And ah for a man to rise in me, That the man I am may cease to be!

I recently came upon this quote from 19th century British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (from his poem Maud). I wonder how many people feel Tennyson’s lament. I also wonder how many people understand that to be a follower of Jesus you must feel this way. What? You mean I need to continually be disappointed with myself? Yes. And since this website has something to do with parenting, we must also teach our children the importance and power of such disappointment in their lives. I’m sure I’ve come across the phrase before, but we can call this holy dissatisfaction.

I’ll never forget when I first started learning the importance of failure before God in my life. I grew up Catholic, and when I was 15 or 16 I heard a homily at Mass on Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Jesus tells the parable to “some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else.” The two men were at the temple, and the Pharisee stands up to pray. He thanks God he’s not like all those other dirty rotten sinners. The tax collector, by contrast, “stood at a distance,” and won’t even look up to heaven, but beats his breast and says, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said the tax collector went away “justified before God.” I remember thinking, “I can do that!” I’m really terrible at this Christian thing, but I can look down, beat my breast, and plead for God’s mercy because there was absolutely no doubt about it, I was a sinner! And still am!

Unfortunately, we tend by (sinful) nature to be more Pharisee than tax collector, and it’s often very subtle. Our tendency is to base our acceptance before God on our performance. What eventually broke me out of this lie is Paul’s declaration in I Cor. 1:30: “It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” If Jesus is in fact my righteousness, why would I want to bring my filthy rags to try to gain his acceptance? If Jesus is my holiness why would I think I could make myself more holy than he has already become for me? And if he is my redemption because he purchased me by his blood, why would I think I could buy God’s favor with my own works? Christianity is a religion for failures, and with all due respect, not the religion of Joel Osteen.

We read about this struggle with ourselves and our sin in Romans 7. Paul is explaining this war within his being: what he wants to do he doesn’t do, what he doesn’t want to do he does. I always think of this passage when I hear the hauntingly beautiful song by Martin Sexton called Way I Am. He ends with the sense of futility every Christian must feel:

Makes me want to say
You know I don’t like the way I am
No, I don’t like the way I am

But I’m gonna change the way I am
I’m gonna change the way I am

You know he’s not going to change the way he is because none of us can fundamentally change who we are. Only God can do that, and it takes an entire life to just get started in the process. This process, called sanctification, is God’s work every bit as much as justification is, and why lifelong Christians are just as dependent on the gospel as new converts. The dissatisfaction with ourselves, if we’re willing to see it in relation to the demands of a holy God, can only come from the Spirit of God. When Paul cries out almost in despair at the end of that chapter, it is only a cry a Christian can make:

²⁴ Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?²⁵ Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! 

Some have argued that in this deliverance Paul means we can be delivered from sinning. In fact in the 19th century John Wesley’s influence led to many Christian movements that claimed we could actually be free from all known sin, otherwise known as perfectionism, or victorious Christian living, or the higher life movement. If you just try hard enough, and will it long enough, you can have victory! Until you don’t. I’ve heard it put that this is a fatal externalizing of sin. But sin isn’t a thing we do or think, primarily, but a condition, who we are. Or in philosophical terms, it’s an ontological status. Until this “body of death” dies, the struggle continues.

But that is the beauty, indeed the genius of the gospel, that as Paul says earlier in Romans (Chapter 3):

²¹ But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— ²² the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. 

The pressure’s off. We’ve been freely given what God requires! Talk about good news! But along with the gospel comes inner transformation, first to hate our sin, and second to long to do what God requires, to hunger for righteousness. And it is God’s character (faithful and just), not our remorse (which inevitably becomes self-centered), which is the basis for it all. John tells us in his first epistle:

⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

So not only does he forgive, he purifies. Every time we fail, he is in the process of purifying us. What hope! And on the other side of the river of life, purify us from it all.