If you’re going through it right now, James 1:12:

“Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.”

Read that again and KEEP GOING. God’s crown of life for you in heaven won’t be “meh.”

If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.

In his book, Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter, Tim Keller makes this really interesting observation re: Peter’s violence at Jesus’ arrest and subsequently equally violent denial of his Lord, shortly thereafter.

It has an important implication for us, and not the one I’d immediately reach to.

Keller:

“Peter’s identity was based on the assumption of his superiority to his fellow disciples.

Peter told Jesus that he was the most passionate and faithful of all. He was not basing his identity on Jesus’s great love for him but on his great love for Jesus.

That meant that while Jesus was Peter’s teacher, Peter was being his own savior.”

Next, Keller links what Self-Righteous, Own Savior mode can do to us, drawing on Yale theologian Miroslav Volf’s theory of what led Cain to murder his own brother.

“Any identity based on our superior performance over other will produce at least two results — fragility and hostility.

First, there will be a deep insecurity and an inability to see yourself. Peter, despite Jesus’s direct warning to him about his coming failure, had no sense of danger. Why not?

Because if you base your very self-worth on being brave, and if you look into your heart and see cowardice, you will have to screen it out and deny it, or you won’t have a self left.

And that is true of any identity not rooted in Jesus’s unmerited love.

…. The second result is hostility toward those who are different.

If you get your identity from being the most passionate follower of Jesus, then you have to be angry or even violent toward someone who opposes your Lord. When Jesus was arrested, Peter was the only disciple who did violence…. when a false identity is endangered, the result is always hostility.”

That, of course, has implications for our lives – whether personal or interpersonal.

I struggle so much with the first aspect of identity – trying to be my own Savior – and absolutely find it so viscerally counterintuitive that God could love me, regardless of who I am or what I do.

That’s not how the world is structured.

That isn’t the way I see life or have experienced it since I was born. It was always a performance-based world, where you were applauded and worth something if you were “good” (however that’s defined) and treated as less valuable if you weren’t.

That’s just the way the sinful world operates.

The clear theological reality is that God doesn’t see us the way others do. We’re all equally sinners and Jesus taught, over and over, that the least is greatest and the point is there is no greatest, at all.

Human evaluation of what success is and isn’t, of who’s greatest or who’s not – it ain’t God’s.

Yet that rubric’s pushed on us from the moment we step into the world, and we never stop getting that message reinforced through every avenue, including ourselves.

So…. when it comes to the idea that God could actually love us because… he loves me? In spite of me? Despite me?

That’s what’s hard. And what I unconsciously try to rid myself of through performance to please and somehow be worthy of him.

I think (know) a ton of Christians struggle with this.

But that’s the self-saving identity Peter had, and it’s a religion of burden and absolute heresy by turning ourselves into our savior.

But it’s so easy to fall into that religion.

As to Keller’s second point — that a false identity will produce hostility — we see that all the time, today, at a macro level, too.

At a group level, Christians increasingly seem to be adopting an identity that’s kin to self-righteousness, and you can see the verbal violence that’s increasingly deployed in the political arena. I used to report and write on politics, and it’s no secret that things have now gotten so ugly and toxic. And Christians far too easily find themselves (whether on the right or left) reveling in the mire.

Instead of seeing the world as a mission field, we often see the world as a battleground between ourselves (“the saints”) and the evil ones who are trying to destroy it.

And we can dehumanize the exact ones Jesus worked so hard to humanize and say, “They’re just as valuable and I love them just as much”).

Keller:

“When we ‘other’ a group or people, we treat them as alien and strange, and we stress what we see as their weakness and evils in an effort to prove to ourselves and others how superior we are by contrast.”

In a wonderful Good Friday address from 1982, Raniero Cantalamessa reminds us that we must all continually embrace the confession “I killed Jesus of Nazareth.”

Not to beat ourselves up.

But to remind us, individually, that we can’t be our own savior, and, collectively, that we dare not judge the others who put the Lord on the cross.

We are all equally responsible, we all spit on and rejected him, and for any of us to put ourselves in judgment of another is to put ourselves on God’s throne. Which is blasphemy.

