While writing this article I listened to Psalm 118 by Peregrinnatti and Steve Rees.
I was tempted to subtitle this article, “Finding Hope When I Let Myself Down,” because I don’t really feel like I have any qualification to tell anyone else how to live their spiritual lives. But I as I remarked in my note earlier today, my failings don’t disqualify me from having anything valuable at all; neither do you, yours. If men had to be perfect to give advice, then we’d have no leaders, no fathers, no pastors, and really, no Bible, given the state of some of its authors. I bid thee, then, endure me, and my presumptuousness of daring to tell you how to live your life; that’s all blogging is, anyways.
I don’t know about you, but I’m so tired of the “unashamed” gospel. I’m tired of the boorish honesty. I saw a clip from Lecrae recently, talking about how he “isn’t ashamed” of his past involving drugs, violence, fornication, addiction, etc.. My point isn’t to beat up on Lecrae in particular—I don’t think he’s a Christian but that’s a story for another time—but really just to point out how exhausting it can be. Perhaps it’s my sinful nature speaking, but I hate hearing about all the little ways everybody screws up. The bluntness and frankness of society today is grating. Why can’t there be a little shame? Why can’t things just go unspoken? The Church retains the practice of pastor and confessor for a reason; if you feel such a pathological need to confess, why not do it to the man allotted to you?
These are all very mean-spirited feelings. I think part of this intent of mine comes from a good place: a desire to have some semblance of decorum restored to society. The other part, however, is darker: I hate seeing other people talk about their sins and failings because it’s simply unseemly to me. It’s unseemly to me because I think it’s weak. I resent that weakness because I resent the weakness in myself. I have written about this before, but I will continue to write about it, because it is my strongest pathology. As a younger man (I am yet a young man), I had many more feminine traits, most of which have since faded with my immaturity; the one that remains unflinching is my pathological resentment of weakness. I live my life much like H.P. Lovecraft, walking the streets, filled with consummate horror at the waste of human flesh I see around me. That is, I see dead-eyed men and women, who once had bright futures, but have since been bludgeoned into corporate automatons. I see every brand of sexual degeneracy paraded around and celebrated, often with a pin or a flag or even, sometimes, a cape. I see men wearing mini-skirts. I see gender-ambiguous entities of obesity with their neck postures cocked at a 80 degree angle as they stare at their phones. My God, everybody is on their phones. I notice it when I look up from mine. The horror, the horror, the horror. My God, the horror.
The horror is that I see myself in these people.1 Out of one man were all nations made, and all humans, no matter the depraved condition they find themselves in, are just like me in a sense. I see them, and I implicitly know that. I once saw an obese woman laying chest-down on an indoor bench, playing with her Nintendo Switch while she watched TikToks on her phone. I nearly cried.2
My sin is this: that I find myself without pity for all mankind. On some level I am unwilling to confront the truth of my likeness to the flesh horrors I witness on the daily. I have to be better, by some natural law, separated by some wide gulf—it’s the only way for me to cope. By separating myself away, I become like the rich man who steps over Lazarus on the way to his estate. The dogs can comfort them; I just don’t want to have to see it. I’m different, I’m better, I’m slated to live the sort of life they could never comprehend. I’m just a higher caste of person, you see.
It’s all a bad joke. I’m not better than them. I’m worse. I know better, yet I find myself falling into the same evil patterns again and again. You see, I know this is true, but I don’t fully believe it yet; it has reached the brain, but it hasn’t gotten to the heart yet. It’s one thing to say “I deserve Hell,” but it’s altogether different, strange, uncanny, to say, “I deserve Hell as much—more—than that filthy street urchin.” The doctrine of the Lutheran Church teaches me that I am really the same as that Nintendo Switch girl, but as easy as it is to understand the logic, it’s impossible to fathom.
I keep harping on her because her case was the first where I felt my hard heart soften a little. Rather than my usual internal reaction of resenting her perceived patheticness, I actually felt pity. The horror hit integer overflow. I couldn’t bare to see a human being live like that, not out of mere disgust, but actual sympathy. I think about her often because of how perfectly she encapsulates what I never want to be in life, who I most certainly will become if I allow myself to, and the level ground of all humanity.
