2019
Self-Righteousness THE KEY TO GETTING BETTER. Steve Brown, pg. 2
Guaranteed Grace GOD'S DETERMINED HIS GRACE WILL HAVE ITS WAY. Andrew Petiprin, pg. 4
I Love God for Letting Me Hate Him EVEN OUR ANGER CAN REMIND US OF GOD'S GOODNESS. Erik Guzman, pg. 8
The Other Kind of Grace KeyLife.org
SOMETIMES GRACE DOESN'T LOOK LIKE GRACE. Jenni Young, pg. 10
SELFby Steve Brown
I’m an expert on self-righteousness… and you are too. It’s perhaps the most dangerous of all human sins. And we’re guilty of it. Five characteristics of self-righteousness:
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The Key to Getting Better.
It’s subtle. We don’t know it when is the reason Christians can’t get along, we’ve got it. why there are such divisions among us, It’s incremental. It never starts out as and why we can’t forgive. self-righteousness but as something In Luke 18, Jesus tells a story about positive and good. self-righteousness. The story has two It’s addictive. We love it when we’re people: a very religious man and a horrible sinner who was a dishonest tax right and want more. collector. Jesus said that the religious It’s indiscriminate. Once we see it, it’s man came to the temple to pray, looked everywhere and not just in religious down at the sinner, and then prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other folks. men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a It’s terribly destructive. week, I give tithes of all that I get.” Self-righteousness makes genuine love almost impossible. My friend, Fred The tax collector’s prayer was Smith, said that it is impossible to love considerably shorter. Jesus said that he anybody who has sinned unless you couldn’t even look up when he prayed, are aware that you are capable of the “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” same sin. Self-righteousness destroys relationships simply because it makes it Jesus said that the tax collector found almost impossible to love…impossible favor in God’s eyes (i.e. was justified) to love those who aren’t Christians and and the religious man didn’t. Then Jesus made an astounding statement. He impossible to love those who are. said, “Everyone who exalts himself will Ever wonder why Christians are so in- be humbled, but the one who humbles effective in our evangelistic efforts? It’s himself will be exalted.” because most people who aren’t believers think of us as angry, condemn- In its religious form, self-righteousing, uptight and judgmental. (I know, I ness is a conviction that one is better know, they are too; but that isn’t the than others—morally, spiritually and/ issue. We’re talking about us.) Do you or theologically. But the connotation know why they think that? God help us, of the word has come to mean someit is a lot truer than we want to admit. It thing more. In its broader form, it is the
spurious view that one is not like other people. Self-righteous people always think they speak as outsiders of the human race. The religious man opened his prayer in Jesus’ story with an interesting statement: “God,” he prayed, “I thank you that I am not like other men.” It’s hard to be a king, to have won so many battles, and to have people singing your praises...without being selfrighteous. Ask David. Don’t ask him when he is doing fine and wielding power; ask him after his fall. It’s a hard lesson but an important one and maybe even worth it: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17).
THE SECRET TO GETTING BETTER MIGHT BE TO SIMPLY RECOGNIZE HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO GET BETTER.
That’s true when we enter the throne room of a holy God too. That’s what I know about self-righteousness. What I don’t know is how to fix it. In fact, it is difficult (maybe impos-
So I have no idea how to get better. I suppose we could have no convictions, never be obedient, and fail at everything we do. However, that violates everything I know about what God would have us be. He wants us to have strong convictions, to be obedient, and to reach for excellence. I guess we could pretend that we don’t have those convictions and those gifts. However, that is even crazier than trying to get rid of them. There is already enough pretending and, besides, we would then become selfrighteous about what we pretend: “Hey, everybody, look at me! You know I’m beautiful, gifted and bright…but I’m pretending that I’m not, and you should praise me for it.” So what to do? I don’t know. I wish I had a system to give you or a ten-step program to deal with self-righteousness. There is no system. I wish I could give you a word-for-word prayer to fix it. There isn’t such a prayer. I wish I could tell you how to be really humble. I don’t know how. Wait. Maybe that is the solution. Maybe the solution isn’t in anything you do…but in what you know. The solution isn’t in the discipline of making ourselves less selfrighteous. It is in the recognition that we aren’t. The secret to getting better might be to simply recognize how difficult it is to get better, to go to Jesus with it, and to tell everybody you know that you’ve been to him…and why you went there. That’s it.
