Abiding in Jesus, Living in Him (18)

 “…and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.” (John 15:2b).

 

I have never been around a combat veteran who freely talks about combat or who glories in their war experience. There was a special operations veteran in one of my parishes who grew up in a rural community, hunting was part of his upbringing. I knew this man when we were both in our 60s. After his discharge from the Army he never laid hands on a gun, he told me, “I can’t touch them anymore because of combat.”

 

I had a dear brother in Christ, now with the Lord, who was a WWII combat veteran. In all the hours I spent with him he only made one remark about combat in the European theater. “The 88s were bad, they were really bad.”

 

One of my nephews, who served in the Marines in the Middle East, gets disgusted when people want him to tell “war stories” – he wants none of it.

 

There are certain experiences we have in life that are not to be made merchandise of, they are not be to gloried in. (Yes, for the purposes of our own healing and also helping others it can be right and needful to speak of them – for we are not to be their prisoners. Together in Christ we can experience victory and healing and wholeness.)

 

In much the same way I find that folks who have truly engaged in spiritual warfare tend not to talk about it; while that often folks who do go on and on about spiritual warfare have little idea what they are talking about.

 

Again, I find the same principle when it comes to sin, and most certainly with what I term “deep sin.” I was once with a group of folks from a certain congregation who seemed to want to outdo each other in talking about how sinful they were – and it shocked me. Where was Jesus in all of that? Where was the Gospel? They were proclaiming an anemic Gospel, if it can be called a Gospel, for I didn’t detect any good news. They were a sweet group of people, but they were wearing grave clothes (John 11:44).

 

Have you ever had food poisoning? If so, this is the best illustration I can give you – sinning ought to be like contracting food poisoning, it ought to make us sick…really sick. Now since there are degrees of food poisoning, I’ll leave it to you to work out the nuances of the analogy, but my point is that sinning is not something casual – it is toxic, and to talk about it as if it is a daily way of life…well…something is amiss if we do that, that is not the Biblical image of our life in Christ. (Thank God that we have continual cleansing in Jesus – 1 John 1:7!).

 

“Surely every man at his best is a mere breath.” (Psalm 39:5c).

 

“With reproofs You chasten a man for iniquity; You consume as a moth what is precious to him; surely every man is a mere breath.” (Psalm 39:11).

 

When fish from the dark places of the ocean depths come to the surface of the waters, we are reminded of who we are outside of Christ and that there is no self-righteousness or pretension that we can hide behind – and so we run to Jesus Christ, confessing and giving thanks that we have been made “the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor. 5:21). We see that Jesus has drawn us to Himself, that our dear Father has drawn us to Jesus, and that this drawing and the grace and faith of Christ has its source in God and not ourselves (John 6:37, 44; Ephesians 2:1 – 10). As Jesus holds us tight, we hold tight to Jesus.

 

Those who know about deep sin are reluctant to mention it, for it is hideous and vile. All the superficial trappings of religion are blown away in the face of the abyss, and it is only when we look to the Cross that we find light and life and healing and forgiveness and peace and rest. At the Cross we enter into the purity and holiness of our Lord Jesus Christ, He clothes us in His righteousness, and we are His lambs forever. We become one with Jesus our Shepherd.

 

When we see “deep sin” we do not see the things we’ve done, so much as get a glimpse of who we are (were) outside of Jesus Christ – we see ourselves rather than our actions, or put another way, we see that the source of our sinful actions was the “self” the “old man” that we once were – a creature of the abyss of sin and death, an enemy of God.

 

This, my friends, is an element of our Father’s merciful pruning – so that we might always and forever be joined to our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

There is a sense in which the prophet Nathan is before us, saying to us as he said to Daivd, “Thou are the man!” Once we realize that this is indeed true, but that Jesus Christ is the Greater and Perfect Man, and that we are in Him, we can get on with life in love to God and others, we can lose our lives that we might find them.

 

Hans Boersma writes of John Climacus and the “gift of tears – a mourning over sin.” Boersma points out that we “don’t conjure up such tears, they are a gift from God.” He quotes Climacus, “When the soul grows tearful, weeps, and is filled with tenderness, and all this without having striven for it, then let us run, for the Lord has arrived uninvited and is holding out to us the sponge of loving sorrow, the cool waters of blessed sadness with which to wipe away the record of our sins.” (Pierced by Love, Hans Boersma), pp. 38 – 39).

 

I find great comfort in this picture of the Lord arriving uninvited and of us running to Him, for there are times when the veil is drawn back and I see myself in certain past situations and it is more than I can stand – it makes me sick and disgusted, I see myself as I was outside of Jesus. I am not simply writing of things I did or didn’t do, I am writing of “me,” of who I was – and it is frightening. It is a severe pruning and it reassures me of the incredible salvation that I, that we, have in Jesus Christ.

 

Dante’s Purgatory is the finest book of its type I’ve ever encountered, a trusted companion on my pilgrimage when dealing with the purging and cleansing of the core of our being. (I recommend the Dorothy L. Sayers translation because of her fidelity to the structure of the Comedy, her pains in translation, and her notes.) Perhaps we could term it a journey of practical sanctification. 

1 Corinthians 3:10 – 15 makes clear that we have a purification process to experience, and I think that Hebrews 5:8 – 9 indicates that this process has an important element that has nothing to do with sin; which is to say that this process has much mystery to it – only our Father can prune us, only our Lord Jesus can truly disciple us, only the Holy Spirit and the Word can work deep within us. Of course to be sure, we are called to experience this in koinonia with one another in Christ.

 

Writing about “deep sin” is something I thought I should do in the event any readers have experienced this radical pruning. You are not alone, you have joined the saints through the ages. Take comfort that our Father’s pruning is merciful, that He wounds so that He might heal, and that He is ever drawing us deeper into Himself and the Holy Trinity, He is ever and always enveloping us in His everlasting love in Jesus Christ.

 

Our Father prunes us so that we might bear more fruit – what a wonderful assurance!