Today is Sunday, and I was supposed to go to church like a good Christian, but I didn’t. I tried to get a ride, but it didn’t work out. I thought “Good. Now I have more time to finish homework.” Instead I found myself pulling up a podcast on Spiritual Formation vs. Moral Formation by John Coe. (Now was that just expert procrastination, or the Holy Spirit? I’ll let you be the judge.) He talked about moral formation. Moral formation was defined as a way we try to hide our bad with good things we do; a way we cover up the guilt and shame that comes with our bad, and how we try to prove to others our worth and that we are lovable that comes from our insecurity of knowing our badness and thinking no one will ever love us if they see who we truly are inside. It’s the attempt to fix/grow/transform ourselves whenever we feel convicted by doing good things. He stated that spiritual disciplines do not grow you. It is only by the work of the Holy Spirit. Because “Apart from Christ, we can do nothing.” Christian life is about denouncing the moral life as a way of happiness and trying to please God. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more or less.
Just because we feel dry in our spiritual lives, does not mean that nothing is happening. It is the Holy Spirit taking us on a journey. He is opening us up to a relationship with God, abiding in Him. John 15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” We cannot “bear fruit” unless we abide in Jesus! The “good works” come from abiding or depending on God, not the other way around! I mix this up constantly. I constantly try to fix myself and manage my life so I can be a better servant of God. That’s not what Jesus was about! He didn’t die for us and take away our sin and give us his righteousness so we could continue trying to fix ourselves! He took away our sin so we could have a relationship with God again!! So we could come near to Him, abide in Him, and depend on Him!
So John Coe also said that if we are convicted by our sin, and our first response is “I’m going to do better,” or “I’m going to work on it and fix it” then we might be a moralist! (Did that sound like a Jeff Foxworthy joke to you too? You might be a moralist if…) Apart from Christ I can do nothing. A speaker in CCU chapel last week worded it like this: It would be like trying to keep a balloon filled with oxygen off the ground. You constantly have to hit it up into the air, only for it to come right back down. Instead, we could just fill it with helium, and then it’s not by our own power that we need to keep that stinkin balloon up in the air! We rely on something apart from ourselves to keep the balloon up, and it’s LESS WORK! Bam. Moralism.
“If awareness of your own sin results in feelings of frustration, self-rejection, and failure, so much so that you don’t want to feel these things, then you might be a moralist. Moralists cannot bear the awareness of being a failure; they cannot bear the awareness of the truth of their motivations; or knowing what really drives them…. And in this we have missed the point of self-awareness. We’ve missed the point of awareness of sin because awareness of bad is a door into love and grace. Awareness of our sin should lead us into awareness of God’s love in the midst of our sin! Our self-awareness should not shame us into deep depression or a motivation to try to be a better person, but it should turn our self-awareness into rejoicing! “I CAN’T GET RID OF MY BAD ON MY OWN BUT HOORAY CUZ CHRIST DID IT FOR ME! I AM NOT DEAD ANYMORE! I HAVE NEW LIFE! THE GOSPEL IS TOTALLY RAD!” Guilt can be healthy. The difference between guilt and shame is that guilt says “I did bad.” and shame says “I am bad.” Healthy conviction would sound like “I can’t and do not want to do anything apart from Christ. I need Jesus.”
So now it’s personal application time. I am a moralist. I’m a painfully self-aware person. I see my sin and failure, and it discourages me from doing anything out of fear that I’ll mess it up. I pray and pray that God will help me to see myself as He sees me, and to take away my self-doubt. But what if the self-doubt forces me to rely on Jesus? What if God is trying to remind me through my self-doubt and guilt, that He has saved me from all of that? What if God is just poking those thoughts into my brain to remind me of the amazing grace He has offered me? Instead of rebuking my self-awareness, Christ has allowed me the freedom to worship Him! I can worship God in my self-awareness of sin by being thankful for saving me from my sin! Instead of focusing inward, I can now focus on God.
2 Corinthians 1:9 says “Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.” This is my all time favorite verse. It’s underlined in my bible with little girly hearts next to it. My heart feels as though I am constantly living out the final moments of my death sentence. Depression really does that to me sometimes. But that verse says that we can choose to focus on the death sentence, the depression, the self-doubt, the enormous amount of sin and failure that clogs up our soul and rely on ourselves to fix it, OR we can focus on the miracle of God’s power to raise the dead and rely on Him to do the same for us. I don’t know about you, but I like option 2. And yeah I intentionally phrased that to sound like a T-Swift song. You can judge me. It’s okay. So yeah. There’s a purpose in all this suffering, guilt, and shame, and it’s not to make yourself a better person. It’s to rely on God, who raises the dead.
So now I’m kind of nervous, because I have about 2 hours to do some homework until I work at 3-10. After getting home tonight, I don’t know how motivated I will be to do homework. Maybe if I don’t get my homework done, I can direct my profs to my blog and tell them it’s the Holy Spirit’s fault….
