This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
In this section of John’s letter, he tells us how to deal with both deserved and undeserved shame. He tells us that the way to heal our sense of shame is to realize that God is greater than our hearts.
How does this knowledge heal our shame? Well, it is like this: all of us have a conscience. That, in essence, is what John is talking about here, except that he uses the word “heart” instead of conscience. The problem with our conscience is that it does not work correctly all the time. In some people, conscience is underactive. I imagine this has been true of many of the great tyrants down through history. Hitler had more than six million Jews killed in the gas chambers. If he ever felt guilt or shame over that horrendous evil, history has failed to record it. That is an extreme example of an underactive conscience.
On the other end of the spectrum is the case of many religious people. Many of us have overactive consciences. That is what John is talking about when he says: “if our hearts condemn us”. Certainly, there are many times when our hearts condemn us properly: when we lie, cheat, steal, are unfaithful to our spouse, fail to honor our parents, fail to put God first in our lives. When we feel guilty about such failures, John has already told us what we should do: we should confess our sins to God and receive his forgiveness through his Son Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. When we do that, John tells us what happens: “If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
However, sometimes we feel a vague sense of guilt, we feel shame, about thoughts, feelings, or actions about which we have no right to feel shame or guilt. What do we do then? We need to realize that God is greater than our hearts; God is greater than our consciences. When our conscience puts us on trial, God is the final court of appeal. We can ask God: “Is what I have been thinking, doing, or saying, really wrong?” How will God answer us? God may answer us in any number of ways: perhaps through some words in Scripture, maybe through the words of a trusted friend or counselor, but always through the work of the Holy Spirit. The bottom line is that when our hearts condemn us, we need to experience God’s grace and God’s love that is greater than our hearts.
In his book, Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve, psychologist Lewis Smedes tells one man’s story of encounter with God’s grace that heals shame. The man’s name was Racehoss Sample….
Racehoss was Big Emma’s boy. Big Emma was a smashing prostitute who made a living by providing gambling and bootleg liquor along with the sex she sold in a shack near a railroad stop in middle Texas. Racehoss got in Big Emma’s way, and she resented him for it from the start. She beat him whenever she was drunk, which was a good deal of the time, and made him know that he was less than worthless.
When he got to be eleven years old, Racehoss would not stand it anymore and took off; he ran away to nowhere special, riding the rails wherever they took him, riding them with bums and hoboes, and, along the way, becoming a creature of volcanic rage. The Second World War broke out, and the army found him but soon found out it could not tame him. He went AWOL every month or so, and each time he did, he got into a fight and was sent to jail for assault and battery. Finally, they sentenced him to thirty years in the Texas state penitentiary. Here he learned for sure that if you treat a person like an animal, he becomes one.
The worst punishment they had for untamed prisoners was confinement in the tomb. The tomb was actually a four-by-eight-foot basement cell with no windows and two solid-steel plates for a door, a solid slab of concrete for a bed, a missing slab in the floor to pass for a toilet—the stench lingering on from occupant to occupant—and absolute darkness. This is where they stuck a prisoner who forgot to grovel low enough to suit his white boss, locked him in there for twenty-eight days, with one cup of water and one biscuit a day, and one meal of mush every six days to keep him alive.
Racehoss spent a considerable amount of his time in the tomb. In the sixteenth year of his captivity, he contradicted one of the guards and was locked in again, but it was not the same this time. This time he was terrified as soon as they shoved him in. He heard a sound of rushing water nearby, and he knew for sure it was going to seep in and drown him. He went crazy.
Here is the rest of the story in Racehoss’ own words….
I … ran around the walls. Then rolled on the floor like a ball…. I mauled myself, scratching and tearing at my body. Slumped, exhausted on the slab, I covered my face with both hands and cried out, “Help me God!! Help meeeee!!”