And, again, at a micro level, to sit in a place of working ourselves to salvation, we are also putting ourselves in the place of Christ.

I will struggle on fighting these unconscious identities and their manifestations for as long as I live.

The only answer is Christ, and even if you and I fail in our fights, we always have to remember that Christ’s salvation is enough.

If our salvation depended on the merit of our own faith, then God help us. None of us would be saved!

But Jesus’ mercy and grace is stronger than anything our sin could throw at him. Thanks be to God.

Ann Voskamp, in her new book, Loved to Life, points to John the Baptist’s famous, “Look! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

Voskamp (emphasis added).

“The lifting of eyes to look to the Lamb of God — this lifting that even the weariest among us can do.

And yet, in the paradox of all things true, the way we turn our eyes may actually be the hardest of all.

Because focusing the eyes is always a matter of how we focus the heart.

Where the eyes are fixed, so the heart is…. Where you look is where you love.

Looking on what your hands can do, looking to what your work is working on, looking to what all your striving is reaching for does little to no good at all. You don’t have to know what to do, but just decide: Lord, Lamb of God, ‘our eyes are on you.’ (2 Chronicles 20:12).

Where you look will save — or smother — your life.”

Think about that phrase: “Where you look will save – or smother – your life.”

Yeah, absolutely.

A famous moment from Scripture comes when Peter looks to Christ and walks on water; then suddenly looks away, below, at the dread of the sea’s depth, and “was terrified and began to sink.”

Instead of the supernatural, he saw the natural and the natural is bleak and will destroy even the strongest of us (physical death being its ultimate conclusion).

Peter’s example is useful, but obviously dramatic, and we often don’t think of our everyday in terms of that drama.

But we’re engaged in the same struggle, trying to walk on water, with the same perverse, deep water ready, wanting to sink us, and how many of us feel we’re drowning? Not just in a moment, as Peter. But for long stretches. I do. Even now as I write. Last night, as I went to bed. More nights than I can count.

And we often drown silently, to ourselves, and indeed, the physical act of drowning isn’t about screaming as often portrayed – it’s famously deadly because it silently takes the swimmer.

And so, you and I often drown in silence because that’s the way most humans do. Alone. To ourselves.

Why is it often alone? Many reasons.

For one, I think it’s particularly difficult to share with other Christians, because we feel extra guilt from confiding to the faith community: “I’m drowning,” because Christians are supposed to be “more than conquerors,” we’re supposed to walk on water because we’ve given ourselves to the one who did, we’re supposed to have the Spirit inside us and therefore, “I’m no longer a slave to fear.”

And yet, we fail more than we conquer. We sink more than we walk on water. At least I do. Maybe you don’t. But I sure do.

And that’s part of the deal.

In his famous parable of the sower, Jesus said that when hard times comes, the faithless will be exposed and disappear from Christianity entirely. Not just for a moment, but forever.

The hard times will come – that’s a promise (“in this world you will have tribulation”) – but what we need to focus on is that, yes, maybe we failed and maybe we sank, but at some point, we looked up and no matter when we look up — whether it’s when we’re partially submerged or even in the belly of Jonah’s whale (“When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord”) — God will never turn his face from us. He will always make a way for us to make it to land again, dry, under the sun.

No matter how many times we drown– as long as we end the matter by looking up, well, looking up is where the thief was and Jesus said, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise.”

I’m middle-aged, but realistically, I’m on the back-end of my life and we never really know, do we, and I wish I could say that I’ve gotten better at this faith thing than twenty or thirty years ago.

But I haven’t.

But the Lord has kept me in his arms, even though I’m still just as needy and dependent and prone to wander as I ever was.

Brennan Manning’s memoir All is Grace says it all in the title.

And remember this song about grace:

“Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far

And grace will lead me home.”

If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.

[PS This blog is a politics-free zone (personally, I don’t think Jesus would identify with sides and notably refused to be drawn into the political issues of the day], and so I’m reluctant to put any political figure on here, but this performance of “Amazing Grace” by former president Obama has always moved me – the way that, at first, the audience isn’t entirely sure whether he’s being serious, but the former POTUS shows, no sings, that it’s an Amazing Grace moment. Such a powerful song.

