The REAL You

You are not your sin; sin is no longer the truest thing about the man who has come into union with Jesus. Your heart is good. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you” (Ezek. 36:26). The Big Lie in the church today is that you are nothing more than “a sinner saved by grace.” You are a lot more than that. You are a new creation in Christ. The New Testament calls you a saint, a holy one, a son of God. In the core of your being you are a good man. Yes, there is a war within us, but it is a civil war. The battle is not between us and God; no, there is a traitor within us who wars against our true heart fighting alongside the Spirit of God in us:

A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death . . . Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells . . . if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus . . . When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. (Rom. 8:2, 9–11 The Message)

The real you is on the side of God against the false self. Knowing this makes all the difference in the world. The man who wants to live valiantly will lose heart quickly if he believes that his heart is nothing but sin. Why fight?

(Wild at Heart , 144–45)

I know many people might not agree with everything John Eldridge has written, but I feel like this rings very true, both as the predominating misconception in the church and also as the life-giving truth, like shackles falling off or a moment of realization, that the world is not as you thought it was—in a good way.

When you read that excerpt, what do you think? How do you react to the idea that maybe you are not sinful at your core? That your flesh, your "sin nature" has been kicked off the throne of your heart and is now an enemy within the gates, trying to deceive and tempt you, but is not you? Does that give you a sense of hope, of freedom?

The yellow flag that many Christians might raise, is to caution against being prideful or thinking we are good apart from God. But that is precisely why I think Eldridge's statements are so needed. We are so afraid of being prideful, which is sinful, that we balk at the idea of saying we are "good". Jesus Himself reserved that for God, didn't He? (context, context, context! Jesus was God! He WAS good. If Jesus wasn't good, then He wasn't God, so that's clearly not the explicit point He was making. We have to be careful with stuff like that...) However, somehow, through being born again by the Spirit of God, of being united with Jesus in His death, resurrection and ascension, we are not the same as we were before. We are not unchanged. Being a Christian means precisely, in some intangible way, that the Spirit of the Living God has made its residence in us, and we are one with Him (not in a pantheistic way, in which we ARE God—we are no longer separated from communing with God because of our sin). So, it is not to say, Christ saved us from our sin, and now, on our own, we are good and are capable of earning entrance to heaven or anything like that. I think we need to process that they go together... If we truly believe that we have become a new creation in Christ, that the old has passed away, that we have been crucified with Christ and He now lives in us and through us, that the Living God has taken up residence in our hearts, our inner being, then in that union, if that has happened and cannot be arbitrarily turned on and off, then who we are has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. We are now beloved and adopted sons and daughters of God, capable of walking in unity with the Spirit of our Loving Father.

The biggest area that seems to be affected by this line of thinking is in the area of my thoughts. If I still believe, contrary to so much of what the New Testament clearly teaches about what happens in the conversion process of salvation and redemption, that I am sinful at my core, then suddenly the thoughts I have and the feelings I have are untrustworthy. I have no way of discerning internally what is from God, from me or the devil. It creates a never-ending self-contempt that keeps me in a prison of second-guessing every decision, every thought. Because even if I think a decision is good or wise, in that framework, I am deceitful and wicked and can't trust my own motivations. How can we live that way? How can we live by the Spirit or find the kind of life-giving freedom that brings hope, faith and love, if we believe our sinful core is so incapable of being good? The only way that could happen would be for God to absolutely override our actions and decisions, like He was controlling a puppet or robot, not a living human who He created with the freedom and capacity to love Him in return in the first place.

I think a lot of my experience in church growing up had this wrong, unfortunately. What are your thoughts, blog readers? Is there merit in clinging to a concept of inner depravity, even after becoming a Christian? Is there deep dangers in letting go of that idea?