Sharing "Journey to the Cross" by Paul David Tripp.
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Lent teaches us that sorrow is the only pathway to a life of true joy.
If someone called you on the phone and said, “I have very bad news for you,” you wouldn’t say, “Oh, thank you, I love bad news!” No, your heart would sink as you waited to hear what you didn’t really want to hear. No one longs for bad news. We all dream of a life that is an endless stream of good news. But the storyline of Lent is counterintuitive: if you want to receive the best news ever, you have to accept the worst news ever. Lent teaches us that sadness is the only road to deep abiding joy. It confronts us with the reality that hopelessness is the only doorway to sturdy, unshakable hope. Rick and Emma’s marriage was a big, chaotic, and often conflictual mess. They were in debt, and their house was in disrepair. Their communication went back and forth between dysfunctional and nonexistent. Their relationship with their children was adversarial. Their spiritual life was a series of cold, formal religious habits. When they had sex, it was a physical act lacking in intimacy. When I first sat with them, I was aware that there seemed to be little warmth between them. The only reason they had asked to see me was the debt. It had grown and grown until it had become nearly impossible to handle.
As I got to know them, what blew me away was that their marriage and family had been this bad for a long time. They had learned to live with the mess. They had become masters at working their way around the dysfunction and keeping it all together. In fact, as I listened to them talk about their life together in matter-of-fact tones, I was impressed that they looked at the mess and didn’t see a mess. What should have stood out as abnormal and dysfunctional looked to them to be normal and functional. They weren’t crying out for help; they just didn’t like having all those big bills to pay. They weren’t desperate for change. In the middle of the mess, with bad news all around them, this couple was satisfied. If I had a magic button that I could have pushed that would have made their debts vanish, they would have been satisfied for everything else to stay the same. This dear couple did not see the evidence of the bad news that was all around them, so they were not hungry for the message of good news that could have transformed it all.
I am convinced that, for most human beings, satisfaction is a much bigger problem than dissatisfaction. Let me explain. We sinners have a scary ability to be satisfied with what shouldn’t satisfy us. Or let me say it another way. We are all too easily satisfied. We are able to be satisfied with conditions that are way less than God’s original design for us, or what grace now makes possible for us. We are often okay with living with things that are not the way they were meant to be. We are like the family that has lived three years with a broken toilet or with a car that has leaked oil for months. We live with the messed-up ankle or the overly sensitive stomach. Instead of fixing things, we find ways to use them even though they’re broken.
We see bad attitudes in our young children, but we excuse them away, telling ourselves that our kids are tired, teething, or a little bit sick. Bad things happen in our marriages that get dismissed as a misunderstanding or the product of busyness. We cut moral corners or step over God’s boundaries, telling ourselves that what God says is not okay, will be okay after all. Like the couple who came to see me, we all have the ability to look at the mess and not see a mess. We all have places in our lives where we’re all too easily satisfied. And here is how this is spiritually dangerous: when you are satisfied, you don’t reach out for help.
The cross of Jesus Christ yanks us out of our satisfaction. If things were okay, God would not have planned all that he planned and controlled all that he controlled, so that at a certain time in history his Son would do for us what we all desperately need but could not do for ourselves. The cross of Jesus Christ is the result of God’s dissatisfaction with the condition of the world that he made and of the people that he placed in it. God was unwilling to be okay with what was not okay. So he moved, but not with the agenda to condemn but rather to redeem. God sent his Son to fix what was broken, to restore what had been destroyed, and to make dead things live again.
The cross is bad news for each one of us. It confronts us with the fact that there is something fundamentally broken inside us that we have neither the desire nor the power to fix without divine intervention. The cross calls us to admit that the greatest danger in our lives is to be found inside us, not outside us. Jesus came to be the perfect Lamb of sacrifice, paying the penalty for our sin. Why? Because the worst news of all is the bad news that sin not only distorts everything in our lives and separates us from God, but it also leads to eternal death. Sin is the bad news we have to accept. Sin is the thing that we have to confess. It is the bad news about all of us, and no one is an exception. You cannot understand the cross of Jesus Christ and be satisfied with pockets of sin in your life.
But the cross is also good news. The dissatisfaction of God is the hope of humanity. The cross tells us that God is willing to do whatever is necessary to fix what sin has broken. It tells us that God is going to move in love and pour out his rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace. The cross welcomes us to look inside and around us and be dissatisfied. It welcomes us not to the dissatisfaction that leaves us hopeless, but a dissatisfaction that leads us to the foot of the cross, where mercy and grace are found.
Lent reminds us that to be satisfied, to say you are okay, and without need of help, you have to close your eyes and shut your ears to the bad news of sin that somehow confronts you every day. Lent welcomes you to bring a dissatisfied heart to your Redeemer, one who has seen and accepted the bad news, and then to reach out for the help that he alone is able to give.
Only those who willingly receive the bad news will then seek and celebrate the good news. Are you too easily satisfied?
GOING DEEPER
Reflection Questions
1. In what ways have you found this statement to be true: “For most human beings, satisfaction is a much bigger problem than dissatisfaction”?
2. What messes have you grown so accustomed to that you no longer notice them? What are you satisfied with that God isn’t? What would change if you became dissatisfied with it?
3. How can God’s dissatisfaction with sin and the resulting brokenness of this world lead us to hope and motivate us to action?
Read 2 Corinthians 5:16–21.
How would these verses change your life if you let them inform you of your mess and brokenness?
16 So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! 17 This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
18 And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. 19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. 20 So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” 21 For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
