Chapter 27
Chapter 27 Blame and the Great Exchange by Kenneth E. Ortiz M y parents weren't believers, so as a child my knowledge of Jesus was minimal. It was my best friend Jim, from middle school, who first invited me to church. He and his family introduced me to Jesus. After attending church with them for several months, I saw my need for a Savior. It was then that I began seeing some dramatic change in my life.
Like many new believers, I was excited about evangelism (a.k.a. preaching the gospel). My friends called me a "preaching machine." I became the president of our school's Bible club. I would gather crowds in the cafeteria during lunch hour to share the gospel, and I often started debates with my friends of other religions. I would frequently walk through the hallways before and after school praying for my classmates—laying hands on the lockers, asking God to bring revival to my high school.
At first, I was driven by the fact that I loved my classmates.
It was common for my prayers to be mixed with tears for them.
I wanted them to experience the same grace of God that I had experienced. But somewhere along the way, my motivations changed. My "preachiness" shifted. I went from being a loving preacher to being judgmental and self-righteous.
My preaching was no longer the result of wanting my classmates to experience the grace of God, but rather because I felt
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they needed to stop sinning. When I first became a Christian, I understood myself as a sinner in desperate need of God's love and grace. But somewhere along the way, I started to see myself as "holier than others."
This evolution in my heart was slow. It probably took about two years. By the time I was an upperclassman in high school,
I misguidedly believed I was more valuable than everyone else simply because I believed I sinned less. I worked hard at my job,
I tithed at least 10% of my money, I never cussed, I didn't drink or do drugs, I memorized Scripture, and I served as one of the key leaders in my youth group. I had developed this attitude that "God sure is lucky to have me on his team!"
I had somehow begun to believe that I had earned God's love. I don't think I would have ever said it that way, but as I look back, that's how I felt. And I secretly began to believe that others really just needed to be more like me. As I developed personal convictions and opinions, I would share them with others.
And if they refused to embrace my opinion and convictions, I would bully them into admitting that they were wrong. There was one instance when some of my friends were listening to electronic music with no lyrics. I started berating them because they were listening to "worldly" music. If music did not overtly sing about Jesus, it was unacceptable to me. I often went out of my way to make people feel like they were bad Christians if they didn't embrace my opinions.
This dramatically changed one day during my senior year of high school.
I was sharing the gospel with my mother, as I had done many times before. And, also like many other instances, the discussion became quite heated. I had been trying to convince her that the Bible was authoritative and relevant to our lives, but the conversation shifted. At some point I began lashing out at her for not having raised me as a Christian. I then accused her of not being as good of a person as me. My mother was clearly not pleased. She felt disrespected. She then looked at me and said,
"Well, maybe you should stop looking at porn every night. You
Blame and the Great Exchange
think you're so much better than everyone, but you're a worse sinner than anyone else in this house."
You see, even though I had wanted to project the persona of being very holy, I actually had a dark secret—a secret addiction to pornography.
It was the 1990s. We didn't have smartphone devices. So I would use our family computer in the living room, but I'd do so late at night after my parents had gone to bed. Although I knew pornography was sinful—and I often experienced shame afterward—I had convinced myself that all of the other good things I did outweighed this one secret sin. I did not know that my mother had installed a software to track what I was doing.
She had known for several weeks. She had been looking for the moment to drop the hammer. And she found the opportune time.
I was stunned. I fell silent. There were probably just a few seconds of silence and eye contact between us, but it felt like forever.
I was humiliated, ashamed. All of the sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks. I said nothing. I slowly walked away, went to my bedroom, and cried. I went back to my mother a few hours later and apologized. She was gracious and kind to me; we were able to talk through it. But the shame had already set in. A few days later a friend of mine said, "Kenny, you're down! You're not the same person!" I shrugged it off and assured him I was fine. But I wasn't fine. I felt depressed. My guilt and shame overwhelmed me for several months. The preaching machine had been silenced.
I struggled to read my Bible and pray. I'd grab my Bible and try to open it from time to time, but I just felt too ashamed.
THE Jesus | WisH | KNEW IN HIGH SCHOOL I wish I had known in that moment with my mother, and during the next season of overwhelming sadness and shame, that Jesus loved me. I wish I had known that his arms were ready to embrace me.
