Graham Greene, that brilliant 20th century writer, in his famous novel, The Power and the Glory, with one of my favorite lines about the oldness of our sin: “Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice.”
And thus….. “it was too easy to die for what was good….it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and corrupt.”
Full passage:
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“How often the priest had heard the same confession – Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much.
It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death.
It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for him or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”
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I don’t know about you, but I’m awfully half-hearted.
And if I’m anything full, I’d say full-sinned.
But I need (and got) a God who died for the half-hearted and full-sinned.
“Quit keeping score altogether and surrender ourselves with all our sinfulness to God who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper, but only his child redeemed by Christ.”
Christians with OCD, depression, anxiety etc are particularly prone to self-loathing and score-keeping, but remember what Brennan Mannning once wrote: God loves us with “magnificent monotony.”
And that magnificent monotony? He won’t be talked out of it. Even if we try to.
