Faith and the Hamster Wheel

It’s Lent. The season on the church calendar when we remember our problem as humans…not that we had forgotten. I don’t know about you, but the voices of shame make themselves known in my heart and mind on a daily basis. My good friend sums them up thus: “You’re not good enough. You never were good enough. You never will be good enough.” Joy, joy. Aren’t you glad you started reading this? Still, I am human so I have tendency to hear those same old voices of shame, and I reflexively turn to the same old “solution.” I turn to my own strength or effort. Better climb back onto that hamster wheel of self-improvement and try to outrun those old voices. It never works. I might do a pretty good job today and check off all the to do’s on my list, and feel a little reprieve. But I’ll wake up tomorrow and something will trigger the voices again, and I’ll be back to square one. Hamster wheel.

Our problem is righteousness. God is, and we are not. And the two do not mix. The Anglican lectionary has us in the book of Romans during this lenten season, and what a perfect book to study when it comes to this problem with righteousness. The letter to the Romans is the Apostle Paul writing out his understanding of the Christian faith from start to finish. A systematic walk through Christianity. The cliff notes, if you will. If you remember the story of Paul from Acts, he was a Pharisee, which meant that he had been thoroughly trained in the Jewish faith and traditions. He would have memorized at the minimum the first five books of the Scriptures, which collectively are called the Pentateuch, or simply “the books of the law” in short hand. In all likelihood, he would have had much of the prophets and psalms memorized as well. Memorized! The vast majority of what we know as the Old Testament memorized. He was an expert in other words, and on top of that he was zealous.

Originally known as Saul, he was famous, or notorious depending on which side you were on, for persecuting Christians, followers of the Way as they were known at that time. He saw them as a threat to the truth, to Judaism. . .to what he thought was righteous. In his mind, and in the minds of most of the Pharisees, there was no way this Galilean named Jesus could have been the Messiah. The guy didn’t look anything like the conquering hero they all expected, and he seemed to break the law. . .a lot. He hung out with law-breakers, with outcasts, with the unclean. . .aka the unrighteous. Which doesn’t make sense with our little formula earlier: God, the righteous + we, the unrighteous = no simpatico! Jesus didn’t seem too concerned about it, and he had the audacity to claim he was the Son of God and the forgiver of sins! That’s just blasphemous. On top of it all and the greatest offense, he died on a cross as a criminal. To be hung on a tree was to be cursed under the law. Proof that he was unrighteous. There was simply no way that this Jesus could be the expected Messiah. No way. And everyone who thought otherwise had to be stopped…they had to be corrected and brought back into the fold. And if they were unwilling to come back then they would be arrested and killed if necessary because that’s what blasphemers and law-breakers, the unrighteous, deserve. Just like the Jesus they followed.

This was Saul’s perspective, and he was right according to his Jewish faith. He was a good Pharisee, a good student of the law. The matter of righteousness is that important and that serious. Humanity’s ability to be in relationship with God depended on it...nothing less than eternity depended on it. So, Saul was zealous and determined to stamp out this aberration known as the Way…these “Christians.” Until he was quite rudely interrupted by Jesus. That famous day on the road to Damascus on his way to righteously (he thought) arrest more Christians, Saul has a supernatural encounter with the risen Lord Jesus, and his world exploded. He was confronted by the risen Jesus himself, who he had dismissed as an imposter, whose death he probably celebrated and now could not avoid. He came face to face with the glorified Son of God, and everything Saul thought changed dramatically. Everything. Nothing was the way he thought it was. If Jesus was indeed risen from the dead, if he was who he said he was…God’s own Son come to save humanity, then everything changed for Saul. He was changed.

Everything Saul believed died on that road that day. Saul died on that road that day. And Jesus gave him a new life. He gave him a new name, a new call. The Lord made him Paul, and turned the man that was once his greatest enemy, the greatest enemy of the church, in to his greatest missionary. . .the one who would carry the message of Jesus Christ to the known world at that time. And what would have been even worse for the Saul the Pharisee. . .insult to injury. . .Jesus sent him as Paul the missionary to the Gentiles. The Gentiles! Everyone in the world outside of Israel and Judaism. The unclean according the the law. The unrighteous by definition. That’s you and me We know who Jesus it because of that interruption in Saul’s life that day. And the letter to the Romans is the fruit of that transformation to Paul.

Paul knew Jesus changed everything, and we see it nowhere more explicitly than in this letter. It was one of his later letters, that he wrote towards the end of his life after he had had time to work out all of the implications of Jesus on reality, and here he writes it down. He re-examines everything he knew from his education as a Pharisee through this new lens of Jesus Christ and puts it into this letter. We see it from his introduction. He lays out the foundation of this letter, of the entire Christian faith in the first 17 verses. He tells us it is all about Jesus Christ. He is a servant of Christ, set apart for the gospel of God, that everything in the Scriptures was pointing to Jesus. He declares Jesus to be fully human and fully God. He tells us he was descended from David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God according to the Spirit by his resurrection from the dead. And he acknowledges Jesus as the Lord and the one who gives us grace from God.

