Never had I experienced anything so tough. I could hardly eat, had trouble sleeping, and was continually battling nausea. I felt at the absolute end of myself. It was the summer of 2009, the low point in the most challenging and difficult year of my life. Then, at the end of June, as we always did, my family and I left home to go on vacation for a couple of weeks. Never had I needed it more.
Just a few months earlier I was riding high. The church I planted back in 2003, New City Church, located just outside of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (my hometown), merged with the well-known but declining Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church twelve miles down the road. The merger process itself took many grueling months to finalize, but in March 2009, the elders from New City and Coral Ridge agreed unanimously on the merger plan that a joint team had drafted. After a congregational vote to approve the merger, the two churches became one new church on Easter Sunday, 2009. Though we all expected some tough times as two very different congregations merged into one, I had no idea how ugly and messy it would become.
With the merger and the leadership transition, a small but vocal group of long-time Coral Ridge members immediately began voicing opposition to practically any and every change we initiated. Blogs were posted, letters were circulated’some anonymously’with false accusations about me. Just three months after I arrived, a vigorous petition drive was started to have me removed. Battle lines were drawn, rumors raced. There was a crescendo of misunderstandings, frustration, and pain.
The virulence of opposition was more than I could bear. I was undergoing the shelling of my life’and I was ready to quit and escape elsewhere. It would be so easy just to walk away and never look back.
All that is what I was going through when, mercifully, vacation time rolled around in June 2009. On our first morning away, I woke up still saturated with the misery that had been intensifying for so many weeks. I opened up my Bible; in the reading plan I was following, it so happened that the day's passages included the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Colossians. Desperate for help from God, I read those verses and my eyes were opened to see the incredible sufficiency of Jesus with greater clarity than ever before.
In my misery I demanded an explanation from God. After all, I had done what he asked me to do’I had put "my baby" on the altar. And now this? Like Jonah in the belly of the great fish, I was arguing with God and making my case for why he owed me rescue. Worn out, afraid, and angry, I insisted that God give me my old life back. As I was reading Colossians 1 that morning, it dawned on me that it wasn't my old life I wanted back as much as I wanted my old idols back, and I knew that God loved me too much to give them to me.
I never realized how dependent I'd become on human approval and acceptance until it was taken away. For the first time, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being deeply disliked and distrusted. I was realizing just how much I'd been relying on the endorsement of others to validate me’to make me feel like I mattered. In and of itself, human approval and acceptance are not bad things. They are, in fact, a gift from God. But I had turned them into idols by making them my primary source of significance; without them I was miserable and depressed.
God began rescuing me from my slavery by forcing me to more fully understand exactly what I already had in Christ. I was learning the hard way that the gospel alone can free us from our addiction to being liked, that Jesus measured up for us so we wouldn't have to live under the enslaving pressure of measuring up for others’including ourselves. His good news met me in my dark place, at my deepest need. Through his liberating Word, I was being transformed, freed, refreshed.
The verses that set me free, specifically, were Colossians 1:9’14. In those verses the apostle Paul says (my summary): You will grow in your understanding of God's will, be filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding, increase in your knowledge of God, be strengthened with God's power, which will produce joy-filled patience and endurance (vv. 9’12a) as you come to a greater realization that you've already been qualified, delivered, transferred, redeemed, and forgiven (vv. 12b’14).
What those verses liberatingly taught me was that because of Jesus' finished work for me I already had the justification, approval, acceptance, security, freedom, affection, cleansing, new beginning, righteousness, and rescue for which I was longing. I started to see the many-faceted dimensions of the gospel in a more dazzling way. It's almost as if, for me, the gospel changed from something hazy and monochromatic to something richly multicolored, vivid, and vibrant.
I was realizing in a fresh way the now-power of the gospel’that the gospel doesn't simply rescue us from the past and rescue us for the future; it also rescues us in the present from being enslaved to fear, insecurity, anger, self-reliance, bitterness, entitlement, and insignificance.
In the crucible of suffering, the now-power of the gospel was liberating me to be okay with not being okay. All of us know we're not okay, though we try very hard to convince ourselves and other people that we're basically fine. But the gospel tells us, "Relax, it is finished. The pressure's off."
I was coming to glorious terms with the fact that because of Christ's finished work for me, I had nothing to prove or protect. I didn't need to pretend anymore that I was strong. I was being set free from the narcissistic impulse to impress people, appease people, measure up for people, or prove myself to people. The gospel alone can free us from the burden of trying to control what other people think about us. It frees us from the miserable, unquenchable pursuit to make something of ourselves by using others.
The gospel frees us from what Paul Zahl calls "the law of capability"’the law, he says, "that judges us wanting if we are not capable, if we cannot handle it all, if we are not competent to balance our diverse commitments without a slip." The gospel grants us the strength to admit we're weak and needy and restless, knowing that Christ's finished work has proven to be all the strength and fulfillment and peace we could ever want and more. Since Jesus is our strength, our weaknesses don't threaten our sense of worth and value. Now we're free to admit our wrongs and weaknesses without feeling as if our flesh is being ripped off our bones.
Through my pain, I was being convinced all over again that the power of the gospel is just as necessary and relevant after you become a Christian as it is before. Along with the vast majority of professing Christians, I once assumed that the gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, while afterward we advance to deeper theological waters. But I've come to realize that once God rescues sinners, his plan isn't to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them deeper into it. We never outgrow our need for the gospel. Because I am a daily sinner, I need God's daily distributions of grace that come my way as a result of the finished work of Christ.
I had become guilty (functionally, not theologically) of thinking the way many Christians think about Christian growth and progress. They think that becoming sanctified means that we become stronger and stronger, more and more competent. And, although we would never say it this way, we speak sometimes as if sanctification is growth beyond our need for Jesus and his finished work on our behalf. In other words, we tend to think of justification as step one and sanctification as step two. And once we get to step two, we never need to go back to step one. We needed Jesus a lot for justification. We need him less for sanctification.
I was becoming frustrated with myself because I realized that I was not as sturdy and unquestioning as I thought I should be. The pressure I put on myself to exhibit strength and faithfulness was proving to expose my frailty and faithlessness. What kind of Christian leader was I? How could I allow these circumstances to get me down the way they had? Where was my faith? Where was my trust in God?
Martin Luther defined sin as "mankind turned inward." And sadly, the way I had come to understand the nature of the Christian life had become terribly narcissistic. I was spending too much time thinking about how I was doing, if I was learning everything I was supposed to be learning during this difficult season, whether I was doing it right or not. I was spending way too much time pondering my failure and brooding over my momentary spiritual successes. In short, I was spending way too much time thinking about me and what I needed to do and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he had already done. And what I discovered is that the more I focused on my need to get better, the worse I actually got’I became neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my performance instead of Christ's performance for me was making me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective. This is the opposite of how the Bible describes what it means to be sanctified.
The truth I was learning through fiery trials is that Christian growth is coming to the realization of just how weak and incompetent we are and how strong and competent Jesus continues to be for us. Spiritual maturity is not marked by our growing, independent fitness. Rather, it's marked by our growing dependence on Christ's fitness for us. When we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better. When we stop obsessing over our need to improve, that is what it means to improve! After all, the apostle Peter began to sink only when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on "how he was doing." Sanctification is forgetting about ourselves; it involves receiving Christ's words, "It is finished" into our rebellious regions of unbelief.
That June morning was when Jesus plus nothing equals everything became for me more than a preachable tagline. It became my functional lifeline! It was rediscovering the gospel that enabled me to see:
Because Jesus was strong for me, I am free to be weak.
Because Jesus won for me, I am free to lose.
Because Jesus was Someone, I am free to be no one.
Because Jesus was extraordinary, I am free to be ordinary.
Because Jesus succeeded for me, I am free to fail.
Sunday morning, September 20, 2009, was the morning when, as a result of the petition drive to force my ouster from our church, a congregational vote regarding me was to be taken after the service. I was there to preach before that vote took place; to say the least, it was an awkward environment. Pockets of people were there to take me down. As I preached, they stared at me with looks that could kill. I preached my guts out’it was the freest I've ever been in the pulpit. I was realizing in the moment that no one in the room that morning could take away anything I'd received from Jesus, which was everything. I was completely free!
As it turned out, the congregational vote that day was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping me as the church's pastor. And since that time I'm pleased to say that God has seen fit to launch a gospel "riot" at Coral Ridge. The everything of God's gospel is setting people free, creating great joy, and reaching our needy city. But what was far more important that day than any "victory at the polls" was the ever-freeing, presently empowering dynamics of the gospel I had rediscovered in the crucible of ache.
