3. Appreciating Salvation: Where Holiness Begins
Appreciating Salvation:
Where Holiness Begins
O LORD, truly I am your servant . . . you have freed me from my chains. I will sacrifice a thank offering to you and call on the name of the LORD. I will fulfill my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people.
PSALM 116:16-18
Our plain man’s sketch of God’s plan of salvation for the individual, as the Bible presents it in its past, present, and future aspects, is now complete. But who is this “plain man” to whom I direct it? The phrase goes back to The Plaine Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601), a famous book on Christian basics by Arthur Dent, an Elizabethan Puritan. The “plaine man” for whom Dent wrote then, and for whom I write now, is a straightforward, unsubtle, honest person whose heart says with John Wesley, “I am a creature of a day, soon to drop into eternity; I want to know one thing, the way to heaven.” And surely this is the best and wisest desire that anyone can ever feel! But if that is so, there is no better course for the present writer than to try to be his own plain man. So I propose once more to speak for myself. In this chapter I reflect on the reactions that knowing God’s plan of salvation should call forth from me.
I said reactions, in the plural, for four at least are in order. Christian holiness embraces all four, which means that our own endeavors after holiness will be radically flawed by the absence of any one of them.
Awe at God’s Greatness
First, I must learn from this plan of salvation to be awestruck at the greatness of my Maker.
Often during the past thirty years, I have found myself publicly lamenting the way in which this twentieth century has indulged unwarrantably great thoughts of humanity and scandalously small thoughts of God. Our time will surely go down in history, at least as far as the West is concerned, as the age of the God-shrinkers. Mainstream thinkers, inside as well as outside the church, have affirmed either the bloodless deism of a God who is cool, faraway, and uninvolved, and who lets His world run free; or the static monism of a God whose achievement is limited to unifying reality by linking all entities and processes with Himself in an interdependent whole; or the pathetic impotence of a God who is revealed in Jesus as an unsuccessful lover; or the faceless force of a God who animates all religions equally, so that none should dream of displacing any other.
There have been lay theologians like G.K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis, and Peter Kreeft, and academic theologians like Leonard Hodgson, Oliver Quick, Karl Barth, Cornelius van Til, G.C. Berkouwer, and Donald Bloesch, who have proclaimed the twin truths of the Trinity and Incarnation, and the twin hopes of personal resurrection and cosmic renovation under God’s sovereignty, in recognizable form. However, they have been a minority. They have often looked like the Danish king of England a millennium ago, King Canute, vainly forbidding the tide to come in while the Waves of scaled-down theologies continue to break and swirl on all sides with ever-increasing impact. Please God, the tide will turn—perhaps it is beginning to turn already—but the God-shrinking trend has long prevailed. Its result is that belief in God’s sovereignty and omniscience, the majesty of His moral law and the terror of His judgments, the retributive consequences of the life we live here and the endlessness of the eternity in which we will experience them, along with belief in the intrinsic tri-unity of God and the divinity and personal return of Jesus Christ, is nowadays so eroded as to be hardly discernible. For many in our day, God is no more than a smudge.
But the plan of salvation, which tells me how my Creator has become my Redeemer, sets before me in fullest glory the transcendent majesty that the churches have so largely forgotten. It shows me a God who is infinitely great in wisdom and power—who knew from all eternity what fallen humanity’s plight would be—and who before creating the cosmos had already schemed out in detail how He would save not only me, but each single one of the many billions whom He was resolved to bring to glory. The plan tells me of a vast program for world history, a program involving millennia of providential preparation for the first coming of a Savior, and millennia more of worldwide evangelism, pastoral care, Christianizing of culture, demonstration of God’s kingdom, spiritual warfare against its enemies, and building up of the Church, before the Savior returns.
The plan sets before me the Father sending the Son to redeem, and the Spirit to quicken, the lost and guilty living dead—dead souls like mine, dead in transgressions and sins, led by the devices and desires of a corrupt heart, and often putting up a smoke screen of religious formalism to keep the light of God from reaching my conscience. The plan covers not only (1) the three-hour agony of Jesus on the cross, vicariously enduring Godforsakenness so that sinners like me would never have to endure it; but also (2) the permanently transforming bodily resurrection of Jesus and the permanently transforming heart-regeneration of everyone who is saved—two demonstrations of the power that made the world that are, be it said, wholly inexplicable in terms of the created forces that operate in the world. (Here then, is where apologetics should start.) Finally, the plan reaches into the future, promising everyone a new, undying body. In addition, it promises saved sinners like me a new heaven and earth, a vast perfected society, and the visible presence of Jesus, to enjoy through that new body forever.