And then—
A ray of light between my fingers. Slowly uncovering my face, the whole cell was illuminated like a 40-watt bulb turned on. The soft light soothed me, and I no longer was afraid. Engulfed by a presence, I felt it reassuring me. It comforted me…I breathed freely. I had never felt such well being, so good, in all my life. Safe. Loved.
The voice within talked through the pit of my belly. “You are not an animal. You are a human being.” And “Don’t you worry about a thing. But you must tell them about me.”
After that, God was real. He found me in the abyss of the burning hell, uplifted and fed my hungry soul, and breathed new life into my nostrils.
The way that Racehoss Sample experienced God’s grace may not be the way that you or I will experience it. That does not matter. God’s grace comes to us in many ways and many forms. One thing is certain: when we experience God’s grace, when we realize God is greater than our hearts and that God loves us, knowledge of that fact changes us. God’s grace changed Racehoss Sample. He left prison and became the first ex-convict to ever work out of the governor’s office, the first to serve as a probation officer, the first to serve on the State Bar of Texas as a division head. He received the Liberty Bell Award and became the Outstanding Crime Prevention Citizen of Texas in 1981. Racehoss received a full pardon and changed his name to Alfred Sample.
Once we begin to experience God’s grace in such a way as to heal both our deserved and undeserved shame, John tells us there are several results that will follow from that experience… The first result is that we have confidence before God.
When we have experienced God’s grace through Jesus Christ then we can approach God without fear, in total trust. The Greek word for confidence, παρρησιαν, means to speak with all boldness. The valued right of citizens in ancient Greece was free speech. Paul tells us we are citizens of heaven and adopted children of God. As such, we have the right of free speech before the throne of God. We can come before God with whatever is on our minds and in our hearts any hour of the day or night.
Paul Borthwick tells the following story…
I was traveling from Boston to Denver, and the departure area for my flight was buzzing with stern-looking men in dark suits talking into their lapels. I asked a flight attendant what was happening. She replied, “Just wait. You’ll see.”
After we settled into our economy-class seats, two of the dark-suited men arrived in first class, followed by former President Gerald Ford. I sat a few rows away! I thought, I’ve never met a President before. I’ll go introduce myself.
But then I wondered, “Why would he want to meet me? I didn’t even vote for him!”
Then I remembered that during my years in seminary, I had met President Ford’s son, Mike. So, I marched toward first class. Before the Secret Service men could stop me, I spoke boldly: “President Ford, I just wanted to meet you. I know your son, Mike.”
We talked briefly, mostly about Mike. Mike’s name gave me “authority” to approach the President.[1]
The same thing is true in our relationship with God. We can approach God with boldness because of our relationship with his Son Jesus who died for us. Boldness is the first result of having an experience of God’s grace.
A second result of having an experience of God’s grace is that we receive from God what we ask of him.
How can this be? Does this mean we can ask God for a million dollars and receive it? The answer is yes and no. If we ask God for a million dollars in order to spend it on our own selfish concerns, then we are not going to receive it. Our receiving what we ask of God is dependent upon our obedience to God’s commands, doing what pleases God. When our hearts are in tune with God’s will then we will naturally ask God for those things that God wants to give us. In some cases that may mean: asking and receiving a million dollars for God’s kingdom purposes. In other situations, we may simply have to ask God for patience to endure and God will give us that patience. However, the main thing we need to see here is that we can ask God with boldness for whatever we need because of what Jesus has done for us on the cross.
John Newton, author of Amazing Grace, once said,
Thou art coming to a King,
large petitions with thee bring,
for His grace and power
are such none can ever ask too much.
Steve DeNeff and Dave Drury tell the following story in their book, Soul Shift:
One time, my dad wanted to congratulate me on something I had accomplished in the sixth grade. He took me to K-Mart and made a wide sweeping gesture with his hand toward the whole store from the entrance. He said, “To congratulate you, I’ll buy you anything in this whole store tonight.” My eyes widened as I thought of the possibilities.
