Context Matters

I found in my mind something a bit disarming while doing seemingly selfless actions.  As I was considering the aim of doing something for the other person I realized that it was, in a way and to some significant degree, my own trying and hiding from my own sins.  In an attempt to be kind or selfless or intentional about serving another person, I found in my heart a kind of balm over my own guilt.  A false feeling of justification or ease about the mortifying truth of my own sin.  I am a sinner and the sins I've committed were against God alone, and no one else.  These sins are not cleansed by acts of kindness, because that would mean they were only as severe as the degree of goodness in an action I could do.  The severity is one against God's holiness, so the act of kindness needs either to measure up to that which can surpass the offense (can I be so kind as to outdo my offense?) or must be exposed as a cheap fraud in trying to pay God back for what I took--namely the honor due Him.

So, I was thinking, and very alarmed at my own thoughts in the moment.  Was I so kind because I had become an expert at fraudulent payments to God?  Or were my acts of kindness genuinely born of a penitent heart for the grace I had received by way of the cross of Jesus Christ?

I suppose the answer is both.  However, without attention to the cross I can easily get away with a momentary feeling of self-righteousness.  This can later turn against me because it is against the cross.  When I am kind I feel relieved of my guilt, perhaps even thinking God is so pleased by my actions that not only has He forgiven me of the repulsive offenses I had earlier made against Him, but my acts are so grand and good that He is now blessing me with the fruit of the Spirit because of them!

What does it mean to obey God's commands?  What does it look like inwardly and outwardly to live by the Spirit and remain in Him?

Love one another.
Forgive one another.
Repent and seek God.

All of these are crucial to our growth in the Spirit, but what often gets hidden behind these beautiful commands is our pride, our offenses against God, and our craving for self-righteousness.

To love and to forgive and to repent and seek God are all good things, but they too have a context which we can get distorted.  Context matters.  We love others not because it relieves us of our sins or provides for us a sense of "feeling good" but because the Father's love has so filled our hearts that what pours over in abundance is the bounty of love from Him to others.  That is, we have so drunk from His cup of grace and mercy that it now flows directly from Him to us and on to others.  It is a love that begins with God.  But here is where we often overlook this context in favor of whatever relieves us of our guilt or shame.  If loving others simply makes us feel good then we are not obeying the command of God to love others.  This love for others must flow from the love God has first given to us.  For in that process we come to see the truth of where love comes from and to whom all the credit is due when it is dispersed.

Forgiveness on the other hand is also a matter of contextual importance.  In other words, what goes on in our hearts is the context we have to look at when forgiving, not the act itself.  Anyone can forgive by way of words or even mental ascent in thinking "well, I might as well forgive this person if I want some peace of mind." Or any other reason aside from the one that points our eyes back to the cross of Jesus Christ.  We forgive because the Savior of the world has declared that His death has washed away all sins, so that the offenses we now make  or that are made against us in the present are all merely reminders for us to look at the wonder of the cross.  In essence for every offense made we are now given the truth to hear Christ say "For this, too, I have died so that you can forgive and be forgiven."  It works in either direction, whether the offense was made against you or was made by you.  All are submitted to the cross when we take our place in Jesus.  The context of forgiveness is to look to the cross and remember "for this offense my Savior died, and His death is powerful to wash away the stains I've made and the stains made against me."  That is forgiveness.

As for repentance and seeking God, I have some trouble thinking about the context here.  It can get so distorted by feelings of remorse or  my own selfish desires to get something from God by way of pleasing Him instead of just getting Him.  But I think, and I could be wrong in everything or some things, that the context of repentance and seeking God are in desperation.  When our hearts are simply broken and desperate we can here say that repentance and seeking God become more and more fervent.  My reason for believing this is that it is possible to think one is repenting and seeking God when one simply thinks they are sorry or that they acknowledge they did a bad thing.  This acknowledgment or awareness can feel like repentance yet has nothing to do with getting rid of the desire.  It simply points out bad from good, right from wrong, and this knowledge leads us to think we will therefore now choose the good and the right because repentance means turning away from what was bad and wrong.  However, the context of repentance falls short in that temporary feeling of knowing right from wrong, because sooner or later we find ourselves repenting for the same thing.  The context of repentance is nakedness and childlike weakness in the face of reality.  Here is where our repentance is not only an acknowledgment of knowing right from wrong but an utter frightening confrontation with our inability to choose one over the other and in this realization we resort to our only hope:  seeking God for the power we need to truly change.  This repentance is both humiliating and uncertain.  I say humiliating because we are exposed as the desperate needy beings we are and uncertain because we wait on the goodness and mercy of God to show up in just the right time to help us in our time of need.  We have no control for when God will turn our desires into good, but we have the truth in that He is good and we can call on Him to be good to us.

In essence, I've examined the context of loving others, forgiving, repenting and seeking God all in the context of my seemingly intentional acts of kindness.  To be sure, our acts of kindness can be hiding a swamp of bile beneath the surface that continues to destroy us because acts do not save a person from eternal death, or we can pause and call upon the Spirit of God who hovers above the deep well of our hearts to remind us of the truth.  Context matters because it reveals the heart.  The Savior is Jesus Christ alone.

Jmegrey