Such are the wonders of the plan of salvation. God’s call to holiness begins by telling me to dwell on these great and awesome realities until I find myself truly awestruck at the greatness of my God, who is making it all happen. In this way I will learn to give Him glory (in the sense of praise) for the greatness of His glory (in the sense of self-display) as the One whose revealed wisdom and power, in redemption as in creation, dazzle, surpass, and overwhelm my understanding. The triune God of the plan is great—transcendent and immutable in His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He is eternal in His truthfulness and faithfulness, wisdom and justice, severity and goodness—and He must be praised and adored as such. Praise of this kind is the doxological foundation of human holiness, which always starts here. Just as there could be for Jesus no crown without the cross, so there can be for us no holiness without the praise.
The Bible Emphasizes Praise
Scripture is full of passages requiring and rehearsing the praises that redeemed people owe to God. Here are a few from the Old Testament:
I will sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted. . . . I will exalt him. . . . Who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders? . . . The LORD will reign for ever and ever (Exod. 15:1-2,11,18).
How awesome is the LORD Most High, the great King over all the earth (Ps. 47:2)!
Great is the LORD, and most worthy of praise (Ps. 48:1).
The LORD reigns . . . he sits enthroned. . . . Great is the LORD in Zion; he is exalted over all the nations. Let them praise your great and awesome name—he is holy. The King is mighty. . . . Exalt the LORD our God and worship at his footstool; he is holy (Ps. 99:1-5).
Praise the name of the LORD. . . . Praise the LORD, for the LORD is good. . . . I know that the LORD is great. . . . The LORD does whatever pleases him. . . . Your name, O LORD, endures for ever, your renown, O LORD, through all generations. . . . Praise the LORD (Ps. 135:1,3,5-6,13,19).
I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart. . . . I will bow down toward your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. . . . May all the kings of the earth praise you, O LORD, when they hear the words of your mouth (Ps. 138:1-2,4).
Praise the LORD. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him! . . . Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit. . . . Extol the LORD. . . . Praise the LORD (Ps. 147:1,5,12,20).
Sing to the LORD, for he has done glorious things. . . . Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, for great is the Holy One of Israel among you (Isa. 12:5-6).
No one is like you, O LORD; you are great, and your name is mighty in power. Who should not revere you, O King of the nations? This is your due (Jer. 10:6-7).
And there is, as sales catalogs say, much, much more: all of Psalms 145–150, for instance, could well be cited here. But we have to move on.
The New Testament also periodically breaks forth into praise. Here are some samples:
My soul glorifies the Lord [declares him great, extols him] and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . . for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name (Luke 1:46-47,49).
Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! . . . from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen (Rom. 11:33,36).
Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen (1 Tim. 1:17).
To the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen (Jude 1:25).
Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise! . . . To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power for ever and ever (Rev. 5:12-13)!
Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed (Rev. 15:3-4).
It was a sound Christian instinct that led Horatius Bonar, author of the little classic God’s Way of Holiness, to pray for praise:
Fill thou my life, O Lord my God,
In every part with praise,
That my whole being may proclaim
Thy being and thy ways.
Not for the lip of praise alone,
Nor e’en the praising heart,
I ask, but for a life made up
Of praise in every part;
Praise in the common things of life,
Its goings out and in;
Praise in each duty and each deed,
However small and mean.
Fill every part of me with praise:
Let all my being speak
Of thee and of thy love, O Lord,
Poor though I be and weak.
So shalt thou, Lord, from me, e’en me,
Receive the glory due;
And so shall I begin on earth
The song for ever new.
Exactly so: real consecration to a realistic life-purpose of pleasing and glorifying God starts here. The life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration. It does not grow elsewhere. That which grows elsewhere is not true holiness, whatever else it is. No blend of zeal, passion, self-denial, discipline, orthodoxy, and effort adds up to holiness where praise is lacking.
Gratitude for God’s Mercy
Second, I must learn from this plan of salvation to be grateful for the mercy of my God.
