Guest Blogger: Andrew Pearson

Today’s guest blogger is The Rev’d Andrew Pearson. Andrew is Associate Rector at St. Helena’s, Beufort, SC.

THE FOLLY OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT

‘Lord, make me thin…or make all of my friends look fatter than me.’ This prayer normally marks the inauguration of summer and the bathing suit season. I think it is fairly clear that men have also bought into the lie about image and the human body. I have now achieved the age where when I look at a recently taken photograph I say, ‘Ugh, I look terrible,’ knowing full well that in five years time I will look at the same picture and say to myself, ‘I would kill to look like that again.’ As human beings we lack perspective. Not just a little, but we are completely incapable of objective self critique.
I have always been bothered by the interview question, ‘What do you feel are your strengths?’ My response tends to gravitate toward what I ‘like’ to do as we perceive our strengths to be those tasks we enjoy. Inevitably, young seminarians and clergy rank preaching as one of their strengths. Frank Limehouse, Dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, once said, ‘I’ve never met a seminarian who didn’t think they were gifted in preaching and I have yet to meet one who is.’ And even after being in ministry a while, things never change. I received an e-mail the other day that asked all of the staff to rewrite their job descriptions (‘What is it that you exactly do around here?’) and I responded, ‘To be awesome.’ In my life I am guilty of over exaggerating both my strengths and weaknesses.

As a fallen man in this world, life has a crushing effect and throws a powerful spotlight on my weaknesses. And as a Christian, God’s Law shows me my incapability of rescuing (much less helping) myself (‘Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect!’). A minister friend of mine said once, ‘The more you believe in yourself the less you can be a true Christian.’ When I first heard those words, as a believer, I grimaced a little. But upon reflection, in light of my fallen nature and God’s holy Law, I could only cry out, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?!’ (Rom. 7:24). St. Paul himself answers his own question: ‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ (Rom. 7:25).

Often life will drive us to seek out the Lord, but like Paul, we find that the more we grow in our faith, the more sinful we find we are. Where there was once a complete lack of objective self critique, God’s Law is held up like a mirror to our sin-soiled faces where we have no choice but to stare directly at the reality of our condition. And yet, this mirror will not clean our faces, but drives us to the soap and water of the Gospel.

Paul’s answer to his own question of rescue was not, ‘I need to try harder!’ or ‘Time to pull myself up by my spiritual bootstraps!’ The answer was outside of him and was found in what Jesus Christ did for him on the cross. The Gospel, to use St. Paul’s words again is simply this, ‘For our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). When Paul found himself struggling, he did not look to his strengths, or the Law, but to the Gospel.

What was, and still is, amazing to me is that Paul was speaking as a Christian to Christians! So often those of us who are ‘mature’ believers think that the Gospel is for those who haven’t heard. Once we have received the Gospel, we ‘move on,’ but Paul stands squarely against such self-reliant measures.

The result of this reliance on Christ and Christ alone for salvation in the Christian life is found in Paul’s ‘Braveheart moment’ when he boldly declares that ‘There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’ When we are able to rest in this Gospel message that comes only through God’s grace, we find that we are able to live in freedom while at the same time knowing that we are in need of rescue.