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There is a story I sometimes tell my seminary students about the young, arrogant preacher who climbed into the pulpit with his “peacock feathers flying in the breeze.” The sermon was a colossal failure. It didn’t even make it to the front row and the young man was devastated. As he walked down the steps from the pulpit, there were tears of shame in his eyes. An old saint standing at the foot of the stairs said not unkindly, “Son, if you had entered the pulpit the way you left it, you might have left the pulpit the way you entered it.”
sible) to write about self-righteousness without being self-righteous.
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and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.”
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hristians of different stripes get grace wrong in many different ways.
For some, grace is like an injection of God’s power to be administered by trained professionals only. For others, it’s an entirely subjective transaction – a feeling I get as a customer at God’s eternal storehouse. Some imagine grace as a kind of eternal fire insurance. For others still, it’s a vague energy like the Force in Star Wars or a system of justice like the Hindus’ karma.
But there’s even more to grace. The power and presence of God is guaranteed from the beginning of creation. This same guaranteed grace is on offer everywhere today. The producer-consumer model we’re used to gets turned on its head: Because God made us, sent his son to save us, and sent his Holy Spirit to sustain us. Grace means that we have to work not to have God in our lives. As George MacDonald says in C.S. Lewis’s Great Divorce: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” Grace means that we have to work not to have God in our lives.
GRACE MEANS THAT WE HAVE TO WORK But grace really isn’t a thing at all. Grace is the activity of God in our lives and in the life of the world. Grace is the way NOT TO HAVE GOD we talk about a God who intervenes. Grace is the way we know that God IN OUR LIVES. will never leave us alone. Grace is the guarantee of transformation from Him who knows us better than we know ourselves, and who loves us more than we can ask or imagine.
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God gives us many things: Our lives, forgiveness of our sins, and our salvation just to name the big ones. He is also our companion, in the pit of despair as much as on the mountaintop of joy. For everything that God pours out on his creatures, we can sum up in one extraordinary way: God gives only one thing, and that is himself. He gave himself in Jesus, as the traditional Book of Common Prayer puts it, “a full, perfect,
At no point is God sitting a cold distance away from us. In Isaiah 55 we learn of God’s role in the agricultural cycle, a common biblical metaphor for the transforming will of God in the human heart and in human society. God is the one who gives both the “seed to the sower” and also “bread to the eater” (55:10). From the beginning to the end, God is in control. He does all the work himself, all the time. We give thanks, however, that God has chosen certain people, things, and words through which his glory is most radiantly made manifest. Christians are not utopians – we live our lives
somewhere, not nowhere. We have bodies, relationships, homes, and work to do. God meets us in particular places at particular times, setting aside certain times, places, and stuff for our benefit. “Do this,” Jesus says to his disciples in the upper room (Luke 22:19, 1 Cor. 11:24). And yet, God’s activity is both more expansive and more mysterious than we can know. The same Lord who set the stars in the heavens is the Lord whose Word is near you, “on your lips and in your hearts,” (Deut. 30:14, Rom. 10:8). God is determined that His omnipresent grace is going to have its way with us. In good times and bad, grace is the answer. In good times and bad, therefore, our response to grace is thanksgiving. If everything is pure gift from a sovereign God, then we should get on with giving
thanks, even when we do not understand. When we decide to put our lives in God’s hand, we discover that there is actually no other place to be. When we long for and ask for grace, we find the whole world lit up with it. “I once was lost,” John Newton’s hymn reminds us, “but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
Andrew Petiprin is one of our new Key Life authors, and we’re excited to announce his first Key Life book is out. Drop by KeyLife.org/store and look for Truth Matters: Knowing God and Yourself. Andrew is Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Tennessee. For six years he was rector of St. Mary of the Angels Church in Orlando, Florida, and before that he trained for ordination at Yale Divinity School. He was a Marshall Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford from 2001-2003. Andrew and his wife, Amber, live with their two children and two cats in Nashville, Tennessee.