It is safe to say that no religion anywhere has ever laid such stress on the need for thanksgiving, nor called on its adherents so incessantly and insistently to give God thanks, as does the religion of the Bible in both its Old and New Testament forms. The psalmists are constantly giving thanks (Ps. 35:18; 75:1; 119:62) and summoning others to do the same (Ps. 95:2; 100:4; 105:1; 106:1; cf. 47; 107:1,21ff; 118:1,29; 136:1-3,26; 147:7). Paul similarly gives thanks over and over again (Rom. 1:8; 6:17; 7:25; 1 Cor. 1:4,14; 14:18; 15:57; 2 Cor. 2:14; 8:16; 9:15; Eph. 1:16; Phil. 1:3; Col. 1:3; 1 Thess. 1:2; 2:13; 3:9; 2 Thess. 2:13; 1 Tim. 1:12; 2 Tim. 1:3; Philem. 4) and directs Christians to do the same (Eph. 5:20; Phil. 4:6; Col. 2:7; 4:2; 1 Thess. 5:18).
The reason why glorifying God through thanksgiving (see Ps. 69:30; 2 Cor. 4:15) is so emphasized is not hard to see. The divine gifts and blessings that Scripture sees as given in the good experiences of natural life and the amazing mercy of supernatural salvation, are far richer and more abundant, and involve far more of divine generosity, than are dreamed of by any other faith.
Our acts of thanksgiving, therefore, are not to be hollow formalities. On the contrary, to be acceptable, they must be genuine expressions of gratitude in the heart for all God’s giving—gratitude for what the General Thanksgiving of the Anglican Prayer Book verbalizes as “our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory.” Of this “inestimable love,” the plan of salvation is the chart.
Love (agape), in the Christian sense of that word, has been defined as a purpose of making the loved one great. We learn this definition from the revelation of God’s love in Christ, the love that saves. As love to sinners deserving hell, it was mercy. As a purpose of raising them from spiritual destitution to the dignity of forgiveness and restoration, acceptance and adoption into God’s family, it was costly—not to us, but to God Himself, as Scripture makes very clear.
God so loved the world [humans in their godless and corrupt state] that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8).
God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice [the Greek says “propitiation,” meaning quencher of divine wrath] for our sins (1 John 4:8-10).
He . . . did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all (Rom. 8:32).
The measure of all love is its giving. The measure of the love of God is the cross of Christ, where the Father gave the Son to die so that the spiritually dead might have life.
Our Motivation
The secular world never understands Christian motivation. Faced with the question of what makes Christians tick, unbelievers maintain that Christianity is practiced only out of self-serving purposes. They see Christians as fearing the consequences of not being Christians (religion as fire insurance), or feeling the need of help and support to achieve their goals (religion as a crutch), or wishing to sustain a social identity (religion as a badge of respectability). No doubt all these motivations can be found among the membership of churches: it would be futile to dispute that. But just as a horse brought into a house is not thereby made human, so a self-seeking motivation brought into the church is not thereby made Christian, nor will holiness ever be the right name for religious routines thus motivated. From the plan of salvation I learn that the true driving force in authentic Christian living is, and ever must be, not the hope of gain, but the heart of gratitude.
The plan of salvation teaches me, not merely that I can never do anything to earn, increase, or extend God’s favor, or to avoid the justified fury of His wrath, or to wheedle benefits out of Him, but also that I never need to try to do any of these things. God Himself has loved me from eternity. He Himself has redeemed me from hell through the cross. He Himself has renewed my heart and brought me to faith. He Himself has now sovereignly committed Himself to complete the transformation of me into Christ’s likeness and to set me, faultless and glorified, in His own presence for all eternity. When almighty love has thus totally taken over the task of getting me home to glory, responsive love, fed by gratitude and expressed in thanksgiving, should surface spontaneously as the ruling passion of my life. It will be my wisdom to brood on and mull over the marvelous mercies of God’s plan until it does.
A little verse once taught to teenagers tells me where I ought to be in my response:
I will not work my soul to save,
For that my Lord has done;
But I will work like any slave
For love of God’s dear Son.
In Romans 12, Paul makes clear that this is how it should be. He has proclaimed the righteousness of God (God’s work of setting sinners forever right with Himself—Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 10:3) in its relation to historical atonement (Rom. 3:21-26), eternal election (Rom. 8:29-39), personal vocation (that is, the “calling” that engenders faith—Rom. 1:6, 8:28-30, 9:24), and the place of Jew and Gentile in the covenant community (Rom. 9:1-11:36). Now He asks for reader-response as follows: “I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy [the Greek says “mercies,” meaning acts expressing mercy], to offer your bodies [meaning, total selves] as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Rom. 12:1).