Kanye West, according to an apocryphal story, told a Jewish co-worker to kiss a portrait of Adolf Hitler every night in order to practice unconditional love. I actually like that story. I think it’s powerful. I think that we have to confront our own hatred and resentment for others directly, even when it damn well seems to be well-earned. My impulse when I truly begin to hate another person, either due to them actually taking steps to harm me, or just by being annoying, has become to wonder, “how can I love this person?” The impulse, of course, doesn’t always trigger in the height of my anger or frustration, but it does come in, reminding me, as my pastor was keen to remind me, that such a person, no matter how evil, annoying, or pathetic they might be, are a person that God died for. And really, I’m evil, annoying, and pathetic too.
A reading from the one-hundred and eighteenth psalm.
I shall not die, but live,
And declare the works of the Lord.
The Lord has chastened me severely,
But He has not given me over to death.
The stone which the builders rejected
Has become the chief cornerstone.
This was the Lord’s doing;
It is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day the Lord has made;
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
I found myself in an awful place today. Repeating the same patterns of behavior over and over, betraying my own best-laid plans and willfully neglecting my more important duties. Coming to, as it were, leaving what felt like a wretched trance, came the familiar process of penance and self-doubt. The devil has grown well-adapted to my particular psychoses. Rather than harrang me with idiocy like “God can’t forgive this sin, you’ve gone too far this time!” the Devil bothers me with a much more pressing accusation, one that might actually be true: you are far too weak to live the sort of life you want. You aren’t strong enough to whip yourself into shape, to wake up early enough, to get the work done, to meet the obligations, to surpass the bare minimum, to ever stop coasting through life. All that might well be true. When I find myself proving it true, I tend to despair: not salvation, but, in practice, of sanctification. I find myself wondering, will I ever make it out of this pit? Will I ever learn to live another way? As I recover, I find myself having to find ways to cope, find ways to regain faith…in myself.
I began in my journal. “Still alive in spirit despite everything.” I’m so tired of these pointless self-affirmational statements. I know they mean nothing. I know they are vain protests against the whole of my nature. But I continue in them, because I know in my brain that giving in to despair makes despair worse. In all likelihood, the devil is using this line of attack on me as a primer to separate me from my confidence in the truth of God’s mercy, from which point he would then attack my ability to belief in forgiveness. Crafty fellow. I did fall into despair for a moment, but after describing my condition for a moment, it struck me. “Like a pig or a dog I wallow in my own mire. Jesus Christ died for people like me.”
Jesus Christ died for people like me.
If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners.
Martin Luther
I had to craft such a bitter, mean-spirited opening that I’m sure was no fun for my mother to read, to bring you to the point where you can possibly understand how significant this realization (of what I really already knew) was. My journal continued: “Though sin and the devil bring me low, break my bones, reduce me to a worm—far less than a man—on the last day I will certainly be saved. This is my sole consolation, and the one thing the devil cannot rob me of.” When I, if even for a moment, finally began to identify myself, not with the spiritual and intellectual elite of the human race, as I so often have an evil tendency to do, but with the dung and the refuse of mankind, the Gospel immediately pierced my heart.
What I came to realize is that it is in pride that I demand to have the power to solve my life’s problems by myself. I say, with pious intent, “a pagan or a Muslim can live a good life according to the flesh and their own power, so why can’t I, to the honor of my God?” Indeed, I should, indeed, I must; yet when I find myself unable to, though I earnestly appeal to God for help, in my heart, I imagine that it is by my own power. The aim—to live a pious, peaceful, upright, God-honoring life, to the best of my capability—is good, and one that I will retain, but as strange and left-vangelical as it sounds, piety had become an idol to me. My thoughts were of “virtue” rather than forgiveness; I desired sacrifice rather than mercy. I felt, for some insane reason, that as part of my practice of the Christian faith, I had to believe in myself.
“Jesus died for me,” I wrote. “This is the only thing worth knowing. It is God’s doing, and it is marvelous in my eyes.” Of course. If you had phrased these statements as questions hours earlier, I would have said, “Amen and Alleluia!” in response, but in some corner of my heart, they weren’t as “real” to, or for, me. But it all became clear. Jesus Christ died for people like me. Upon writing these words, I knew that the ‘marvelous’ passage was from a psalm, and I felt strangely called to find and read the entire thing. And so I read Psalm 118.
I found the passage in question, which was mostly Messianic. If I might add, the stone that the builders rejected refers not only to Jesus as the rejected Messiah of the Jews, but also our constant rejection of God and His ways. As we learn as good Lutherans, we pray, “thy Kingdom come,” so that God’s Kingdom would come to in, to, and through us, for the Kingdom will come regardless of whether we pray for it or not. When the Stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, it also becomes the Cornerstone of our minds, our consciousnesses. I reject God daily. I am, on all levels except physical, a Jew. And yet, this stone, the very Rock of the Gospel, which I never live up to, has become the chief cornerstone of my mind. May God knock down all the crappy, rotten, sinful wood that has been built atop of it, to make space for pure spiritual bricks upon the pristine white cornerstone.
Look at it: the answer is right there. “This is the Lord’s doing.” It is not my doing. I work against it many days. “This is the Lord’s doing.” It is GOD that saved me, GOD that sanctified me, GOD that slaps me when I’m being stupid. It is GOD who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, in Whom I have life; so why do I bother trying to raise myself up to life? There is, of course, nuance here I’m not getting. If I imagine that God will fix my life without my cooperation, I’m in for a rude awakening—but at the same time, that is almost precisely what happens. I can’t explain it in full; it will probably only really make sense for those who have Faith and know what I’m talking about already, making this entire paragraph superfluous.
Beyond the passage that I quoted, however, was something more remarkable, the words standing out as if emblazoned in fire. Earnestly, I did not believe it when I read it. I stopped and stared for a few moments. There it was, written plain as day: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” I shall not die. The first of the devil’s foul lies to mankind has been robbed out of his mouth, and placed into the mouths of believers! We do not boast of our own virtue or power, or knowledge of good and evil, but of what God has done for us! I shall not die; though this life drain me of joy and I find myself as if losing the battle to sin, the Lord has declared in sovereign decree that damnation is impossible to me. Exactly as it is written: “The Lord has chastened me severely, but He has not given me over to death.” He has not given me over to death. Though everything around me goes to shit, though I find my life in shambles, though I let all my potential go to waste, though I find myself a bitter old man while still yet young in the flesh, despite all these things, the Word of God reigns supreme over all my troubles: I shall not die. He has not given me over to death.
In David’s boasting, we find a promise. “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” Of a certainty, to the point where it is beyond all question, our lives will come to be living testimonies of God’s work. I will become more like Christ by the day, though I do not notice it. I will grow out of my reactive hatred of weakness. I learn to feel pity and sympathy for my fellow man. I will become a man who has some right to be called a Christian. I will become the sort of man that children can be glad to call their father. It is unavoidable, inevitable. And though my life is necessarily filled with wailing and striving, it is GOD who will establish the work that He began in me. It is GOD who’s works I will declare. It is by GOD’s power that I shall not die, but live. He has not given me over to death. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our sight.
I wrote a poem about the feeling. An excerpt:
Skin covered in filth, in need of a shower
Yet neither water nor heat makes this feel less foul.
How will you escape this?
Trails buzz, winds sing, yet stone roads howl.
How will you escape death?
I’m tearing up now imagining the sort of life that poor girl lives.
Everything in this article is literally me. I've had most of these same thoughts, the evil ones and the tearful disbelief when Jesus tells me He died for that sin, too. And that one. And that one, as well. "Such knowledge, Lord, is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain!"
Wow. I was just going through the same "awakening" this week, and you expressed it perfectly (please keep writing)! I have felt that the more I try to be good, the more I despise myself and my sin. And it is indeed a good reminder that we are completely dependent on God's works for us.
And your whole text reminds me of Jesus' words "apart from me you can do nothing" and Isaiah chapter 64 (a good read for all of us, sinful worms).