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It takes some form of bravery to admit that everything you have to offer God is viewed by him as dirty rags in comparison to what Jesus has done. The Christmas story declares that none of your efforts mattered in the first place. Life flows out of Jesus and who he made us to be, not who we think we can make ourselves to be. The Incarnation of God undoes every intuition we have to set us free.
The LARK BLOGCAST is a written exploration of God’s scandalous grace read aloud for those who don't have time or don't like to read. Listen in and be encouraged as you go. Read at larksite.com/blog. Join the conversation by emailing howdy@larksite.com.
Read the blog that this episode read aloud at www.larksite.com/blog/god-witih-us-raggedy-rags or read below:
GOD WITH US: RAGGEDY RAGS
Jameson Allen
“Tonight we’re just raggedy manger stragglers who feel the heaviness of our old raggedy clothes from fighting the long battle with evil and badness. With our raggedy rags, we’ve tried to polish this dark world into something good enough to win our way to freedom. With our raggedy rags, we’ve tried to patch together our own ropes to somehow climb to freedom. With our raggedy rags, we’ve tried to disguise ourselves as someone else, as someone better, as someone bigger, thinking we could sneak our way to freedom and back to God.
Jesus whispers, “The freedom you could never earn with your raggedy rags - that’s what I came to give you. I came to win you back to Me, to give you Myself, to make you free. I did it for love, because I could never, no matter what, ever stop loving you.”
Ann Voskamp, Unwrapping the Greatest Gift
THE GOOD NEWS OF BEING FOUND OUT
Being found out may be one of the most liberating experiences of all. Pain, embarrassment, and consequences come to bear anyway, but the charade is over. There is no joy in the edited life, burying reality under a mountain of lies and aesthetic manipulations.
The incarnation of God simultaneously reveals two truths we always bet against. First, it shows that our belief that God is far off, angry, and waiting for us to come to him is ungrounded. Instead, he has come, and he is here. And he isn’t leaving.
Second, it exposes the truth that we needed God to do something outrageous to rectify what went wrong. We were dead with no way back. Helping ourselves was further gone than the reversal of aging.
When the blazing light of Christ hits our skin, we feel the pain of our death peeling off and the ecstasy of his life raising us up. In this way, being found out is the best, worst thing that can happen.
THE RAGS OF MORALISM EXPOSED
It is sad and twisted, sneaky in Voskamp’s words, how we convince each other there’s an appropriate response to God’s love and grace. It’s mostly sad because our attempt to hold a high view of God’s grace nullifies it instead.
Taking issue with “cheap grace” and “abusing grace,” we fill in the fine print Jesus forgot. All that can ever get you to God is Jesus. As he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
So we construct religion after religion for getting to Jesus, now that he can get us to God. We relocate the religion Jesus judged instead of leaving it where he buried it. No matter how many times we read Jesus’ words, we default to a false view of God that leads to truckloads of false expectations.
“We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind” (Isaiah 64:5, NLT). Our best efforts are useless garbage.
The exiled people to whom Isaiah prophesied desired their old temple way of life (Isaiah 64:11) like Israel desired Egypt just after being set free (Exodus 16:3). Sounds all too familiar. Today, Christians desire their temples to faithfully (anxiously) worship the God who ironically ended religion forever.
OUTED BY THE SCANDAL OF CHRISTMAS
All the ways we’ve always thought we get to God have been confronted and confounded in Jesus. When Jesus was delivered by a woman who never had sex with a man, the judgment of all our “raggedy rags” began. Our ability (and need) to contribute has been exposed as illusory, and God arrived in utter weakness to reveal just how free we’ve always been.
Jesus’ arrival showed that for grace to be grace, it must be uninhibited and boundaryless, limited not even the extent of the rebellion. The only alternative is the affirmation of the most terrifying fear of all: we can out-sin the grace of God. In truth, this is absolute nonsense because for God to be God is for God to be gracious. Grace was not a decision God deliberated over.
God is known throughout the Bible for making mothers out of barren women. But Mary is the first mother he made out of a virgin. The message of Christmas is that God brings life out of the lifeless. The Gospel in Christmas is that God became the most delicate form of life to reveal his devotion and to disillusion his creation.
The Incarnation of God was not a concession. God was not bothered, annoyed, or embarrassed by becoming immersed in our life. It was his crowning celebration of our life in him and the primary expression of what it means for God to be God and for humans to be human.
‘God With Us’ is not a myth or a metaphor. It is the reality that holds all things together, and it is the only thing that can ever convince us that we already eternally matter to God.
‘GOD WITH US’ IS NOT FAIRNESS
This is where we finally allow ourselves to accept the blazing light and life of Christ. As we slowly warm to the idea of being fully seen and exposed, the scales on our eyes begin to give way. The pain of being shown what we are without him is finally surrendered to the medicine of his promise to never forsake us (Kruger, Across All Worlds).
“I have sat in offices for years and watched frightened people draw new breath once the worst was said and nothing bad happened as a result… Life takes on a completely different hue once we tell just one person what it is that we’ve worked so hard at not saying.” (Joan Chittister, Radical Spirit). Truly, it is we who cannot forget our sins, not God. It is we who fight for fairness instead of forgiveness.
The God who became a Messiah by becoming a human baby has forever pronounced his love over people who only fail to prove their love for him. The Gospel in Christmas is that God is not running away from us or waiting in the distance. He is sprinting toward us.
“I am loved so much that I am left free to leave home. The blessing is there from the beginning. I have left it and keep on leaving it. But the Father is always looking for me with outstretched arms to receive me back and whisper again in my ear: ‘You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests’” (Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son).
This means no one, no, not one, must change their ways to be counted among the faithful. Our “raggedy rags” have been proven obsolete and unnecessary by the birth of Christ and the Incarnation of God. We are finally free to really live without fear of failing the one who will never fail us.
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