Christians, says Paul, are to be moved and stirred to consecrated living by their knowledge of God’s love, grace, and mercy—the mercy of sovereign salvation, whereby God pardons, accepts, and exalts the undeserving and wretched, at fearsome cost to Himself. Insofar as there is a difference of nuance between the terms “love,” “grace,” and “mercy” of God, “love” means His outgoing to bless those whom He sees as having no claim on Him; “grace” means His outgoing to bless those whom He sees as meriting His rejection; and “mercy” means His outgoing to bless those whose state He sees to be miserable. Love expresses God’s self-determining freedom, grace His self-generated favor, and mercy His compassionate kindness. Paul has dwelt on God’s sovereign mercy to sinners in Romans 9:15-18 and 11:30-32. Now he says, in effect, “You who know this mercy in your own lives must show yourselves truly grateful for it by the thoroughness of your commitment to God henceforth. This thoroughness is your holiness, for holiness means giving your all to God as God has given, is giving, and will give His all to you. And this thoroughness will please God, for it will show your appreciation and affection for Him, and so will be the real essence, Spirit-taught and Spirit-wrought, of your worship of him.”
It is important to be clear that, as praise to God for His transcendent greatness is the doxological basis of holiness, so commitment to spend one’s life expressing gratitude for God’s grace, every way one can, is its devotional basis. No reordering of life that does not spring out of such a commitment adds up to holiness, admirable though it may be by other standards and from other points of view.
It thus appears that, as the Puritans used to say, the heart of holiness is holiness in the heart. The holy sacrifice that gives God pleasure is the Christian whose heart never ceases to be grateful to Him for His grace. God is pleased with the Christian whose aim every day is to express that gratitude by living to Him, through Him, and for Him, and who is constantly asking, with the psalmist, “How can I repay the LORD for all his goodness to me?” (Ps. 116:12). Such a Christian was the Scottish saint Robert Murray McCheyne, who wrote:
Wakened up from wrath to flee;
Hidden in the Saviour’s side,
By the Spirit sanctified;
Teach me, Lord, on earth to show,
By my love, how much I owe.
That is the kind of Christian that I must seek to be.
Zealous for His Glory
Third, I must learn from this plan of salvation to be zealous for the glory of my Savior.
It is often said that God’s goal in the plan of salvation is to exalt Himself by exalting us whom He saves, and that is true. But the New Testament goes further, insisting that the Father’s prime purpose throughout is to exalt the Son, whom we know in His incarnate being as Jesus Christ our Lord. The Son of God, who is God the Son (second person of the Godhead), was and is the agent of all the Father’s works in creation, providence, and grace. He is the mediator of all the goodness and mercy that has ever flowed from God to men and women. The New Testament identifies His life, death, resurrection, and enthronement as the hinge of world history, just as it depicts His throne itself as heaven’s centerpiece (Rev. 4–5). As the Father loves the Son and expresses that love by honoring Him in the eternal fellowship of the Trinity, so He intends that through the outworking of the plan of salvation, in which Jesus is the focal figure, “all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father” (John 5:23).
To that end, and in direct acknowledgment of the perfection of the Son’s costly obedience in making atonement for human sin, “God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).
Writing to the Colossian Christians, who were being told to worship angels alongside Jesus, Paul spells out the Father’s plan for “the Son he loves” (Col. 1:13) to have supreme honor at every level as follows:
All things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross (Col. 1:16-20).
We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ . . . in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 1:28, 2:3).
In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority (Col. 2:9-10).
You died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory (Col. 3:3-4).
You have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all (Col. 3:9-11).
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. . . . Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. . . . And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Col. 3:15-17).
From these texts, which together constitute the “plotline” of Colossians, the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ in the plan of salvation are plain to see.
The book of Revelation shows us the same thing (as indeed do all the New Testament books of any length: but I limit myself to this one further example). Starting with the vision of Christ in glory, dictating personal letters to each of seven churches (chapters 1–3), it moves on to depict Him as the Lion of Judah in the form of the slain Lamb, enthroned as Redeemer and Lord of history (chapter 5), to whom songs of praise are repeatedly addressed. In due course the Lamb appears as the conquering Word of God, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (Rev. 19:16). The book closes with Jesus speaking in His own person as the Lord of all, just as He does in the three opening chapters, and declaring: “Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. . . . I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you [recipients of the book] this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star” (Rev. 22:12-13,16).
