Triple Cure

There’s more than one savior within the church.

There’s more than one lord over the church.

There’s more than one spirit at work inside the church.

Our Contradictory Witness 

Multiple petty monarchs are vying for control and seek to dominate all others, subverting the Lordship of Jesus Christ and dispossessing Him from His throne.

Their obsession with control inside and outside the church drives others away and keeps the church frozen, brittle, and at war with itself.

It’s destructive to our gospel witness–making it harder to see the real Lord, Christ.

A multitude of fixers and wannabe heroes are taking sides, taking over other people’s problems, appointing themselves avengers, and creating untold divisions between “sides”.

They divert people from the one and only Savior because they try to protect themselves and others from all pain.

It’s destructive to our gospel witness–making it harder to see the real Savior, Christ.

A false spirit of religion drives people relentlessly under its lash, choking out all upwelling life, joyful liberty, and gospel grace–quenching the Holy Spirit.

Disguised as super-commitment, hyper-rigor, and fanatic devotion, it is the furthest thing from God because self-righteousness is the gravest sin against God.

It’s destructive to our gospel witness–making it harder to see the true Spirit, the Spirit of Christ.

So what is one to do?

In a word, repentance.

Repentance involves forsaking false roles and quitting false jobs.

It means I admit I cannot fix, solve, or save people from their problems.

Instead of displacing my own pain and using the problems of others to fix myself, I admit I am beyond self-fixing and desperately in need of the true Savior.

And that admission is painful, deeply painful.

It means I admit I have no control over anyone else, am not the boss or the king, and am small, vulnerable, and far underneath the authority of the Almighty.

Instead of displacing my loss of control by trying to control everything and everyone else, I admit I am out of control, enslaved, and powerless.

And that admission is painful, deeply painful.

It means I admit that working a religious formula, laboring under a religious system, requires no trust in God and is therefore a sham.

Such a spirit is not the Holy Spirit who liberates and matures, but a false spirit that enslaves through guilt and fear and thus keeps us in immaturity.

And that all my self-punishing, self-hating, guilt-compensating behaviors are in vain.

And that admission is painful, deeply painful.

Therefore repentance is painful.

No wonder we avoid it, bobbing and weaving and swerving and side-stepping it as much as possible for as long as possible.

Repentance means we admit we are broken and beyond fixing, we are out-of-control careening towards self-destruction, and that the spirit of religious self-improvement will not avail us.

But once we hit bottom, and realize we’ll never be anyone’s savior or anyone’s lord–including ourselves, the spirit of religion loses its chokehold over us.

The positive part of repentance is returning and coming home to Christ.

We see Him as supremely sufficient to save us, supremely compassionate and good, and place ourselves entirely in His hands.

We see Him as supremely authoritative and in control, and take shelter under His ultimately good Lordship.

We turn control of our lives over to the Holy Spirit, and He fills us afresh and begins His ministrations within our soul.

A new overflow of reconnection with Christ, restoration to Christ, and alignment with Christ and His will displaces the fierce, all-consuming compulsion to seek our own will and our own way.

We find ourselves in His loving arms–safe, well-governed, set free, brimming with desires to do good towards God and others in His name in the Spirit’s power.

Grace becomes our hallmark, and extending and escorting others to the grace of Christ becomes our mission.

We become part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Repentance is therefore the triple cure.

It reunites us with our Savior, repositions us under His loving Lordship, and opens the gateway for the Holy Spirit to work wonderfully without puffing us up or re-empowering our fallen ego.

We stay vulnerable and small, but are so dearly loved it doesn’t matter anymore.

What the American Evangelical church needs isn’t more rituals, more political power, more formulas of success, or more magical miracles done by larger-than-life celebrities.

What we need is the triple cure of repentance–and where we return from our wanderings is Christ Himself.

There is a solution.