And we see that incredible fruit in the fact that the man who once wanted to hunt Christians down was now rejoicing at the news of their faith. He tells the Roman Christians that he longed to come see them, that he wanted to come and encourage them in their faith, to build them up and continue to spread the word.

All of this builds to the verse that is the key to understanding the fundamental difference that Jesus brought into the world…the main idea that Paul will spend the rest of the letter explaining, that “the righteous shall live by faith” (v. 17). In Romans, Paul tells us that this is what Jesus really revealed to us. This is what he makes possible. This is the good news. The righteous shall live by faith. Or a more accurate translation is: “the one who by faith is righteous shall live.” As we said, Paul took righteousness very seriously. It is the most important thing when it comes to humanity’s relationship with God. We have to be righteous in order to be in his presence because he is righteous. What does that mean? Righteous means to be good inside and out. . .in short, perfect (Matt. 5:48). Completely good, no flaws, no shortcomings, no lapses in judgment, no dirty little thoughts or secrets, no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s something that we don’t really give much gravity to these days. We are rather cavalier about the righteousness of God, but if we really understood it we would be in terror. As famed pastor and author R.C. Sproul wrote, “We are not in terror, because we have blocked out the view of God’s righteousness. We judge ourselves on a curve, meaning ourselves against others. We never judge ourselves according to the standard of God’s perfection. If we did, we would be tormented…” (from his sermon, "The Just Shall Live by Faith”).

We avoid true righteousness because none of us could stand in the light of it. There’s nowhere to hide. It’s like the asteroid in the 1998 movie Armageddon…there’s no escape. It’s “a global killer.” No one survives, and not even Bruce Willis can save us from it. No matter how great an oil driller he is. I just introduced this movie to my kids a few days ago, and it’s still a ridiculous and frankly awesome plot for a movie. Anyhow, we try to ignore this issue of righteousness because deep down we know it would mean curtains for us. This is exactly what Paul spells out in the first couple chapters of Romans. He applies the full force of the law, the full demand for perfection that comes from a holy God because he knows without being clear about that we would always find some sort of excuse. We would find some way to keep our game of denial going, to get back on that hamster wheel of self-justification and improvement, to try to avoid reality. But we will have to come to grips with it at some point whether it be now or when we stand before the judgment seat. The truth about righteousness will hit. . .

And the only hope for us when it does hit is this message that Paul proclaims to us, “The one who by faith is righteous shall live.” This is the passage that inspired the entire Reformation. Martin Luther was tormented by the idea of God’s righteousness, and it was when the Spirit opened his eyes to understand this verse that he finally experienced the good news of grace in Jesus Christ. This verse is originally from the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament where he said, “The just shall live by faith” (2:4). Remember Paul had the OT memorized. Habakkuk wrote it in distress when the people of God were being invaded by pagans, and the pagans were winning. He cried out to God asking if he cared that the wicked were devouring his people. God answered saying, “the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the just shall live by faith” (vv. 3-4).

His soul is puffed up; it is not upright in him. In other words, those who are puffed up, proud, who think they are righteous, are not. Righteousness only comes through faith. This finally made sense to Paul in light of Jesus. He had been taught his whole life that righteousness was something that you achieved. It was something that came through the observance of the law, through obedience. That’s what he spent his life trying to do, and he thought he was doing a pretty good job at it because he thought it had to do with outward actions and appearance. My default “solution.” What you did made you good, made you righteous. It was about your behavior, external, but Habakkuk shows that is not true. He is consistent with Jesus’ teaching about righteousness that it has to do with the soul first, the inward condition of your heart (Matthew 12:33-37). The soul is not upright in him or her. If that is the case then it doesn’t matter what you do because you’re broken on the inside on a heart level. No matter how good your actions are they cannot change your heart. You still have selfish thoughts. You still judge others in your mind. You still think all sorts of horrible things. There’s no way for you to fix that.

That’s why we needed Jesus to change absolutely everything. It cannot depend on us because if it does then it’s curtains for us. So it must depend on Someone else. That’s why righteousness depends on faith. . .it depends on Jesus. . .on what he did for us. Paul will drive it home again and again. . .that this is our hope that the righteousness of God has been revealed from faith for faith. The righteousness of God is revealed in Jesus Christ, and we are righteous by faith in him. Essentially, it is trust. That’s what faith means, trust. Jesus gives you a promise that he lived and died and rose again for you, and it inspires trust in you. You trust that his righteousness, his perfection counts for you. All faith means is that you are saying, “Amen!” Which translates: “let it be so!” That’s faith. That’s what we live by, not our works, not like the proud in Habakkuk, who think they’re OK on their own.

Sproul sums it up better than I ever could when he says, “What it means to be a Christian is to trust [Jesus] when he speaks, which does not require a leap of faith or a crucifixion of the intellect. It requires a crucifixion of pride.” That’s something that happens to you. Just like it happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. Jesus interrupts our lives and opens our eyes to the hamster wheel. He reveals that all our effort is getting us nowhere, that we are stuck. We know we are not OK on our own. That’s the testimony of God’s law showing us that we can never do enough to change our hearts. And Jesus gives us what we can never earn. He is good for us, and he tells us that that is exactly what he came for. He gives us himself, his righteousness, and it becomes ours by faith alone. Amen!

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