What I have to learn, then, is this: my salvation, from start to finish, is through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ (“in” signifying there a personal communion that is also an enlivening union, willed and wrought by divine action). God the Father planned it this way, for the glory and praise of Christ, His eternal Son. The mercies of election, redemption, regeneration, and justification are mine in Christ (Eph. 1:4,7, 2:4-10; Gal. 2:17).
I have died with Christ, God thereby terminating within me the old way of living that I renounced. I have been made to share Christ’s resurrection life through the Holy Spirit, so that though I am still who I was, I am no longer what I was, but am now inwardly a different person altogether (Rom. 6:2-11; 7:4-6; Gal. 2:20; Eph. 4:20-24; Col. 2:11-13,20; 3:1-4, 9-11). My business henceforth, in all of my living, is to trust Christ, obey Christ, love Christ, exalt Christ, worship Christ, draw strength from Christ (2 Cor. 12:9; Phil. 4:13; Col. 1:11; 1 Tim. 1:12; 2 Tim. 4:17), rejoice in Christ (Phil. 3:1; 4:4), give Him thanks, abide (“stay put”) in Christ (John 15:4-7), and look forward in hope to the day when Christ will come to take me to be at home with Him (John 14:1-3; Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:6-8). I know that Christ views His disciples as His friends (John 15:15). I must show my appreciation of this fantastic privilege of friendship with the world’s reigning Lord. I must seek to honor and glorify Him every way I can.
I should not, indeed, so focus on the Son that I forget, or ignore, the Father and the Spirit, for then I would be what is sometimes called a “Jesusolater” (one who worships Jesus in a way that is false to the Bible view of God). Equally, however, I should not so focus on the Father and/or the Spirit that I fail to keep central in my gaze the unique glory of Christ, as the Father and the Spirit want me to do (see John 5:23, 16:14). Both mistakes have been made in the past, and are still being made in some quarters. I have to try to avoid them, or I shall grieve my God, and starve my soul.
Salvation and Holiness
Exalting Christ, then, by worship, witness, and service, as the main focus of our uplifting of the triune God, should be our constant aim. Failure here means missing the path of holiness, for a life commitment, deliberate, zealous, and daily renewed, to glorify the Lord Jesus is the dedicatory basis of holiness. There is no holiness without a Christ-centered, Christ-seeking, Christ-serving, Christ-adoring heart. And the plan of salvation requires us to get our hearts into this frame and keep them there.
How can we do that? It is far, far more easily said than done! One help is to think often about the cross. Charles Wesley says this as it should be said:
Behold him, ye that pass him by,
The bleeding Prince of life and peace!
Come, sinners, see your Maker die,
And say, was ever grief like his?
Come, feel with me his blood applied:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified.
Then let us sit beneath his cross,
And gladly catch the healing stream,
All things for him account but loss,
And give up all our hearts to him.
Of nothing think or speak beside:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified.
Another help is to soak one’s soul constantly in the four Gospels, where the majesty and beauty of Jesus are projected with electrifying power. (Why don’t we make more use of the Gospels than we do?) A third help is use of a good hymnbook in one’s personal prayers, alongside (of course!) God’s own hymnbook, the Psalms. In the hymnbooks I know, up to half the songs express praise and love for Jesus in an explicit way. Weaving them into my prayers (a habit learned from Wesley’s Methodists) moves my heart in the desired direction. Love of great hymns, especially those of men like the two Wesleys, Isaac Watts, and John Newton (of “Amazing Grace”), has many good effects, and the zeal for the glory of Christ that you catch from them is one of the best helps to holiness that I know.
Living Naturally as a Child of God
Fourth, I must learn from God’s plan of salvation to be natural in the living of my life.
What does it mean to behave naturally? The question is more tricky than it might appear at first. Once the members of my college fellowship group agreed to take turns sharing a major personal interest with the rest of us, and one sought to initiate us into religious dance. We sat down on the floor, and were told that when the music started, we were to move our limbs in any way that seemed a natural response to it. Soon all were wriggling and writhing like snakes emerging from the basket at the snake charmer’s piping—all, that is, except me.
