15 Feet of Gospel

I don't want to share this, but I have to. Keeping with the whole "How does the gospel apply to us as a work place" theme that we've been exploring here in the Sending Center, here's a true story that happened just yesterday.

I had arranged to have a call with an outside organization about a conference that they wanted WHM to come and speak at. On our end I was going to be joined on the phone by someone else from the office. About 5 minutes before the call, I noticed that my co-worker, we'll call him Saul, hadn't come by my office yet. So I went to swing by Saul's office to see if he was ready to go.

As I was walking down the hall, about 5 feet before I got to his office I thought to myself, "He better be here! I went to the trouble of arranging the call and making sure the other organization knew that he was going to be there for it." And as soon as I saw his empty office, I immediately snapped to myself, "Well that's just great. Where is this guy?!"

As I continued to walk down the hall another 5 feet, I noticed the lights on in the conference room and I immediately thought, "Oh Patric.... You sad, small, judgmental legalist. Saul is probably in the conference room right now, attending our morning prayer meeting, praying for our missionaries and maybe even for your meeting. Why do you jump to such conclusions and never seem to think the best of your brother?" It was such a great reminder of how instantly my heart reaches out and judges someone for even the slightest infraction of rules in the "Fifedom of Knaak."

As I approached the conference room, I looked inside without breaking stride and saw that low and behold, Saul wasn't there either. My response, before I had even walked another 5 feet? "I KNEW it! I knew he wasn't in there and that he would be late. This is just like him. He better get here soon or I'm not going to be happy about this. At all."

So in the space of 15 feet I had judged Saul for not being in his office and ready to go, was then convicted of my sin and repented (assuming that he was in the prayer meeting), then sinned again against Saul with my self-righteous attitude as soon as I saw he wasn't in the prayer meeting either. Two rounds of sin and 1 round of repentance in the 10 steps it took me to walk 15 feet down the hallway. My heart turns on dime when it comes to sinning, but when it comes to receiving and resting and relying on the grace of God my heart responds like a semi-truck being pulled by Chihuahua.

And the best part of this... in the 30 seconds that I was gone to see where Saul was, he had called and left a very nice message on my voice mail saying he hadn't forgotten about the call and was on his way up the stairs right then. The call started right on time, with everyone present an accounted for.

I can't help but think that my big brother Jesus had a huge smirk on his face as I was listening to Saul's voice mail. For the Savior of the World, he's got a pretty good sense of humor, and he just loves irony.

The Injustice of Jesus

In the Sending Center here at WHM, we've starting going through our new small group study, The Gospel-Centered Life in an effort to keep thinking about how the gospel renews and transforms us as work place.

A recent lesson on minimizing our sin got me to start thinking more about how and why I minimize my own sin, especially at work. One of the things that is definitely a "hot button" sin for me is the need to justify myself. Sometimes it is big, and grandiose, and I need to let everyone know about it. But most of the time it is far more insidious--it is a quiet, private, ongoing conversation in my head where I reply to each action and each response of everyone involved arguing my case, showing them how I'm right I am (or at least more right than they are). These sorts of conversations, whether public or private, always feature some element of, "I may not have done things exactly right, but that's because so-and-so ___________ (sinned against me first, didn't do what they were supposed to, is so stubborn and unrepentant, expects too much of me, doesn't understand how hard things are for me... take your pick). Ahhh... the heady elixir of blameshifting. It's hard to admit, but I'm addicted to it and no amount of resolution on my part will cure me of it.

So as I was thinking and praying these issues through, I was again reminded of a simple truth that I hadn't really thought about in a long time--Jesus knows exactly what it is like to have someone misread his motives and accuse him of something that isn't true. Although he was perfect, he came and lived and ate and worked with people who were decidedly not perfect. And as the quintessential human being, there was at least the temptation on his part to respond the same way I do when I feel that I've been treated unfairly. But he never does this does he? You never see Jesus walking around muttering to himself while mentally rehashing events, or yelling at the Pharisees, "Oh yeah. Well if you wouldn't have been such legalists to begin with, I wouldn't have had to turn Elias into a pile of dust! This is your fault."

The truly remarkable thing to me about Jesus' consistently perfect response to these challenges is that he KNEW he was right! Every single time something happened, Jesus knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn't misreading someone's motives, or going off half-cocked without all the facts. He knew that whatever sin was messing things up, it wasn't his. The false accusations, the willful rebellion, the stubborn refusals, the out and out rejection of him in favor of pet idols... in each and every case, Jesus would have been perfectly justified in executing the exact judgement that the law required, because he knew that he was never at fault. And yet the only judgement that gets executed is upon Jesus, as he pays for the sins of his children on the cross.

I think one of the many (many, many, many) reasons I fall so short of Jesus in this particular area is that I find it impossible to completely, utterly and totally rely on his merit instead of earning my own. Think about this for a second, Jesus never (ever) tried to establish his own reputation before men and women because he rested so secure in his Father's love for him and the identity that the Father had established for him. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had someone be in opposition to me at work where I've consciously and convincingly relied on the merit that Jesus has earned for me, instead of jumping in to start explaining why I'm right and they are wrong.

Sin has rewired my heart to be "auto-justifiying." I don't even need to try, it just happens. So here's to praying for more disruption and rewiring of my sin-hobbled heart. Here's to more situations where I can see clearly that my Father's love, Christ's hard earned merit, and the Holy Spirit's gentle helping and empowering offer me far more at work than a well worded e-mail, a well argued case, or a sense of "I may be wrong, but they are more wrong!" Here's to the seeming injustice of not defending my record, so that I can more desperately and clearly cling to Jesus' record.