Brennan Manning, in The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus (emphasis added).
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“It is simply not possible to know the Christ of the Gospels unless we alter our attitude toward ourselves and take sides with Him, against our own self-evaluation.”
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Do we do that?
“Take sides with Him, against our own self-evaluation?”
It’s hard, but that’s the beauty of Christianity. It’s not about us, it’s about what he’s done for us.
In The Furious Longing of God, Manning quotes Basil Hume, who claimed that Christians find it easier to believe that God exists than that he loves them. That’s been my lifelong battle, as well.
Paul Tillich, in this famous passage, gets it exactly right. Because of Christ’s grace, “simply accept the face that you are accepted.”
Legalists want to make it harder. It isn’t. Jesus did everything.
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“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life.
It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged.
It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us.
It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you…… Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”
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For some of us, that’s too great to believe. Simply accepting that Christ accepts us.
Accepting his evaluation of ourselves, and not our own.
It’s terribly hard for me. And it’s especially hard when we have mood disorders that take us down paths of self-loathing and self-criticism.
But in the moments where we do grasp that God loves us, adores us, treasures us as much as he does his own son, Christ (John 17:23), then there isn’t anything more beautiful than that.
And it’s then that we can barely contain ourselves from telling others about this Good News. And that’s what the Good News and Great Commission are all about.