What was going on? Well, music has never suggested to me that I do anything except stop and listen to it, like Coleridge’s wedding guest who was stopped by the Ancient Mariner and mesmerized into listening quietly to his albatross story. As a child I found it irritating to have to march to music at school and run around chairs to music at parties, instead of being able to stand still and listen without distraction. As an adult I have always felt that dancing to music is disrespectful to it. I suppose that helps to explain why I have never been able to do it (I still cannot dance). So there I sat, a glum dummy, watching my fellow students shimmy from the waist up and flap their hands, and in due course get up and hop around. Nothing occurred to me to do, so I did nothing. Was I showing contempt for the instructor, or for the activity? Not at all. In a way that my wife (who likes dancing) would, perhaps rightly, describe as most unnatural, I was being “natural” in the way that is natural to freaky me. For being natural is not a matter of doing what is expected, or what others are doing. It is a matter of doing, or not doing, what one’s own inner nature prompts.
What sort of behavior, now, is natural to the child of God?
The Christian’s Nature
A widespread but misleading line of teaching tells us that Christians have two natures: an old one and a new one. They must obey the latter while denying the former. Sometimes this is illustrated in terms of feeding one of your two dogs while starving the other. The misleading thing here is not the reminder that we are called to holiness and not to sin, but that the idea of “nature” is not being used as it is used both in life and in Scripture (see, for example, Rom. 2:14; Eph. 2:3). The point is that “nature” means the whole of what we are, and the whole of what we are is expressed in the various actions and reactions that make up our life. To envisage two “natures,” two distinct sets of desires, neither of which masters me till I choose to let it, is unreal and bewildering, because it leaves out so much of what actually goes on inside me.
The clearer and more correct thing to say, as we have seen already, is this: we were born sinners by nature, dominated and driven from the start—and most of the time unconsciously—by self-seeking, self-serving, self-deifying motives and cravings. Being united to Christ in new birth through the regenerating work of the Spirit has so changed our nature that our heart’s deepest desire (the dominant passion that rules and drives us now) is a copy, faint but real, of the desire that drove our Lord Jesus. That was the desire to know, trust, love, obey, serve, delight, honor, glorify, and enjoy His heavenly Father—a multi-faceted, many-layered desire for God, and for more of Him than has been enjoyed so far.
The focus of this desire in Jesus was upon the Father, whereas in Christians it is upon the Father and the Son together (and the latter especially). But the nature of the desire is the same. The natural way for Christians to live is to let this desire determine and control what they do, so that the fulfilling of the longing to seek, know, and love the Lord becomes the mainspring of their life.
Augustus Toplady, one of the pioneers of England’s evangelical revival in the eighteenth century, showed that he understood this when he wrote:
Object of my first desire,
Jesus, crucified for me;
All to happiness aspire,
Only to be found in thee.
Thee to praise, and thee to know,
Constitute my bliss below;
Thee to see, and thee to love,
Constitute my bliss above.
Whilst I feel thy love to me,
Every object teems with joy;
May I ever walk with thee,
For ’tis bliss without alloy.
Let me but thyself possess,
Total sum of happiness:
Perfect peace I then shall prove,
Heaven below and heaven above.
The momentous truth that thus emerges is that to “walk with Christ,” as Toplady puts it, in the path of holy discipleship, is the life for which the hearts of Christians truly long. From this follows the equally momentous truth that obeying the promptings of indwelling sin (the sin that still marauds in the systems of Christians though it no longer masters their hearts) is not what they really want to do at all, for sinning is totally unnatural to them.
Why then do we ever do it?—let alone make a habit of doing it, as notoriously we sometimes do? Partly, no doubt, because we fail to recognize sin for what it is, through ignorance of God’s standards. Partly too because we yield to the nagging pull of temptation, giving way though we know that we should not and need not. But partly too because we let ourselves be deceived into supposing that to give way to this or that inordinate desire—for food, drink, pleasure, ease, gain, advancement, or whatever—is what we really want to do.
Again and again it appears that Christians are not sufficiently in touch with themselves. They do not know themselves well enough to realize that, because of the way in which their nature has been changed, their hearts are now set against all known sin. So they hang on to unspiritual and morally murky behavior patterns, and kid themselves that this adds to the joy of their lives. Encouraged by Satan, the grand master of delusion, they feel (feelings as such, of course, are mindless and blind) that to give up these things would be impossibly painful and impoverishing, so though they know they should, they do not. Instead, they settle for being substandard Christians, imagining they will be happier that way. Then they wonder why their whole life seems to them to have become flat and empty.
