STUMBLING OVER BLINDNESS
Tragedy, trauma, and suffering are incredible motivators. They leave us with scars; imprints of the impacts—indelible memories that shape and define certain narratives so many of us live by. Without these painful realities, much of our lives would look very different than they do now.
Each of us has our story. We’ve all had experiences we reminisce on with melancholy, maybe a laugh or two, but hopefully, and most importantly: wisdom. Without acquiring wisdom, suffering begets more suffering; an open wound has not yet become a scar. Truly, to attempt movement through life without wisdom is to stumble over ourselves, blind-folded by naivety, ignorance, or arrogance.
UNHEALED WOUNDS HAVEN’T BECOME SCARS
We either haven’t had our disillusionment exposed to our conscious yet, or, we are in such deep denial that we can’t see through the fabric of our own facade; we look into a world we’ve created based on the makeup of the mask we wear and are fooled by what we see, which is actually our goal (even if subconsciously): self-deception. It’s a psychological defense-mechanism used as a means of not dealing with trauma or stress in a healthy or productive manner; evasion rather than introspection and submission to the healing work of God. Therefore, without scars, it’s obvious to those with scars that, for whatever reason it may be, our wounds haven’t healed yet.
The one common scar of every Christian is the healing of the ‘old life, or the “old self,” as Paul puts it, that dies and becomes a new life, or new self in Christ:
Ephesians 4:22-24 says:
“to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
OUR WOUNDS BECOME SHAME OVER TIME
As we grow in spiritual maturity in our walk with Jesus, we end up, through a repentant heart, coming to understand the hurts we’ve caused people as a consequence of choosing sin over God. This is a “wound.” We’ve hurt ourselves, and others, because we chose against God, who is our source of life, love, and all things good (Psalm 36:9). Our wound will not heal on its own. And without God (who is our healer as much as He is our source of life (Jeremiah 30:17)), our wound will remain unhealed and become vulnerable to further wounding/infection, which gradually translates to what we’re familiar with as bitterness, or shame. We don’t have the power to forgive ourselves without God’s mercy in us. Mercy is a good thing, and remember, all good things come from God, because God is love:
1 John 4:7-8 (ESV version)
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.“
RECEIVING GOD’S FORGIVENESS
To reiterate, when we find ourselves revisiting shame, we need to remember to lovingly ask ourselves if we’ve neglected to receive God’s forgiveness. Perhaps for many of us, we haven’t even asked God to forgive us yet. But it’s our response to His forgiveness of us that we find ourselves able to forgive ourselves. When we don’t accept God’s forgiveness, we’re unable to receive healing, and we continue to live with the wound.
Consequently, we may find ourselves caught in a knot of believing we don’t deserve forgiveness, as though we believe our own sense of judgment is righteous and holy apart from God’s. But apart from God, our judgment is flawed, as is our sense of goodness and righteousness. Therefore, how can we judge ourselves righteously without God? We can’t. That’s why we must turn to God for forgiveness first, and He is faithful to forgive us all of our sins (1 John 1:9).
IMITATING GOD, THE JUDGE, GETS US NOWHERE
There is a bit more to say about judgment. When we hang onto our sins, and therefore our shame, we are essentially holding onto painful memories as though they are our only reality, or even our identity—as though apart from which we would be no one and nothing. The problem with that belief is that it makes us into what God is meant to be to us, and our response to playing God in reaction to our own sins is that we live in self-judgment, which is also a self-delusion—since the only framework by which we can be judged is by the source of all judgment: God.
Concordantly, the only heart posture in which we should be considering our sinful ways is from the humility in bringing our fallenness before God. There is no righteous judgement without God, but with Him, we can finally see the speck in our own eye (Matthew 7:3-5). We come across righteous judgement by an attitude of veneration for the truth of God’s Word. Without the righteousness of God found by pursuing God in humility and reverence, we cannot understand how to judge with both love and truth.
OBEYING A COMMAND TO SURRENDER OUR BURDENS
Understanding the importance of seeking forgiveness from God through faith in Christ is paramount to understanding the joy of being reborn into Christianity. To hang onto shame is to miss the true joy of letting go of the burden of carrying sin inside. Our hearts grow weary and faint. We need rest from the exhaustion of trying to keep ourselves together when inside we feel like we’re falling to pieces (Matthew 11:28-30). Jesus offers rest for our souls, but we can’t receive it when we say, “No Jesus, I’ll carry it. I sinned, it’s my responsibility to carry this weight.” That isn’t what God wants us to do.
Read Psalm 55:22 (ESV version):
“Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.“
We are commanded to cast our burdens onto Him. He already took the punishment for every sin we ever have committed, or will ever commit—with Him on the cross. He paid the price; it is finished, as Jesus said (John 19:28-30). Holding onto our burdens because we don’t believe in another way, especially after what Jesus did, is essentially believing that Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection weren’t enough. That is the kind of mentality that will take us to hell; when we’d rather believe we can handle our lives and all the temptations and all the evil, and not accept God’s only gift of salvation through Jesus—for free. But since Jesus is the only way to God (John 14:6), our idea of carrying our own burdens doesn’t fit the criteria for God’s forgiveness (Romans 6:23).
COUNTERFEIT NOTIONS
Those who refuse to accept God’s forgiveness through Christ either cling to the shame or vacuity of atheism, at worst; at best, they adhere to the spiritual incoherency of agnosticism—since the only illusional benefit of carrying our own burdens is the fallacy that we’ll correct ourselves over time, on our own. This is yet another counterfeit notion from the devil many fall prey to, because anyone who’s been alive long enough will admit to the flawed human propensity of falling back into old habits or sins, despite our best efforts and intentions, churning our need for Christ to a level of desperation as we crawl back to our vomit for the 100th time (Proverbs 26:11).