In Truth Matters, Andrew helps readers ground their lives in the ancient truths of the Bible and journey on with meaning and purpose. As it champions the authentic teachings of the Christian faith (it really is all about grace), Truth Matters points to doctrine, liturgy, and tradition as a way to discover not just the truth about God, but to actually encounter God himself…and be forever changed.
Guaranteed.
Buy Truth Matters by Andrew Petiprin at KeyLife.org/store
God’s Not Mad at You Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of the ministry of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Since life is hard for everyone, grace is for all of us. Put simply, grace means that because of what Jesus has done, God’s not mad at you. In fact, he loves you: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Radical grace leads to an equally radical freedom, and that radical freedom leads to infectious joy and surprising faithfulness to Christ. And that changes lives: “I used to be one of those try harder, pray more, and get involved in more bible studies type Christians to try and get closer to Jesus but after listening to your sermons and reading a few of your books the light came on. I feel like a tremendous load has been taken off my shoulders.”
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“I know some people have accused Steve of heresy, which is a bit weird. His messages...make me want to follow Jesus even more!” “I think you saved me from going atheist....You have helped Christianity to be-
come practical to me. And the proof of the effectiveness of your teachings in my life is that the ideas you teach linger in my brain. They continue and continue to produce good fruit and satisfaction in Jesus Christ as I live day by day. I am finally really becoming transformed, and you have been principle in opening these doors in my soul.” On radio, in print, on CD and online at KeyLife.org, we’re proclaiming the scandalous reality of Jesus’ good news to set the captives free. But we can’t do it alone. We need your help, and so do countless Christians who are suffering under the burden of “do more, try harder” religion. Every gift, of any amount, makes a big difference. But if you can’t give, or if you simply don’t want to give, please don’t feel any guilt about that. We’re not into manipulation or pressure. We just want to let you know what Key Life is about and the difference it makes. You can give at KeyLife.org/give, call 1-800-KEY-LIFE or use the attached envelope.
Steve Brown Hidden Agendas We like to pretend that hidden agendas are just for self-important bosses or egotistical politicians, but we all have them. Deep down, we all have a secret plan for getting from where we are to where we want to be, even if we refuse to admit it to ourselves. And if our hidden agendas aren't enough, we wear masks to obscure the truth even more. We put on these masks—like religion, appearance, power, politics, or protection—to drive our agendas. But all of this leaves us feeling phony, ashamed, guilty, and afraid. It's killing us and hurting those we love. But for most of us, it will be a cold day in a hot place before we will be fully honest with anyone else.
Matt Johnson Getting Jesus Wrong Jesus is not a life coach, a movement leader, a cultural visionary, or a blessing dispenser—but you might not know that by listening to many Christians talk about their faith. Feel-good slogans promote a caricatured Jesus made in our own image who cannot save us and leaves us feeling guilty for not saving ourselves. Following the wrong Jesus disappoints us and produces anxiety, pride, and despair. In Getting Jesus Wrong: Giving Up Spiritual Vitamins and Checklist Christianity, pastor and new Key Life author Matt Johnson is genuinely funny and transparent as he shares his personal encounters with a string of false saviors and shows us what it looks like to get Jesus right.
It does no good to tell God that you didn't steal and eat an apple (with apple juice dripping down your chin). God always recognizes and loves the "you" behind the mask.
The message of the Bible is about Jesus coming to exhausted and disillusioned disciples as we are and offering a whole new way of thinking (the way up is down) and a whole new way of life (a rich exploration of the depths of gospel love).
Andrew Petiprin Truth Matters
Kendra Fletcher Lost and Found
Newcomers to the church need a guide for connecting doctrine to real life. In a world that’s increasingly relative, new Key Life author Andrew Petiprin helps readers discover unchanging truth based on God’s Word.
