One of the curses of our humanity
is our propensity for one-upmanship. Our broken natures have meant we’re
innately competitive and judging others comes seamlessly.
The greatest threat for the
Christian, with the exception of backsliding, is having a superiority complex. It’s
no novel problem. The newly converted Jewish believer in Early Church
times possibly felt more ‘chosen’ by God than a Gentile was. They needed to be
reminded:
“There is
no one who is righteous, not even one...”
~Romans 3:10 (NRSV)
A Rightly Situated Perception Of
Salvation
We’re quickly fooled regarding our
rites of passage through the faith. We quickly externalise things of the moral
and ethical world. We quickly judge.
Take the circumstances of the gay couple
wanted to marry, the drug addicted, or the sexual offender. Or, going to
religious extremes, let’s take the Muslim, the Hindu, or the Buddhist. None of
these, and more, is any worse than the best Christian without Christ. There is
no one who is righteous, not even one...
We can lose sight of this very
basic fact of the faith in our going-out-and-coming-home lives. By our
ignorance and arrogance, in our moments of not seeking God, we become profaners
of God’s royal law and liberty to all humankind. The grace of God has come in
the death and resurrection of his Son. And we limit this limitless grace every
time we fail to love one of God’s own—every human being.
The Most Important Ingredient Of Living
The Saved Life
Could there be a more important
character ingredient than humility? That is, to know how close we were to
death, and how close death appears again when we forsake Christ. We have
nothing of our own, and never will.
The most glaring of all realities
is a cosmic difference between God and all humanity. Nobody is righteous; only
God. Only through the Son of God are we made free.
Humility is the process and
endpoint making our faith operate on a level playing field. It sees the next
person and thinks not better or less of them. Disregarding where they come
from, their allegiances, their habits, and their dispositions, they are still,
like us, children of God.
Living the saved life is never
forgetting the eternal paradox: we deserved death yet were redeemed for life in
Jesus’ name. This is not just an intellectual fact. We’re to incorporate such a
fact into our everyday lives, by tolerance and patience and compassion and
kindness and inclusivity. Nothing within the field of virtue is beyond us when
we remain humble, clung to the truth.
We don’t need to wallow in our sin
to remember, without Christ, we’re wicked.
***
Christian superiority forgets
humility and grace—that we’re all sinners—and becomes Pharisaic. It creates
divisions where love was meant to create unity. We ought to never forget, none
are righteous. Without Jesus’ gracious sacrifice we’d all be lost.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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