While the Christian walk breeds improvement and progress through faith and action, we are not disillusioned into believing that we eventually won’t want to sin while still on Earth. True Christian humility will confess that our temptations never cease permanently in a fallen world, but our desire to grow in closeness with Christ gradually becomes louder and bolder than the movement of temptation in our flesh, creating the space for choosing God over sin, more and more as we spiritually mature in our walk.
THE CHRISTIAN SCAR IS A REMINDER LEADING TO A NEW WAY OF LIVING
In receiving God’s forgiveness, our wound becomes a scar. It’s the scar that unites us, just like the scars of Christ Himself are the reminders that we are united in Him, and that it is, indeed, finished.
With our scar comes many Godly attributes, one of which is boldness. Christian boldness is a result of lacking a fear of the world because the only thing to fear is to be without God. When we surrender our lives to God by faith in Jesus Christ, our lives are under the protection of His will and guidance. By lacking a fear of the world, a fear we once had when we did not have any fear of the idea of God—we are enabled by His grace to love others in the way He has commanded us to. We become more and more free from our selfishness to give in the ways that most reflect Jesus in our lives:
Matthew 25:35-40 (ESV version)
For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
FREEDOM FROM THE SELF
Our “scar,” while spiritual, survives as a reminder that we came from something far worse (life without God), but have been ‘reborn’ into something much more holy, purposeful, and eternal. When we are reborn, we attain a scar of the person we once were to remind us that we have surrendered the freedom of the self, for the freedom to choose God instead of the self (John 7:17).
THE SCAR OF SIN UNHEALED
We will never forget where we came from. We can push bad memories as far back into our minds as we possibly can to keep them out of our conscious awareness, but they won’t escape our subconscious. They won’t evade us completely. We always know. Even if we forget because we’ve avoided it for so long, our stoic spirit and stern countenance knows it well; the darkness we hide under is really just a covering for something so bad, that we chose to try hiding under time itself, hoping it would take our memories away.
Stoicism is the scar of sin unhealed, whereas joy is the scar of sin washed white as snow (Psalm 51:7).
BELIEVING A FALSE REALITY AS REAL
Some of us have even tried living out a false life we never would have lived otherwise, all because we were afraid to do the work of healing, conceding to the intervention of a higher power and giving ourselves to God. The old self is never gone when we hide it. But the old self is exposed to the light of truth by the time we put on the new self. The new self is the admission that we no longer desire to live for ourselves, but for God and His purposes. We need to be seeking the will and desires of God by fearing Him, and loving Him, in order to find ourselves wanting our new self in Christ.
EACH PERSON HAS THEIR OWN DECISION TO MAKE
We don’t need to hide the past, but rather, lean into the future God has prepared for us. Our pasts are merely part of a journey that led us to discovering Jesus as Lord, and so we are to consider it a blessing when given the opportunity to share our testimony with someone. Our testimony may be the missing piece to someone finding the right reason to consider accepting Jesus as Lord; to have their wound healed into a scar as they put on their new self through faith in Christ.
EVERYTHING GOES BACK TO GOD
Every person was created by God for a purpose. Sometimes our lives don’t make any sense, but admittedly, we’re living in a corrupted world. We’re living in a world that, despite how it was created by God and is still good to this day (since God’s hand has not yet been removed), it is currently a world wrapping itself in chaos; diseases, wars, and judgment. And yet, everyone and everything has their purpose (Proverbs 16:4). Everything goes back to God. We can either come to an understanding that God is in control and that we need to pray, have faith, and live out what God calls us to do, or—we can fall into a large sum of the population that believes that we just need to do what makes us feel happy and not worry about the rest of the mumbo-jumbo-religious talk.
SOONER OR LATER
As Christ-followers, we experience hardship now so that, sooner or later, we can be prepared to share how God delivered us (1 Peter 3:15). We feel pain now in order to, at some point, glorify God in how we healed us, or how He is currently healing us. There is trauma now, so one day—sooner or later—when God has removed it from our lives, we have a scar that says, “Look how God loved me in Christ. Look how He saved me from the trauma.” When we attain our scar, we can experience anything the world throws at us because at some point, whether sooner or later, it will be another reason to love God even deeper, to glorify Him even more boldly, and to testify to the riches of His grace and mercies.
THE CHRISTIAN LOVE, HOPE, & JOY
Even if we’re only starting off on a fresh journey towards growth in Christ, we still have the new reminder that God has established in us the Truth of Jesus Christ as Lord in our lives. At some point, He wasn’t. Now, He is. Now, life can truly begin. Our hearts are being made new; we can give account to all who ask why we believe what we do; why we love the way we love, and why we have a hope and a joy that doesn’t make sense in a world like this. Very simply, it’s because Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). This world will one day pass away, but the Word of God never will (Matthew 24:35). Such a beautiful reminder in such crazy times!
LIFE IS GOD MOVING THROUGH US, NOT US MOVING THROUGH LIFE
We need not fear. God lives in all who receive Jesus as their Lord, through faith by the movement of the Holy Spirit. There are people in this world who believe this life, without God, is just what we make of it. That is a truly sad, empty and short-sighted way to live. As Christ-followers, we can help people see that life is not what we make of it; life is how God moves through us as His church body. Life is how people see God moving not only through the beautiful and intelligible design of nature and creation, but by how the Holy Spirit moves in those who have answered the call of God in Christ.
By this manner of living, we embrace God’s purpose for each of us individually, while also recognizing His goodness as we come to comprehend, over time, how He has and is collectively restoring all things to new in Christ. There is an eternity to anticipate, at any moment, as we await Christ’s return.
Photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash
