It's a Coverup!

I apologize upfront for a somewhat morbid illustration, but please indulge me because I think it makes the point well.

Imagine your child comes to you and has wounds on his or her face. There was an accident on a bicycle and then a fall into a rock. As a result, some chipped teeth, a black eye, a cut on the cheek flowing blood, and some swelling. So you, being the good parent that you are, apply makeup with expert care to cover up the wounds. In fact, you do an amazingly good job of it - hardly anyone will notice.

Ridiculous? Of course it is. No good parent would do this. A good parent would take the child to the right doctors to get wounds treated, teeth repaired, and so on. No amount of makeup, regardless of how good, will make the child well. And your concern as a parent is your child's wellness. If the child asked you to do nothing more than apply makeup, you would still go to the doctor because of your commitment to that wellness - you want the child's health to be transformed.

When we go to our heavenly Father with our wounds, our hurts, our sin, our addictions, our anger, our unforgiveness, our jealousy, and our judgmentalism, do we ask Him to just apply makeup so that hardly anyone will notice? Do we ask Him for every kind of "fix" except transformation? Do we ask Him to take away the bad consequences, to take away the bad emotions, and even to take away the bad behavior without asking Him to heal us and transform us?

In Christ, we have been transformed. But also in Christ, we still need to be transformed. There is still an abundance of ways we need to be healed and changed. Our attitudes still need to be transformed, our thoughts still need to be transformed, our words still need to be transformed, our money management still needs to be transformed, our prayer life, our family life, our work habits, our ethics and morals, every corner of life - all of it still needs to be completed in our transformation.

Then why do we ask God to just apply a little more makeup?

In the Old Testament, they had the "Day of Atonement" (Lev 16), called "Yom Kippur" in Hebrew. "Kippur" means "to cover," and was also the name of the lid to the ark of the covenant - the "cover." That's what the OT sacrifice did - it covered sins, but it didn't transform souls. That's what makeup does. And that sometimes what we ask God to do.

Jesus came and offered to transform us. To heal us. Not to cover it all up, but to take it all on Himself and then transform us.

When you come to the Lord in prayer about your brokenness, your sin, your need for healing, pay attention to what you say. Listen to yourself. If you are stopping short of asking to be truly transformed, go deeper in prayer. Keep going deeper until the guttural cry of your heart is, "Father, covering this up is not enough! Not this time! I need to be transformed!"

We would never just slap makeup on our children's serious wounds. May we be so insistent with our own souls.

We're Fixers Because We're Pharisees

In the church, we love to "fix" things. A problem comes up, we immediately try to fix it. Someone expresses a spiritual doubt, we immediately try to fix it. A couple gets into a spat, we try to fix it ... and especially right away. A child does something disrespectful, and we try to fix it, no matter whose kid he or she is. Our elders often talk about their own tendency to want to, and in some cases attempt to, fix almost every situation that comes our way.

Part of this tendency is well-motivated. We have a vision for how things ought to be, we see things that aren't as they ought to be, we don't want to be callous and ignore the problem as if we didn't care, and so we get right on the task of fixing. On rare occasions, we have what it takes to "fix" something, but in many cases, we don't really. We can't really fix a child's misbehavior. We can regulate it. We can induce guilt or shame because of it. But most of the time we can't get to the core issue that manifested itself in a behavior we deemed inappropriate. But we want to fix it! We're fixers!

I was talking this over with our Lifestyle Discipleship Coach, Jimmy. As we talked this out, another strain of conversation we'd been having collided with this one. We are Pharisees. We are Pharisees because we judge others on our righteousness scale. We often ignore the idea that we're Pharisees because we don't hold to same outrageous rules the Pharisees in the Bible had. We don't have rules like that, so we must not be like them. But we are.

We constantly judge people. I'm not just talking about discernment, where we rightly and soberly assess sin as sin. I'm talking about judging. We see what people do, and we go far beyond discernment right into internally declaring them unrighteous. What they did was wrong and that determines how I should respond to them. I will criticize them, think less of them, and mentally categorize them as people "who need help." Often, my help. They need fixin'! And so, I try to fix them.

