When I was seventeen, shortly after coming back to the faith of my youth, I found myself in a bit of a conundrum. There I was, energized by a new–found force, a belief that electrified my heart and mind with systems of belief, glimpses of a new world, and the firm sense that finally I had found truth and that this truth would never abandon me.
Everything had changed, but then again, everything hadn’t. I remember being holed up in the dorm room the summer before my senior year. I was participating in two–a–day football camp, which, since I attended a boarding school, meant three–a–day football camp because of the time we saved not having to drive home to eat and sleep. As a Navy kid, I was used to bumping around from town to town, base to base, school to school. I appreciated the idea of a hometown, but only notionally. In fact, the boarding school was actually the fourth high school I had attended, and blessedly it would be my last. I remember sitting at my desk, bored, physically exhausted; my mind sought sleep but my teenage hormones, which knew not fatigue, raged against the dying of the artificial light in the parking lot outside.
Thoughts of reckless abandon crept in to my newly–revived heart. I could not stop the flood of images from my past life, from an alternate universe where faith had not found me, and I played, therefore, freely in sundry carnalities.
With the psalmist and the martyrs, I would pray, ‘How long, Oh Lord?’ How long until my thoughts and actions fit the faith that I now claimed as my own? (Nothing like a little melodrama to spice up youthful religious fervor.)
It seemed as serious as an angioplasty at the time. I remember waking each morning and starting the day with review and audit of the dreams I had dreamt the night before. My primary concern was not the activities of my nocturnal imaginings, but my disposition toward them. My most urgent question: ‘Was I a follower of Christ in my dreams?’ This seemed the most important line of inquiry. If I was gunned down in a dreamy shoot–out (this happened at an alarming rate for a child of the suburbs), did I find hope in death? Did I pray for God to save me? Better yet, did I pray at all in my dreams? This question got to the heart of it.
Though it may sound silly now, these questions seemed poignant at the time. What else could be as important? If you aren’t a Christian in your dreams, then how are you really a Christian at all? This made absolute sense to me, so of course I kept my scruples to myself.
The problem, I surmised, was that there seemed to be an inner me and an outer me, and the two had gotten along well for some time, but no more. Despite my best efforts and near constant prayer (‘pray without ceasing’), the rift between faith and life seemed unbridgeable and vast, and the irony was that I myself was standing on either side of the rift waving across the expanse like a happy fool.
Then the breakthrough.
A few years previous, a neighbor had given me a copy of a popular devotional. The neighbor was a Roman Catholic with five girls (this would figure in my later life), but the devotional was of Protestant vintage, so I decided it was trustworthy and kept it nearby. I had not cracked its bendable, blue faux–leather cover for two years, not until that summer in that dorm room during football camp.
One of the first devotional readings I stumbled upon was about spiritual surrender. I consumed the page–length treatment hungrily. That was my answer. Surrender. Surrender to God’s will. Stop fretting over errant thoughts, stop auditing dreams, stop nitpicking whether I was convicted of the sins of my earlier high–school life. Stop being, as one pastor vividly described this pathology, an obsessive mole burrowing toward the center of the earth. Surrender and love God. Even now, such an idea seems both benign and impossible, but I can still feel the fresh relief that came when I read those words, their black type upon a cool white page, the serifs and the ascenders of the letters lancing the blisters of hyper self–analysis.
…
Before going into the ministry, I worked in a public relations firm in Washington, D.C., and like any agency that handles client work there would be times when we would take two clients who were competitors in the same industry and when that would happen, the firm would have to construct an internal wall or screen, which would separate the teams that were working on the competing clients. Members of each team were forbidden from talking to one another about their client work, desks were sometimes moved to prevent accidental sharing of knowledge; when teams were meeting in the conference rooms the curtains on the glass wall would have to be drawn.
As you can imagine, our firm did not like to have too many internal walls in place at any given time because of the way it affected productivity. We were a large firm, but these internal divisions effectively cut the power of the team to a fraction of what was actually available. There was often a sigh of relief when one or another of the clients moved to another office or another firm, because we could go back to being a whole office again.
Let me offer this paradigm. Sin is the behavior, thoughts, and desires that arise from the internal walls we have established in our own lives. The result of and fruit of sin is internal fragmentation. Think about the last time you obviously sinned, whether in public or private. Before you did what you did, or thought what you thought, you had to say first to the Lord, ‘You cannot be my God right now.’
You may have done this through actively rejecting the Lord or selectively forgetting about Him—a convenient amnesia. Sin happens when we consciously or unconsciously recite this pitiful liturgy:
I know that you are one Lord, and that when I am in worship on Sunday morning I say that there is none beside you, but right now, I have someone or something else that needs to be before you, something or someone else that I want to worship.
You may be present when I worship, but you cannot be present when I am bored and looking for something to amuse me. You cannot be present when I need to feed my ego. You cannot be present when I talk to this particular person, and I need to set myself over against them. You cannot be present when my kids are driving me crazy at the end of a hard day and I have just been stretched a millimeter too far.
That is where we build our own internal walls, and that is where fragmentations happen. Repentance on the other hand is bringing that wall before the Lord and asking Him to tear it down.
Repentance is often portrayed as a labor, a task, but it is better understood to be a gift. See how the psalmist asks for it.
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting! (Ps. 139: 23–24)
As I learned that summer in my dorm room, repentance is surrender — surrender to God’s knowledge of you and His work of sanctification in your life. You surrender to Him because He is the only one who can accomplish the sort of demolition work you need, tearing down the walls that you have constructed to make your sin possible. Far from a self–centered endeavor, repentance is focused on God and His faithfulness. It means submitting to Him and His will, claiming the wholeness promised by God throughout the Scriptures, a promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Repentance is saying, ‘Grant me wholeness—all my heart, all my person, all my effects—directed toward the worship of the one Lord, and the service of His image on this earth, my neighbors.’
Contrary to current beliefs, Christian repentance does not derive its power from self–loathing, or being able to name a litany of sins, or putting oneself down in order give the appearance of humble penitence. Rather, repentance is a gift of God, a stance in life that says, ‘I know my true rest is in the Lord, that I love Him best when I love Him simply, and I want that in my life, and the Lord has promised that He will make it happen in me through His Spirit.’
Repentance is throwing the doors of your soul open before the Lord and saying come in. ‘Don’t let me wall off rooms where I can replace you with another god. Because you are one, I want to be whole in my love of you.’
Henry David Thoreau thought he had to be alone to learn simplicity and wholeness, but biblical wholeness doesn’t work that way. Biblical wholeness cannot be found alone in a cabin in the Connecticut woods. Rather the unity for which Christ prays in John 17 is initiated by the Spirit who works in the worshipping community through the reading of the word, the celebration of the sacraments, and the lifting up of one another in prayer.
Community and its compatriot intimacy are perhaps best understood as shared wholeness. Wholeness of the individual inspires and is nourished by wholeness of the community. The church is not perfect, far from it, but we are called to co–labor lovingly and supportively, and when we fail, we repent to one another and receive one another back in forgiveness.
The Wholeness Imperative: How Christ Unifies our Desires, Identity and Impact in the World by Scott Redd will be available from Christian bookstores or online from August 3rd 2018.