When my wife was growing up, her family briefly attended a church where the pastor told his beloved congregation: “You’re worse than a worm. A worm doesn’t sin.”
He’d say it after the congregation sang, “Amazing Grace,” which I guess the pastor thought was John Newton’s takeaway.
We know that’s a horrible way of looking at things, but we often do feel stuck in Wormdom, because shame, self-loathing and guilt go hand-in-hand-in-hand with depression.
Like many depressed Christians, I need to remember why God loves me in order to know he does.
We might know the answer, but we have to hear it new ways or else we’ll stop believing it because if you tell your wife, “I love you” every day, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same way, she’ll start to wonder if you’re just saying it out of legal obligation or heart.
If you’ve never read it, Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair is a wonderful, new place to hear why.
I won’t retell the whole story, but here’s the part you need to know.
One evening, the lovely, married Sarah Miles is doing her affair thing with writer, Maurice Bendrix, and a bomb explodes where they’re affairing, and Bendrix is pinned underneath a door.
Sarah falls to her knees and foxhole prays to the God she doesn’t believe in to save Bendrix.
And makes a vow – if God saves Bendrix, she’ll break off the affair.
While she’s still on her knees, a hand moves from under the door, because the hand of God has moved from heaven, and her lover is alive.
As is so often the case with humans, Sarah’s gratitude is short, and she realizes the horror of what she’s done. She’s made a deal with a God she doesn’t believe in to squash an affair she loves with all her heart.
But Sarah dutifully holds up her end of the vow — she cuts Bendrix off, decisively and without explanation.
Then she descends into misery and bitterness.
When we give up sin, we often feel the anger of spiritual obligation, which is something the Bible doesn’t talk much about.
We feel it when our heart but not our mind is far from God, when we believe in the truth of his commandments, but don’t love the God who has given them.
When our love for God fades, his commandments might not break our faith, but they can crush our spirit and leave us bitter towards a God we don’t love but still follow, and a world we love but can’t follow.
Sarah has it even worse – she doesn’t have faith in God the way we do, and yet she has a vow she feels inexplicably bound to.
With no Bendrix to sleep with, she decides to throw herself into other affairs but nothing approaches what she once had.
Sarah grows angrier with God, writing in her journal:
“You let me sin, but you take away the fruits of my sin. You let me try to escape with D [her new lover], but you don’t allow me to enjoy it. You make me drive love out, and then you say there’s no lust for you, either. What do you expect me to do now, God?”
God never answers, and Sarah throws her final spite in God’s face.
“What do you love most in me?” She writes to God in her diary.
“Tell me that, God, and I’ll set about robbing you of it forever. I want to do something that I enjoy and that will hurt you.”
She starts to search her soul, but to her surprise, she can’t find anything that God would love. Every good part of her is tainted by something selfish and she’s finally left calling herself “a bitch and a fake.”
Sound familiar?
Well, here’s the truth Sarah didn’t know and we often forget: God does love something most in us and he loves it with all his heart – Christ.
And further, we cannot rob him of that thing.
In a fit of selfish indulgence, you could rob God of your love, your kindness, any goodness possible, and then stare him down in the face and say, “What do you think of me now, God?” And I think he’d just say, I still see Christ, my dear child.
If Sarah believed, she could have said, “God, you know I am a bitch and a fake, but what is Christ? He is perfect. And thank God that I can never rob you of the thing you love most in me.”
That’s wonderful, but it still leaves me a little cold, emotionally, because it almost seems like a salvific sleight of hand.
God loves a phantom me, and he’s willing to love me only because he doesn’t see me, but Christ.
That’s hard. We feel Christ loves a part of us and not the whole of us, and no one wants to be loved for just their good parts. They want to be loved as a whole human being.
“God might know me, but in order to actually like me, he has to overlook or block out huge parts of me,” we might think.
We struggle with these thoughts because we’re thinking of a God who looks at us from outside a relationship, and not, inside one, as our Father.
Parents love their kids from the context of relationship, and while that might seem legal and cold, we know it’s anything but. In fact, relationship puts more heart into our love than anything else.
My kids are mine, legally, but far more than that, they are mine emotionally. And what means more – their birth certificate or their birth?
Once we hold them in our arms for the first time, we say “for better or for worse” and know there’s no worse that could stop us from loving those little hands no matter what they might do in the future.
We have to believe that about God. We cannot have a heart for God if we don’t feel he has a heart for us.
But does God really love us as much as Christ?
My favorite, go-to-verse in the Bible comes in John (natch).
In Christ’s famous John 17 prayer for his followers, he says the Father loves us “as much as you love me.” In case you doubt that means what it says, the Greek for “as much” means just that — “in proportion” and “to the degree.” Or according to Thayer, “corresponding to fully.”
So if you ever wonder how God could love you – do this instead, ask how he could love Christ, and you have your answer.
Do you wonder how God could love Jesus?
Would you ever ask God, “How could you really love your Son?!”
And yet we ask that over and over, about ourselves. Like Sarah, you and I often feel we’re a “bitch and fake,” but God hates it when we condemn ourselves. That’s Satan’s job.
Instead, Paul says you, me, we’re, “his dear children.”
If you’ve never read The End of the Affair and want to, then stop right here because I’m going to spoil it and tell you how Sarah’s story ends.
In God’s arms, as his dear child.
She writes to the Lord:
“I didn’t know it, but you moved in the pain…. my disbelief made no difference to You. You took it into your love and accepted it like an offering…. I wasn’t afraid of the desert any longer because you were there.”
Christian Heinze is editor of the Weary Christian.