At the time, I didn’t have a full grasp on how money worked or how much money Dad had. So, I sort of limited things in my mind. I didn’t even look at the huge stereo systems, expensive bikes, or anything that cost more than one hundred dollars. Instead, I chose a cassette tape case that was less than fifty dollars. I was content with just that case. It was more than I could afford myself, for sure, so I chose that one. It was nice. Only many years later did I find out from Dad that he had one thousand dollars cash in his pocket that night. What’s more, he brought his checkbook just in case that wasn’t enough. In my selection, I limited his blessing in my life.
Imagine how much God has in his pocket for you. You don’t ask God for all the spiritual power you could because you forget that you are his child. Like me and my earthly father, you don’t realize all he could do for you, in you, and through you.[2]
This leads to the question: what are the specific commands we need to obey in order to receive what we ask of God?
John gives a very simple answer to that question: “And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.”
We need to believe and love. In the Greek language of this passage, the verb “believe” is in the aorist tense. This means John is thinking of belief in terms of a one-time, past action. John is talking about when we first come to faith in Christ. However, the verb “love” is in the present tense, thus indicating a continuing action. Love is to be the constantly expressed action that demonstrates our faith in Jesus Christ. Love and faith go together.
In his book, Sources of Strength, President Jimmy Carter shared this lesson.
After a personal witnessing experience with Eloy Cruz, an admirable Cuban pastor who had surprising rapport with very poor immigrants from Puerto Rico, I asked him for the secret of his success. He was modest and embarrassed, but he finally said, “Senor Jimmy, we only need to have two loves in our lives. For God, and for the person who happens to be in front of us at any time.” That simple yet profound theology has been a great help to me in understanding the Scriptures. In essence, the whole Bible is an explanation of those two loves.[3]
John tells us something similar. If we believe in God’s Son Jesus Christ and love others, then we can ask God for whatever we need, and God will give it to us; if we believe and love then we will enjoy great success in life.
John goes on to tell us that the ones who believe and love actually have God living in them and they live in God. In fact, we cannot believe in Jesus or love others without God’s help, without God living in us.
You may rightly ask: how do we know that we have God living in us? We know because God has given us the Holy Spirit to assure us. The Holy Spirit is ultimately the one who gives us confidence before God the Father.
Again, Lewis Smedes wonderfully describes the experience of God coming to live in us by the Holy Spirit, the experience of grace that heals our shame…
The grace of God comes to us in our scrambled spiritual disorder, our mangled inner mass, and accepts us with all our unsorted clutter, accepts us with all our potential for doing real evil and all our fascinating flaws that make us such interesting people. He accepts us totally as the spiritual stew we are.
We are accepted in our fantastic contradictions and our boring corruptions. Accepted with our roaring vices and our purring virtues. We are damaged masterpieces, stunted saints, there are ogres and angels in our basements that we can hardly tell apart and that we have not dared to face up to. For the whole shadowed self each one of us is, grace has one loving phrase: you are accepted. Accepted. Accepted. Accepted.
Grace heals our shame, at the beginning, not by taking all our shame away and not by separating the sheep of undeserved shame from the goats of deserved shame but by removing the one thing all our shame makes us fear the most: rejection. Nothing that could make us unacceptable will keep God from accepting us.
No one whose shame is healed by grace has any reason to suppose he or she will in this life ever be pure light. She may in the energy of grace become more of the true self she is meant to be. The inner shadows may get lighter. Some of her ogres may give way to her angels. However, she will never be so pure of heart that grace is not needed nor so poor of spirit that grace will not accept her.
[1] Paul Borthwick, “In Jesus’ Name, Amen,” Christian Reader (January/February 2001), p. 30-31
[2] Steve DeNeff and David Drury, Soul Shift (Wesleyan Publishing House, 2011), p. 55
[3] Jimmy Carter, Sources of Strength, Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith, Times Books, 1997, p. xvii; submitted by Ted De to preachingtoday.com
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