That's what Pharisees did. They tried to fix people with their rules. We try to fix them with rules, correction, "advice," arguments, and meddling. Their behavior is distasteful to us, and in order to get distasteful things away from us, we fix. We become very self-centered in fixing others - trying to manipulate their lives so that we don't have to endure something we don't like. We are far more like Pharisees than we care to admit. And we're fixers because we're Pharisees.

The alternative is not that we should pull away and be uninvolved. Rather, we should commit to not fix them, but be with them in the mess and draw them to the only One who can fix anything about any one of us. The behavior is only a manifestation of something far deeper, and although man can help with many issues, ultimately only God can fulfill the deepest needs of the human soul. We can offer counsel and share what we've learned from experience. We can educate and encourage. We can do things that actually do help. But we can't "fix," and to try to fix is to point them away from the only One who can.

Now, when I read what Jesus said about removing the plank from our own eye before removing the speck from our brother's eye, I realize how brilliant Jesus is. Removing that speck is fixing, and you have plenty of fixing you need done before you ever think about fixing someone else.

There. I hope I fixed this situation.

And I would be guilty of my own rant if I stopped here.

Our tendency to fix, our Pharisaism, is itself something I can't fix in you or you fix in me. The Pharisee's rules and our tendency to fix are both rooted in unbelief that God actually does transform those who come to Him. Because we don't trust Him to do so, we make rules or try to fix. Our first step is to trust that He will. If anything needs fixin', it's our tendency to disbelieve that God transforms people in Christ.

I'm sorry I'm in your way

We have just reached the halfway point in Ephesians. The first three chapters are primarily about what's true ("indicative"), and the last three chapters are more about what to do ("imperative"). We are presently right between the two halves, holding in our back pocket what we have learned about God's work while reaching forward to how those truths should find be expressed in how we walk day after day.

One thing that is abundantly clear from those first three chapters is that the real power that changes our lives is not our lone effort, but the very hand of God. He called us and provided salvation for us (chapter 1), He made us alive and brought us near (chapter 2), and He displays His manifold wisdom and can fill us beyond our own ability to imagine (chapter 3). The hand that truly changes lives is not mere flesh.

Therefore, the ideal in ministry is to cultivate God's work in the lives of people. Not to do the work, not to be the hero, not to implement the jazziest program, and not to have all the answers. Rather, the best we can do in ministry is provide the ripest environment for someone to receive the only real work that changes us in eternal ways. A farmer doesn't make plants grow - but he works hard to create the richest environment for that growth to occur.

However, sometimes in our efforts, we get in the way. More to the point, sometimes I get in the way. Just recently, as I was mowing the lawn (so, you know it wasn't all that recent), I was tumbling through my head several ways that I have gotten in the way. In just about every area of responsibility, I can name ways that I have occasionally gotten in the way instead of making the way straight. Teaching, administrating, communicating, preaching, praying, counseling, coaching - you name an area, I can point to ways that I get between God's power and the people I'm supposed to be assisting.

For that, I apologize. And I admit that I have not yet figured out how to keep out of the way, so I will get in the way again. But I'm interested in far more than issuing an apology for past and future shortcomings. My main purpose here is to encourage all of us, including me, to be ongoing students of what it really means that only God's power transforms.

Whether we are teaching or sharing our faith or being involved in ministry activities, how can we get out of the way? How are we tempted to get in the way, and then how can we step aside? How can we prepare the soil for God's power to be most effective in others (and in ourselves)? For example, do I teach in a way that adds the burden of lone human effort, or do I connect people with God's potent eagerness to be at work in us?

I'm prompted to write not because of some particular incident, and I'm not beating myself up. But I did have one of those too-infrequent moments of clarity in seeing some specific ways where my efforts occlude rather than reveal. I suspect that I'm not alone in this. With our continued partnership, we have everything we need in order to have a greater impact by learning better how to just get out of the way.

Of course, that only makes sense if God's power is in fact reliable. It comes down to whether or not we really believe this to be true.