mattbraunlin
Member
Down Another Peg
I have struggled for most of my faith-life with a strange aversion - sometimes even animosity - to Paul's letters. For years I have largely dismissed his writings for reasons I have never been able to fully explain.
But I think I've made a breakthrough, and with some unlikely help.
In an episode of Rick and Morty, Rick is fed up with Morty and Summer's idolization of him. And so he sits them down in front of a whiteboard in order to prove his contempt for them logically. We are spared the deconstruction, but this is how Rick ties up his feelings for his grandkids:
So, in conclusion, you're both equally mercurial, overly sensitive, clingy, hysterical bird-brained homunculi. And I honestly can't even tell the two of you apart half the time because I don't go by height or age, I go by amount of pain in my @#%—which makes you both identical.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is not a far cry from what we find in Paul's Letters. They are a systematic, academic, theological education in the desperately wretched condition of the human race. Through Paul, God takes us on the most humbling of spiritual journeys. He sits us down in front of a whiteboard and proves not just spiritually, but logically, that we are awful and we need help.
I really feel like this is the pure and simple reason why I have refused so much of what I have found in Paul's writings: I was too proud to accept the absolute standard of my own sad failure which God shouts so loudly through Paul. All these years I have rejected Paul's message of my utter need for my Saviour. Time and time again I have gone back to his letters, and time and time again I have shut my Bible in anger, subconsciously snarling, ‘I'm not that bad!’
And I am. I am that bad.
Right now I am studying Paul's Letter to the Romans. And I am truly enjoying it. I am learning from it. And the only explanation for this is that God has humbled me. That I have at last allowed the Spirit to bring me to the lowly level of a sinner like Paul, who declares in Romans 7:24:
Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?
Before Paul was Paul, he was Saul. A murderous theocrat, who knew factually that he was the bee's knees in God's eyes. Only a miraculous encounter with Jesus, the God he had tried to destroy, could have shown Saul what he truly was: a monster. A proud and ruthless tyrant, on the road to certain doom.
Only the blood of Jesus Christ could have transformed Saul into Paul. Only the humbling work of the Holy Spirit could have turned a puffed-up, self-righteous Pharisee into a man who openly declared himself to be the worst sinner of them all. (1 Timothy 1:15.)
To read Paul's Letters is to confront your own pride. It is to hear God telling you that you are worse than a mercurial, overly sensitive, clingy, hysterical bird-brained homunculus; you are a sinner. You are helpless as a lamb in the slaughterhouse of your sin, and you need a Saviour. Only through Christ's blood are you made right with the Father.
Only in humility before God are we truly glorified.
I have struggled for most of my faith-life with a strange aversion - sometimes even animosity - to Paul's letters. For years I have largely dismissed his writings for reasons I have never been able to fully explain.
But I think I've made a breakthrough, and with some unlikely help.
In an episode of Rick and Morty, Rick is fed up with Morty and Summer's idolization of him. And so he sits them down in front of a whiteboard in order to prove his contempt for them logically. We are spared the deconstruction, but this is how Rick ties up his feelings for his grandkids:
So, in conclusion, you're both equally mercurial, overly sensitive, clingy, hysterical bird-brained homunculi. And I honestly can't even tell the two of you apart half the time because I don't go by height or age, I go by amount of pain in my @#%—which makes you both identical.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, this is not a far cry from what we find in Paul's Letters. They are a systematic, academic, theological education in the desperately wretched condition of the human race. Through Paul, God takes us on the most humbling of spiritual journeys. He sits us down in front of a whiteboard and proves not just spiritually, but logically, that we are awful and we need help.
I really feel like this is the pure and simple reason why I have refused so much of what I have found in Paul's writings: I was too proud to accept the absolute standard of my own sad failure which God shouts so loudly through Paul. All these years I have rejected Paul's message of my utter need for my Saviour. Time and time again I have gone back to his letters, and time and time again I have shut my Bible in anger, subconsciously snarling, ‘I'm not that bad!’
And I am. I am that bad.
Right now I am studying Paul's Letter to the Romans. And I am truly enjoying it. I am learning from it. And the only explanation for this is that God has humbled me. That I have at last allowed the Spirit to bring me to the lowly level of a sinner like Paul, who declares in Romans 7:24:
Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?
Before Paul was Paul, he was Saul. A murderous theocrat, who knew factually that he was the bee's knees in God's eyes. Only a miraculous encounter with Jesus, the God he had tried to destroy, could have shown Saul what he truly was: a monster. A proud and ruthless tyrant, on the road to certain doom.
Only the blood of Jesus Christ could have transformed Saul into Paul. Only the humbling work of the Holy Spirit could have turned a puffed-up, self-righteous Pharisee into a man who openly declared himself to be the worst sinner of them all. (1 Timothy 1:15.)
To read Paul's Letters is to confront your own pride. It is to hear God telling you that you are worse than a mercurial, overly sensitive, clingy, hysterical bird-brained homunculus; you are a sinner. You are helpless as a lamb in the slaughterhouse of your sin, and you need a Saviour. Only through Christ's blood are you made right with the Father.
Only in humility before God are we truly glorified.