Kendra Fletcher, homeschooling mom of eight, took pride in having it all together— the right schooling, the right theology, the right church, and the right mealplanning, home-managing, keep-it-all-together parenting. Then it all fell apart. Three of Kendra’s children were taken to the brink of death in a period of 18 months.
Mirroring the structure of traditional creeds, Truth Matters helps readers better understand truths about themselves by understanding the truth about God and his desire for a relationship with us.
As wave after wave of crisis hit her family, she learned that doing life and religion “right” was a poor substitute for a living relationship with a loving God.
As it champions the authentic teachings of the Christian faith, Truth Matters points to doctrine, liturgy, and tradition as a way to discover not just the truth about God, but to find God himself.
More than a memoir, Lost and Found will help you find your value, worth, significance, hope, and identity in Christ alone. Experience the freeing grace that only Jesus can give!
To order these books, use the attached envelope, call 1-800-KEYLIFE, write to steve@keylife.org, or order online at KeyLife.org/store
I Love God I
For Letting Me Hate Him by Erik Guzman
t’s normal to think you’re destined for greatness, that you have a unique calling that will change the world. It’s normal to expect that you can walk on water, that God will intervene to protect you no matter how irrational or risky your choices. It’s normal to take on more than is humanly possible. It’s normal to be unable to relate to mere mortals and go silent with social anxiety. It’s normal to have to quiet racing thoughts with alcohol and drugs. It’s normal to erupt with rage at common inconveniences. It’s normal to cry uncontrollably watching Bill Murray movies. It’s normal to feel trapped with no hope of the depression lifting. It’s normal to hate yourself so much that you can’t take a bath without thinking about blowing your brains out in the tub because it would be easier for your wife to clean up. That’s all normal… until a shrink says you have bipolar disorder. Then it’s crazy. And who wants to be crazy? Apparently I do, or I’d go back on medication. But that’s just too rational. I walk on water. What else do you expect from a crazy person?
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Is this a cry for help? No. I have all the help I can stand. This is just an opportunity for me to offer my raw, broken mind to illustrate God’s grace. (You will, of course, want to be suspicious of what a crazy person thinks about God.)
I have been enduring a long, dark stretch of depression. I work. I try not to drink too much. I try not to suck those closest to me into my implosion. I sleep. Before I go to bed I ask God to make it stop or kill me. And every day that I wake up, terrified that I have to do it all over again, I get angrier and angrier at God for making me slog through the molasses. You know what keeps me going? The freedom to rage at God, to tell him just what I think about the mental and emotional hell I’m going through. Like Lieutenant Dan on the shrimp boat in Forrest Gump, I climb the rigging in the middle of the storm, shake my fist at God and scream, “You call this a storm? Blow, you son of a bitch! Blow! It’s time for a showdown! You and me! I’m right here! Come and get me!” And he does. He blows and blows and everything that’s not tied down goes overboard. Then, when the storm dies down and the sea calms, I hear him reply, “I love you.” (I don't literally hear a voice. I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy… yet.) When I say I hear God, I'm talking about remembering when the Father said to Jesus in Scripture, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” And I'm talking about what the Father said when Jesus looked ahead to his cross and begged, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” The Father was silent. Do you know what the Father said when he said nothing to Je-
sus’ plea? He said he would rather lose one beloved Son and raise him from the dead than lose all his children. “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2:10). In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God promises to get us Home before it gets too dark. He said “I love you” as clearly as he possibly could. That love is something I count on when I go into a bipolar fit and decide to wrestle with my creator. “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Nothing in all creation can separate me from the love of God, and one of those things in creation is my screwed up mind. That means there is no delusion so grand, no depression so dark, and no rage so raw that can make God stop loving me. That’s a great relief, and it gives me the freedom to express every twisted thought and emotion to God.