CBS has a good read on why “Amazing Grace” remains one of the most universally-known and loved songs, regardless of faith, actually. It’s about humanity, in our truest form. We are all entirely reliant on grace. Every human knows that. And so we all feel the song when we hear it. I read or saw somewhere [perhaps a review of this book] that Christians — in trying to “sweetify” our hymns — made a brief effort to change the word “wretch” to something less “sordid.” But…. that didn’t fly. And not because of stiff, conservative theological resistance, but because — even among non-believers — the song loses its power without the truth of “wretch.” Grace doesn’t resonate as deeply unless contrasted with wretch, and every human has felt a wretch, and by the grace of God, when we feel that way, may we all look up because it’s the only place where the wretch can find someone who sees us as we don’t – created, loved, and longed for.]

Brennan Manning, in A Glimpse of Jesus: The Stranger to Self-Hatred:

“No antecedent beauty enamors me in his eyes. I am lovable because he loves me. Period.”

In general, I think the word “story” is a bit overused in Christian lexicon these days, but in his book Searching for Enough, Tyler Staton invokes “story” in a way that I hope makes you feel important and recognized, because often, in our illness, we feel so useless (excessive self-criticism is a symptom of many disorders).

Staton uses the word “because” in his exposition on story, and often the word “because” can throw us because there’s so much “because” that’s befuddling, but if we understand Christianity properly, “because” can inject us with some life-giving energy, and give us the sense again that who we are matters to God.

Not just for this earth, but for all of eternity.

Staton:

“The English novelist E.M. Forster draws a distinction between a story and a plot with the single word because. A story is merely events arranged chronologically — ‘the king died and then the queen died’.

A plot occurs when the focus zeroes in on the causality, the because of those events — ‘the king died and then the queen died of grief’.”

Staton then applies Forster’s remarkably simple but magical word “because” for great writing to your Christian life, and the Because of you revolves around the Because of Christ.

“The question Jesus’ life leaves us with is this: Is it merely a story, or is it a plot?

Is his life only a series of events, or is it something more coherent, the first and greatest because?

To answer this question, we are forced to engage a similar, but much more personal question: Is my life merely a story, or is it a plot? Am I the sum total of chronological events, or is there a coherent plot?”

The greatest because? I love that. Christ’s life was the greatest because there ever was.

And if we really believe that Jesus came to die for us, because he wanted to defeat death, sin, and raise us to share in his inheritance, then we can go forward in life knowing that we matter to his plan because he created us for a reason.

And just as Christ’s entire life, from virgin birth to resurrection, was linked by a series of redemptive because’s, so, indeed, your life and my life is linked by a series of redemptive because’s, as well.

We may be facing unbelievably difficult circumstances, disorders, and diseases, but Jesus did as well — because that was the cup he had to drink from on earth to drink the one when he was reunited with his Father.

When we look at how perfectly transparent and redemptive the because’s were in Christ’s life, we can know it’s the same for us, even if we can’t see it.

And that’s because we don’t live life in perfect retrospection. Instead, we get caught in relentless introspection, and it can drag us down and take our eyes off the fact that we know how it all ends.

The drama of life will never stop, just as the drama in a story or movie continues, but there will be a discharge in that war. An It’s A Wonderful Life Ending moment for you and me, and methinks Jesus can cook up something better than Frank Capra, no?

So think about your because in the light of your final redemption. That’s super hard to do. Our disease makes it even harder.

But just think of how clear each because was in Christ’s life, and even though he was a man of sorrows, he did end up rising up from the grave.

You and I will rise up from our physical graves too (and the graves we often mentally feel stuck in).

Because Christ did, you and I will.

In the meantime, if you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or any other mood disorder (all medical conditions)….

For readers in the United States…

Find a psychiatrist here.

Find a therapist here.

For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.

For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.

[Painting: Les Disciples Pierre et Jean courant au Sépulcre le matin de la Résurrection, Eugene Burnand]