so we'd like to think.  The thing is that Paul isn't even talking about salvation in verse 3.  He addresses it in verse 2 (omitted), reminding the Galatians that the salvation they received was (as he expects the Galatians agree) a free gift of grace received through faith.  The Galatians knew this at one point and most of them appearently remembered it.  But the Jewish preachers had gotten them confused on one point: what do we do after our salvation.  They hadn't been bewitched into thinking they could earn their salvation, but they'd bought into the idea that, once they were saved, the rest of their spiritual walk was up to them.

Practically speaking, isn't that how most of us live, too?

Oh, sure, we know that Jesus died for our sins.  It's His death and the grace of God, imparted through faith in Him, which leads to salvation.  We know that.  We are already saved (though if you haven't yet staked all your hopes of eternal salvation on the finished work of Christ on the cross, this isn't talking about you).  But now that we know that, now that we've accepted Christ into our life, we want to shove Him into the passenger seat and take over.  This goes way beyond wanting to live a worldly life.  Even if or when we decide we want to be spiritual, we want to do it on our terms.  We make plans for our spiritual growth.  We invent systems to ensure it.  Then, we go out and build ourselves in godliness using our own two hands.  You may think I'm joking but it's true.  We see one of our Christian friends has a good spiritual life, one worth imitating.  He just finished reading the Bible through in a year.  "I bet if I read the Bible through in a year, I'd be more satisfied with my spiritual life," we say.  "I could be as good a saint as him!"  So, we go find a Bible-in-a-year schedule and start musling our way through the scriptures page by page (and you can tell it's just human effort when we hit the census data in Numbers and feel like we're struggling through a boring reading assignment).  I know, because I've done this!  We commit to doing evangelism once a week and faithfully show up every week to try to talk those atheists into coming to church--or else, since that sounds really hard, we decide to stay at home.  We set up ridgid prayer calanders and lists, so that our conversations with God can become scripted and burdensome--turning them into just another assignment to check off.  We tell people later, "I did my prayers this morning" and are genuinely proud.  I've done this, too.  We go further.  We know that God doesn't want sin in our lives, so we invent elaborate and burdensome systems to prevent ourselves from sinning.  We go out of our way to avoid particular temptations--even if it means sinning in other ways.  We perscribe extra regamines of prayer, Bible study, and scripture memory.  All of this sounds hard, and those of us who've tried it know that it is really, really hard, but we just shrug our shoulders in a helpless way.  "Christian life requires discipline and sacrifice," we tell ourselves.

But we have forgotten the point.  We have forgotten what kind of discipline and sacrifice Christ requires of us, and to what end.  We have been bewitched just like the foolish Galatians.  We began our lives in Christ...well, in Christ!  We began by accepting that there was nothing we could do to earn our way into Heaven, and that only Christ's death on the cross could atone for our sins and save us from Hell.  We began by surrendering our attempts to win over God's favor by works--we sacrificed such a lifestyle--, and accepted His free grace as a gift through faith in Him.

Then, something happened.  We lost sight of all this.  Where are we now?  Having begun in the Spirit, in Christ, in grace and faith, we are now far away from all these things.  Our lives in Christ may have started like that, but now our "growth in godliness" has none of these elements.  Our regiments of human work (self-assigned Bible readings, studies, memorizations, and rote prayers) have replace our need for the Spirit's guidance.  Our human values of discipline and sacrifice (meaning, giving up what's good so we can bore ourselves to tears trying to work our way into a closer relationship with God) have replaced the divine values of grace and faith we learned earlier.  We no longer trust God to keep us from sin, or to forgive us when we fall--we must invent and cary out systems to save ourselves from the Devil's schemes.  Though our lives in Christ began with Christ, Christ now has virtually nothing to do with them.  Seriously!  If this describes your spiritual life, take a hard look at it.  Where is Christ in your Christianity?  Did you consult Him at all when you made your plans for rigorous spiritual growth and dicipline?  Did you call on His strength?  If you prayed to Him at all, was it just to have Him rubber-stamp your own plans and give you a little extra umph in pulling them off?

I know what I would have had to answer.  About a year or two ago, this described my spiritual life very well.  Christ's only role in my Christianity was to start me on my spiritual journey, give me an occasional boost in my human plans for spiritual betterment, and pick me up and get me back in the race when I stumbled.  It was an exhausting and fruitless way to live.  Slowly, bit by bit, God brought this to my realization and started taking control away from me.  I came to realize I needed His help every day, not just when I messed up or faced a particular challenge.  Then, I realized that, sometimes, God had His own ideas of what my spiritual growth should look like--and that sometimes these ideas were very different from mine.  They always turned out better, too.  I learned to trust Him and put faith in Him again, as at the beginning.  Finally, He opened my eyes to what a perfectionist I was and what havoc it was making of my spiritual life.  This summer, I agreed to turn over the wheel to Him.

The result has been a different way to live spiritually.  Some of my Navigator friends may be scandalized to hear this, but I haven't memorized a single verse in months.  I haven't had a regular reading time or even a plan all summer.  No "quiet times" or "HDAWG" (Half-Day-Alone-With-God: basically, a really long prescheduled "quiet time") either.  I haven't had a prayer calander and I've forgotten where I put my last list or what was on it--or even when exaclty I made it.  Needless to say, I haven't been dutifully praying for all the hundreds of items I recited before.  From a human perspective, it's chaos.  Some days I don't read the Bible at all.  Other days, I spend half the day reading the Bible.  Somedays, I play video games half the day (I used to try to impliment systems to keep me from the temptation to play too much video games, because I didn't think God could help me) and write my novel the other half, and then take a nap!  Some days I spend the whole day blogging and journaling.  I don't have a schedule for anything, or a plan, or a system.  What I do have is far better: what (I find) I wanted all along.  I have Jesus, and He has me.  I stop often (I don't have schedule for this either) and ask Him what He wants me to do.  "What should I do next, Jesus?  What do you want me to do today?"  I try to be attentive to the Spirit's repsonce.  Sometimes, I hear, "Read."  Sometimes, I hear, "Write" or "Rest" or "Go for a walk."  Sometimes, when I do hear read, I ask Him what He wants me to read and sometimes it's not the Bible (*gasp*).  Sometimes He speaks to me through the John Eldridge book I picked up.  Sometimes, it's through an old letter or a journal entry.  Sometimes, it's even fantasy He wants me to read, just to have fun with Him!  When it is the Bible I read, it's almost never on any schedule.  He often leads me to Psalms (He knows I like it and that it gets right at my heart--and He likes that), or the gospels.  Sometimes, I'll be reading along, halfway through a chapter, and He'll tell me to stop.  One of the verses struck me and we need to talk about it.  I'd rather press on and forget the topic, but He insists I stop and pray or meditate on it.  He's always right!

So, I've lost my systems.  I've lost the neat human orderliness whereby I used to measure my faith.  But I've found something far more precious, which cannot be quantified.  I've found a deeper, truer relationship of love with God.  It takes discipline and sacrifice, true, to constantly subject my will and my understanding of my spiritual situation to His, but it's worth it.  He romances me and I yield to Him, and that's just so good no words can describe it.  I know I'll never go back.  Maybe, if you can take a moment to surrender your human plans and systems for spiritual growth and ask for God to really lead you in your spiritual life, maybe neither will you.