The truth is that they are behaving in a radically unnatural way, one that offers deep-level violence to their own changed nature. In doing what they think they like, they are actually doing what their renewed heart—if they would only let it speak—would tell them that it dislikes intensely, not only because it brings guilt and shame before God but, more fundamentally, because it is in itself repulsive to the regenerate mentality. The regenerate heart cannot love what it knows God hates. So these Christians are behaving unnaturally, occupying themselves in activities against which their own inner nature revolts. Such behavior is always bad medicine, producing sadness, tension, and discontent, if not worse.
Backsliding
There is a venerable Christian term for this condition: backsliding, a recurring word-picture in Jeremiah (see Jer. 2:19; 3:22; 5:6; 14:7; 15:6). Particularly pertinent to our present discussion is the first of these passages, where God says through the prophet: “ ‘Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the LORD your God and have no awe of me,’ declares the LORD, the LORD Almighty” (Jer. 2:19).
Three centuries ago the Puritan commentator Matthew Henry spelled out the implication of these words as follows:
Observe here, (1) The nature of sin; it is forsaking the Lord as our God; it is the soul’s alienation from him, and aversion to him. Cleaving to sin is leaving God. (2) The cause of sin; it is because his fear [awe] is not in us. . . . Men forsake their duty to God, because they stand in no awe of him, nor have any dread of his displeasure. (3) The malignity of sin; it is an evil thing and a bitter . . . an evil that is the root and cause of all other evil. . . . It is not only the greatest contrariety to the divine nature, but the greatest corruption of the human nature. . . . (4) The fatal consequences of sin; as it is in itself evil and bitter, so it has a direct tendency to make us miserable. . . . [It] will certainly bring trouble upon thee; the punishment will so inevitably follow the sin, that the sin shall itself be said to punish thee . . . and the justice of the punishment shall be so plain, that thou shalt not have a word to say for thyself. . . . (5) The use and application of all this; “Know, therefore [consider, then], and see it, and repent of thy sin, that so the iniquity . . . may not be your ruin.”
The unnatural act of backsliding, then, is always to be avoided, both because it provokes our holy heavenly Father to discipline and correct us in a punitive way (as is further explained in Heb. 12:5-10), and also because, at some stage and in some measure, bitterness and misery are its ultimate and inescapable fruit. We must realize that all sin has the nature of suicidal, self-impoverishing madness, in the Christian life no less than elsewhere. To see this, and accordingly to commit oneself to follow one’s heart by running in the path of God’s calling and commands as hard and as fast as one can, is the directional basis of holiness. Since that is the most truly natural course for any Christian to follow, it holds out a hope of deep happiness, heart-happiness, here and now, that can never be attained otherwise.
Cheerful Holiness
A paradox of Christian holiness that mystifies outsiders is that, despite the privations that Jesus described as self-denial, cross-bearing, cutting off one’s hand and foot, gouging out one’s eye, leaving wealth and security for poverty and some measure of persecution, holiness is essentially a happy business. Now we see why this is so. Gloomy self-immolation is not holy living, any more than is Pharisaic posturing. Real holiness is a cheerful matter of following one’s heart in thinking and planning, and prayerfully doing, what comes most naturally at heart level—namely, praising God, and loving and serving Him and others, as we have already seen. Whereas the world’s naturalness takes the form of godless self-indulgence, the Christian’s naturalness takes the form of Christian holiness. That is the fourth truth that the plan of salvation requires me to learn in my head, and then live out from my heart.
So we reach the end of this long overview, in which we have taken our bearings in God’s plan of salvation. We can see that (1) adoration of God for his greatness, (2) gratitude for the grace that saves, (3) zeal to exalt Jesus, “my Savior and my Friend” as the hymn calls Him, and (4) wholehearted pursuit of God and godliness according to the natural desire of the regenerate heart, are the four foundations of holy living. These are the first lessons that we have to learn in Christ’s school of holiness. They are lessons to which we need to keep coming back, since they slip out of our memories and mindsets so easily. But they are basic lessons. It is from them that we have to move forward, and where they have not yet been learned to some degree, holiness has not yet begun to be formed in us as God intends. So we start here! Are you still with me? I hope so. Let us proceed.