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Yeah, I can trust Jesus, the God who knows what it’s like to beg for the cup of suffering to pass only to be an-
Then again, maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about. If so, this isn’t for you. Move along. Go back to your ham and eggs, mortal. But if you’re losing your grip on reality, or if you done lost it, you are not alone. I think you and I can make it if we remember what’s really real. Our God creates by speaking. He said, “Let there be…” and there it is, all around us. His word makes reality out of nothing at all. And his word to us is that we are loved just as much as he loves Jesus. By speaking that word he says, “Let there be faith,” and there it is, all up inside us. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). This is gospel sanity. It’s the light for the darkness, it’s more real than the suffering, and it will keep us from utter despair.
Rage on. When all the kicking and screaming is over, I will collapse and try to remember in the dark what God said in the light. Yes, he made me crazy and he could stop the madness if he wanted to. That stirs up a hatred for him that scares me. But, in the words of Brennan Manning, God loves me just as I am, not as I should be. And so, I love God for letting me hate him. How’s that for bipolar thinking? If that sounds nuts, you’re right. It’s absolutely cuckoo. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). Then again, there’s always medication. “Prozac until Jesus comes back” is certainly a good option. Erik is author of The Seed: A True Myth available in the KeyLife.org/store.
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My anger at God is strangely comforting. I wouldn’t be mad at him if I didn’t believe he’s real and that he's really in control of my suffering. And I wouldn’t dare express that anger at God if I didn’t believe he loves me despite my cussing and spitting. So, when I have it out with God, it proves to me that I believe in divine sovereignty and love. I really have faith in Jesus’ finished work on the cross. He was sane for me, and I’m eternally grateful. Only a real Christian can be insane enough to curse God and thank him at the very same time. And, as depressed as I am, that thought makes me smile. I have a real faith giving me hope that one day God will wipe away every tear from my puffy eyes.
swered with silence. There was a reason God the Son had to go through hell, and in my saner moments I’d like to believe my pain can be redeemed as well. Maybe me telling you all of this is part of that redemption.
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THE
OTHER
KIND OF GRACE
by Jenni Young
"From this one place I can’t see very far; In this one moment I’m square in the dark; These are the things I will trust in my heart: You can see something else." ~Sara Groves
Sammy saw it first. (Sammy is seven and still pays close attention to life’s wonders.) He showed it to me, so I saw it next. We looked at it outside of our window for a long time. And the chickens? The chickens never saw it at all. It was a hawk, perched high on a dead branch, eyes intent on the chicken coop.
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Now we are modern backyard chicken keepers, totally into free ranging. We know happy chickens are free chickens, scratching for bugs, dust bathing in the sun, and pecking through the grass, and we treat our chickens accordingly. In fact, think it is possible we have the
happiest chickens in Tallahassee… …which might explain why those feathery girls were in that coop that day, crowded together up against the door. They were dreaming about bugs and dust and grass and the good life. In short, they wanted out, and we weren’t opening their door. They pecked and pwocked and gave us dirty chicken looks. But they never saw the hawk. Keeping chickens temporarily cooped up while a hawk perches high and stares at them isn’t dumb or mean. It’s just good chicken tending. While I snapped pictures of the whole scene and texted them to my husband,
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fered, when the test isn’t passed, when I thought about that hawk and those the diagnosis isn’t good… basically chickens, about our children and the when life restricts me beyond what I boundaries we give them, about how can control, I far too quickly wonder much we love to see them happy and where grace has gone. free, about how sometimes we spot some proverbial hawks and have to enBut my chickens and force some temporary I miss grace my children… they boundaries, about pretty easily when I are reminding me how whether or not the children don’t get what I want and about the other kind of grace – the understand, prothink I do deserve it. grace that comes tecting them from when God sees the things that will damage hawks and I don’t. They are reminding their little souls isn’t dumb or mean; it’s me that restrictions beyond my control just good parenting. are always within His, and this too is Then I got to thinking about how somegrace. times God’s grace is like that. Sammy and I sat together the other day I see the daily kind of grace pretty easand watched a hawk while it watched ily when I get what I want and know I our chickens, and today a happy flock don’t deserve it. I miss it pretty easily of hens who never saw it waiting there when I don’t get what I want and think foraged for bugs in our yard, alive and I do deserve it. When the relationship free. isn’t restored, when the job isn’t of-
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