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On keeping the gospel for yourself too
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from handing out something you’ve stopped receiving yourself. You know the symptoms. You’re talking about grace constantly. Explaining it. Defending it. Preaching it. And somewhere in the middle of all that explaining, imploring and encouragement, quietly, without anyone noticing, you stopped standing under it. Still convinced, but now just a spectator rather than a participator.
It happens to us all if we don’t hold on to the grace that once stirred our heart. Paul had to write to Peter’s face about it.
Here’s the thing about the gospel. It’s lavish. That word is in the neighbourhood of what Paul is reaching for in Ephesians 1 when he says God has lavished upon us the riches of his grace. Not measured it out. Not portioned it carefully. Lavished. The formidable kind of generosity that doesn’t stop to see if you actually deserve another helping. The kind that makes you slightly uncomfortable because you know what you’re bringing to the table.
And yet. The person who can articulate all of that with precision, who can walk someone else straight into that room and show them every corner of it, can stand outside the door themselves. Busy pointing the way in for others. Permanently on the threshold. Sometimes, you need to put your hand in the jar and apply the ointment to yourself. Well, maybe not sometimes, always.
There is something in us, maybe in those of us who carry a measure of theological formation more than most, that quietly rebuilds the ladder once grace has knocked it down. Not the big ladder. Not the one that tries to earn salvation. The smaller, domestic ladder. The one that says: you should be further along than this. The one that whispers you’ve seen too much, been taught too much, to still be struggling with that. The one that turns the gospel into a message you deliver rather than a world-shaking revolutionary, life transforming track suite you live in.
Spurgeon said something about it. A man who preaches well to others and neglects his own soul is like a street lamp. Lighting the road for everyone passing, while he himself stands in the dark and the cold.
The remedy isn’t self-focus. Or pulling your socks up. Or pulling someone else’s sock up. It’s the same thing you’d say to anyone else…
Look at what God has actually done. Not generally. Specifically. In Christ, before the foundation of the world, he chose you. Not the version of you that had it together. Not the you that showed up after years of refinement. You. And the price of that wasn’t a slight inconvenience. It was everything.
When you feel the tired, desperate, despondent weight of your own inconsistency, observe your slow progress in the reflection of a shop window, aware of the gap between what you teach and how you actually live in the wild, that is not the moment to tighten your self-help grip on yourself. That is the moment to let the gospel affect you the same way you want it to stir and encourage the person sitting across from you on Sunday.
Extravagant. Unearned. Not scaled back because you’ve been in the room long enough to know better.
You haven’t been in the room long enough to need it less.
