We Thought We Were OK

What’s so disturbing about the good news of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom? For one thing, it makes us to see reality, makes us understand that most of what we’ve always believed about ourselves is wrong. John the Baptist, the announcer of the coming of Jesus, expressed this point in the first few verses of Mark when he called his listeners to “repent,” to turn around, do an about-face:

And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. (Mark 1:4-5 - NIV)

The very word “repent” gives us chills, like we’ve just encountered some madman with a big gray beard and a badly painted sign announcing the end of the world. But repenting is more like taking a reality check and deciding that your version of the world isn’t working anymore. Repenting is like grasping that this independence ride we’re on has only separated us from our roots, from the one who made us. Repenting is understanding that we’ve offended the one who holds our lives in his hands, and something has to change.

We thought we were OK, but we’ve come to realize that we were lying to ourselves all along. It’s amazing, this ability we have to cover over all our fears and doubts about ourselves and go on pretending that we’re perfectly all right. All the values we once treasured – power, wealth, pleasure – have God’s spotlight turned on them. To our surprise, in the glare of the good news that Jesus brings, our values look cheap and selfish, lacking both substance and staying power.

The Good News forces us, as well, to give up the illusion that we have control over our own lives and destinies. Jesus didn’t call us to learn how to make our independence from God work better. He called us to recognize that we were never equipped to live independently at all, that God never gave us that ability, that we’re not good at it. In fact, there’s only one meaningful relationship that Jesus wants with us - one in which he is utterly in control.

Already everything about this is starting to look like it’s backwards. Independence and self-reliance are out and surrendering to the control of Jesus is in. It rankles the mind of most of us that we could be accused of being so wrong. How could our cherished values be so utterly incorrect?

But there it is. There’s the good news – that Jesus came to earth to die to pay the judgment penalty against us, the penalty deserved for walking away from God to try to live a life we were never made for. That Jesus rose from the dead to take his rightful place as the ruler of our lives. The bold sweeping audacity of it is amazing.