Over the next few months, I slowly slipped out of that depression. I eventually began reading my Bible and praying
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again. I started to enjoy and re-engage in the Christian life, but it wasn't quite the same. I still had this wound, this sense that I was dirty. I was certainly no longer the self-righteous or judgmental person I had been for several years in high school, but I was truly struggling with any sense of confidence or assurance.
I went to Bible college after high school. There I started to study the book of Romans. It was this study that would transform my life. I began to study a doctrine known as "the imputation of righteousness." Basically, this means that the righteousness of Jesus is imputed (transferred or given) to us.
| Let me explain this doctrine in simple terms. Imagine at the end of the semester you've got mostly Ds and Fs in all your classes. But someone else got straight As. Now imagine if that person opted to switch grades with you. Imagine you got all the credit for their good grades, and your bad grades were transferred to that person's record. In essence, this is exactly what
Jesus did for us on the cross. He took on our sins and died the death we deserved.
Without Jesus, we all have "failing grades" in the ledgers of heaven. The Bible is clear that in our natural state, we are all absolute spiritual failures. God has set a standard of goodness and holiness; without Jesus we fail to meet that standard (most of us, with flying colors): "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Each and every one of us have sinned. Our spiritual grades reflect that we have all failed.
But when we become followers of Jesus, he changes everything. His record is perfect. He lived the life you and I could not live even if we tried. And if you put your faith in Christ, he swaps his record with yours. You get credit for his work. You get Ais straight As.
Through Christ, our own records have been removed from us and Christ's record has been transferred to us. The great sixteenth-century pastor Martin Luther called this "the wonder-
ful exchange 1. Martin Luther, quoted in J. I. Packer and Mark Dever, In My Place
Condemned He Stood (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 85.
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I wish I had known in high school that not only was my sinful record—past, present, and future—completely eradicated, fully expunged, and wholly erased, but I was also declared righteous before God.
In studying the book of Romans, my eyes were awakened to this incredible truth: Jesus had chosen to forget my past, he wiped the record clean. I began to realize that I was declared righteous
_ before God, not by my good behavior, but by Christ himself.
In Romans 4, the apostle Paul uses the Jewish patriarch Abraham as an example. He makes it clear that Abraham was declared righteous by God because of his belief in God, not by actions or works or behavior. Abraham gained favor with God, not because he made himself into a righteous man, but because he believed God. In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, that in him we might become the righteousness of God"
(2 Corinthians 5:21b).
As I began to understand this truth, it transformed my life. During that previous season of shame, I would tell myself over and over again how I was too dirty and unworthy to pray.
I remember lying in bed staring at the ceiling and wanting to pray, but I would say to myself, "Kenny, you've sinned way too much this week. God does not want to listen to you."
There were times when Id enter into a corporate worship gathering or church service, but I wouldn't sing or engage. I'd just stand there, while everyone around me sang and praised
God. I just felt like God didn't want to hear from me. I felt that I wasn't "good enough." But when I finally realized that because of Jesus, I was in right standing with God—that I had been declared righteous, that my heavenly record did not reflect my own folly, but instead reflected the righteousness of Jesus—
God drew me to engage with him. I could come to him, knowing I had a clean record, not because of anything I had done, but because of what Christ had done on my behalf.
When I had given my faith to Christ several years earlier in middle school, it was that trust that made me righteous.
Nothing else.
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This truth transformed how I viewed others. No longer could I behave as if I were more righteous than other Christians.
Christ is my only claim to righteousness.
This doctrine also shifted how I fought against my own sinful habits. I realized that I was no longer fighting against my sin to change God's opinion of me—his opinion of me was settled. I fight against sin because I love God, not because 'm earning my place in his family.
Whether I sin little or much, my place in God's family is not in jeopardy. Even when I sin, I can still come to God, sing to him, pray, and repent; I can do all this with confidence that he will listen and have mercy on me. In fact, the best thing I can do whenever I sin is to come to God, confess, and pray—knowing that my place with him is secure.
THE Jesus | WANT You To KNow The gospel I wish I knew in high school is simply this: I am declared righteous before God because of my faith. Not because of anything I do or do not do.
And the same is true for you. If you have believed in Jesus, you are righteous. We fight against sin, not because we are earning our way to Jesus, but because of the joy set before us—that we have already been declared righteous in Christ.
DEVOTIONAL QUESTIONS
Read Romans 4:1—8.
1. How does Abraham become righteous? According to this passage, does Paul regard righteousness as a gift or an achievement?
The author of chapter 27 describes how he looked _ down on the sin of others. How does the gospel free us from arrogance and lead us toward humility and compassion?
Blame and the Great Exchange
3. Who are some people in your life you view as "worse sinners" than you? How might the gospel enable you to view them with compassion and humility?
RIGHTEOUSNESS (noun): The state of being perfectly acceptable to God in every way. Through Christ, sinners are counted as righteous before God. Another way to say it is, you are enough.
What this means for you: Because of Jesus, you are counted righteous before the God of the universe.
You no longer have to try to prove yourself to him or others.
| an n . city, py Tragedy and Healing by Scotty Smith M y earliest impressions of Jesus are connected to two distinct environments: the church of my childhood, and my maternal grandparents' home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Our family attended a church I would describe as "southern." As a faith community, we didn't fight liberals, or conservatives; we just "went to church." It's just what you did on Sunday morning. I was born in 1950 and the question, "Where do y'all go to church?" was as common as "Where do you grocery shop?" or "Can you recommend a family doctor?" or "Who can I trust to fix my car?" or "What do y'all do for fun?"
But I went to church long before I went to Christ. Mine was an assumed gospel; not a needed or celebrated one. Whenever
I thought of Jesus, I imagined a rather tall, light-skinned man, with long shiny brunette hair. He wore an off-white robe with no wrinkles in it. He was surrounded by lambs and crowds of people.
I certainly thought of Jesus as an important role model, though I didn't consciously try to follow him. Nor did I have any concept of having a relationship with him. I believed all you had to do to go to heaven was die. I wasn't afraid of God or hell, and I didn't live with a particularly guilty conscience. I was taught good and bad, but I simply ignored God most of the time, except for a few religious superstitions.
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For instance, I would say a prayer of forgiveness and protection most nights at bedtime. Occasionally I would shoot up some
"bartering" prayers to God: "Please get me out of this mess, and ll do better." And we did repeat a "blessing" before we ate supper as a family. I would never think of setting anything on top of the Bible that collected dust in the headboard-bookcase of my twin bed. And I zealously sought never to utter any word
- damning God's name. But I never read the Bible; God's name was simply a three-letter word.
My exposure to God, Jesus, and spirituality took a different shape in Grandmother and Granddaddy Ward's home.
Whenever I spent the night at their home (a great treat)—after a most wonderful breakfast, my grandparents would take a little
Bible verse from a plastic loaf of bread, read it, and then take a few minutes to pray for all of us—their five adult children and their many grandkids. They prayed. They loved. They talked to God in personal, endearing, and comforting ways.
When I came to faith in Christ during my senior year of high school, I found language to describe their beautiful relationship with God. They offered up the "aroma of Christ" as described by the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:15—16. I saw the gospel of God's grace in them before I ever knew my need for it.
My grandparents "beautified" the gospel with their tears, welcome, and kindness. They struggled honestly and valiantly in life. For years, my granddaddy bravely suffered through severe depression, and they both loved my aunt through a tenyear heroin addiction. But the next tragedy to interrupt their lives devastated mine as well. When I was eleven years old, my mom—their daughter—was killed in a head-on car wreck.
The tragedy of my mom's death exposed several things in my life: the absence of my relationship with Jesus, the absence of a relationship with my dad, and how much I relied on my mom.
She was my world—my oxygen, light, and feast. My dad was essentially a stranger. He paid the bills, but he didn't act like a father. We didn't touch, and rarely talked. Our distant relationship continued for years after the death of my mom. From the age of eleven through eighteen, I felt like a housed, but homeless child.
THE JESUS! WISH | KNEW IN HIGH SCHOOL
Three years before my mom died, a part of me died as well. I was lured into a neighbor's barn, where an older boy I admired sexually abused me. Thankfully, this didn't begin a systemic cycle of abuse. It only happened once; but with enough impact to break and skew how I viewed sex, sexuality, and my body. Perhaps due in part to the hyper-masculine messages ['d received from my father, I never shared this story with anyone until many years later. I wish I had known that Jesus invited me to come with my shame, and to find healing.
Through those difficult years, 1 masked my pain and insecurities with food, attention from others, and alcohol. They became my temporary, insufficient healers.
But things changed in 1968. At the age of eighteen, I came to know Jesus personally at a Billy Graham movie event—The Restless Ones. Bad acting, poor script, cheesy music, but when
Dr. Graham presented the good news of Jesus, I heard the gospel in a way I had never heard before. I consciously received the free gift of eternal life. I truly believed Jesus lived, died, and rose again for me.
For six decades, I have trusted that there's nothing more than the gospel, just more of it. God continues to expose my deepest needs and affirm his absolute sufficiency to meet them.
THE Jesus | WisH | KNEW IN HIGH SCHOOL In high school, I wish I had known that Jesus is a Savior to love and trust, not simply a model to follow. My initial understanding of the gospel went something like this: once you become a follower of Jesus, all your sins—past, present, and future—are forgiven. In gratitude, you fill your life with good works.
Though I didn't base my salvation on good works—I did take pride in my "goodness." I confused pleasing Jesus with appeasing Jesus. I wanted to keep him happy.
It took years for me to discover that my works can never earn his happiness. When Jesus died for my sins on the cross, he completely satisfied my sin-debt for all eternity. He covered me with his perfect righteousness. He came to be my Savior for
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always—even on the dark days. I wish I had understood how much more of Jesus there was to see and savor. God has been faithful these many years to expose the much-more-ness of my need, and the way-much-more-ness of Jesus.
In high school, I wish I had known Jesus as my healer. Isaiah 53:5b says, "with his wounds we are healed." Asa child, I was told to be strong. I didn't need healing. I wasn't sick. I wasn't needy.
~ My dad modeled the concept, big boys don't cry. So I didn't.
This message, clouded with the misguided concept of Christian victory (see Romans 8:28), left little room for me to honestly process my grief. I thought I was to be "more than a conqueror" in life. So I masked my pain. I hid my grief.
What I really needed then and continue to need now, is the freedom to live honestly and transparently. Christ welcomes us to come. He is with us and for us in our pain and sorrow. He wants to join us in these difficult places. We have no reason to hide; we are welcome.
I wish I had known as a teenager that God enters our brokenness; he brings tender presence and healing grace. He weeps over death and abuse and he carries our shame.
I wish I had known that in the absence of love from my own earthly father, Jesus reveals the Father to us, that we might be re-parented through the Spirit of adoption.
To see Jesus is to see the Father, which doesn't mean Jesus zs the Father. It means, as the Son of God, Jesus perfectly reveals the family likeness. It also means that by his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has done everything necessary for us to become daughters and sons of the living God. To receive Jesus is to be given the legal rights and personal delights of having God as our Father.
By the riches of grace and the Spirit's work, we learn to cry "Abba, Father." It's the cry of desperation and delight, vulnerability and surrender, honesty and hope. As we grow as his children, we come alive to the love and presence of the only perfect parent. Oh, how I wish I had known God as the Father of mercies and God of all comfort in high school.
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THE Jesus | WANT You To KNow My friends, I want you to know God's welcome is always primed to receive you. His grace is completely inexhaustible, no matter your struggles or brokenness. His mercies will always overmatch your messes. And his love for you is the greatest constant and freedom you will ever experience in life. I so wish I had believed this in high school; but I'm grateful to believe it now and always.
DEVOTIONAL QUESTIONS
Read Isaiah 52:1—13.
Isaiah 52 prophetically describes Jesus. Which phrases encourage you to trust Jesus with your weakness?
The author of chapter 28 shares how he learned to hide his hurt and pain. Have you ever been discouraged from sharing honestly?
3. How can God's grace and the person of Jesus enable you to be more open and honest about your own struggles, sins, and fears?
EMMANUEL (proper noun): A Hebrew word meaning, "God with us." In the book of Matthew, we learn that Jesus himself is our Emmanuel.
What this means for you: As New York pastor Tim Keller has noted, most world religions tell you how you can get to God; but Jesus is the God who came to be with you. Jesus is the God who ate with sinners and touched the ill. On the cross, he shows you that he isn't just with you, he Is for you.