Fuzzy Slippers and Toxic Spider Spray (Part the Second)

I’ve been wrestling with how to describe accurately how God rescued me by showing me what I’d been missing about the gospel. You see, it wasn’t one thing, so much as a collection of things, initiated through one (seemingly) subjective experience, and two books. So if you’ll forgive the fuzzy (ha! I made a funny!) chronology, here’s what happened:

A bathroom stall and two books

One Sunday, we loaded up our (at the time) little family of four for the thirty-five minute sojourn to church. Some of you are blessed to sit under teaching that makes the weekly battle with carseats and morning tantrums and barking shins on stubborn strollers worth the fight. Suffice it to say, at that time, we weren’t. I’d taken to praying silently on the way up for God to give me one moment – one song, one sentence, one word with a friend – that would give me something true and hopeful to hold on to. And in His goodness, He would.
This particular week, we sang a song I’d not heard before, an old hymn set to new music:

Before the throne of God above,
I have a strong and certain plea,
A great High Priest whose name is love,
Who ever lives, and pleads for me.
When Satan tempts me to despair,
And tells me of my guilt within,
Upward I look, and see Him there,
Who made an end of all my sin.

What happened next might make some of you firm cessationist friends a little twitchy, so move the beverages away from the laptop, ‘K?

As we sang, my mind and heart was utterly overcome by the reality of what we were singing – that God loved me, and that He was for me.

I was so overwhelmed that I began to sob, right there in my usual pew not far from the front. I didn’t sob loudly, of course. I didn’t fling myself onto the floor – I was a Baptist, for goodness’ sake – we have rules about these things. But I did flee the main sanctuary, for the sanctuary of the ladies’ restroom. And for the next twenty minutes I sat, where it is customary to sit in such places, and I wept.
I wept under what felt like an enormous weight – not the usual weight of despondency and frustration, but this time, the heavier weight of an astounding, cosmic contradiction – the perfect love of a perfectly holy God – for me.

I felt the weight of that truth, not so much lifting my burden, as covering it, then crushing it, until it was gone.

After some time, I gathered myself and headed to the infants room, where leaning over and nursing my daughter provided time for my blotchy face and swollen eyes to recover, as well as offer an easy excuse to my husband for why I’d been gone so long.

When we returned home, and the kids and Phil were doing what they did each Sunday afternoon (napping semi-peacefully), I did what I usually did – headed to our office to find a book to read. This week, the one that caught my eye was R.C. Sproul’s “The Mystery of the Holy Spirit”. I pulled it off the shelf and settled in to our well-worn recliner.

To be clear, I did not think for one minute that what I had experienced that morning had anything to do with the Holy Spirit. Being the faithful graduate of an evangelical school and mega-gelical church that I was, I’d spent very little time studying Him at all. I ‘d learned that focusing too much attention to Him would produce unorthodox and potentially damaging fruit in my life – too much saying “Jesus”, instead of His real name (“The Looord”), and hand raising – especially hand raising. I remember hearing the Holy Spirit described in one chapel as “the key in our spiritual ignition – He starts us up, and we put our foot to the pedal and drive.” But that seemed to be my problem. I wasn’t driving anywhere, at least, anywhere good.
Thanks to another “unusual” turn of events, everyone in the house slept extra-long, and I finished the book in one sitting. After everyone woke up, I peppered Phil with so many questions that he finally said, “You need to read one other book.” And he handed me one written by one of his college professors – David Needham’s “Birthright”. I sat down after dinner and read that in one sitting, too.

And it was reading those two books, and many more that followed, that marked the beginning of, first, a rediscovery of the gospel, and, equally important, the beginning of the changes in my heart and life that had been so missing before.

I’m in the Exterminator business (because my Father owns the company)

Before, I had thought of Christianity mostly as a series of intellectual and behavioral transactions. You stopped thinking one way, and you started thinking another. You stopped doing sinful things, and you started doing righteous things. God had got the ball rolling, but it was your job to keep it going. But what David Needham and R.C. Sproul taught me was that Christianity is first and foremost an identity built around Jesus, not me. It’s a literal and eternally permanent transformation of what it means to be a human being. It is about who I am, before it’s about what I then do (because of who I am).

Repenting of my sin and believing in Jesus had not just been an intellectual transaction!

It was a Spirit-ual one, too. Jesus had taken all of my sin (even the sin I had committed as Christian, even that which I would one day commit), and given me His righteousness. And because of that, God now loved me like He loved Jesus. His love was not conditional on what I did, but on Whose I now was. And beyond that, because I was His, I had (and had always had, from the moment I first repented back in college, even if I didn’t know it) His Spirit, to be in me and with me, to remind me of who I was. He is not just the key to my spiritual ignition; He’s the fuel in my spiritual engine. His power can never and will never run out. He reminds me of my new identity, and continually teaches me about what it looks like, and what it means to walk in it.

And part of my new identity means seeing sin the way He sees it, and treating it the way He does.

When God saw sin, He killed it. He didn’t cuddle it.

And the power He used to do it was the same power He’s given me.

I’m not a superhero. The power to kill sin doesn’t somehow emanate from my fingertips like the Iceman. It comes from Him.

It’s not the ineffective whacking away with the law that kills it; it’s the divinely-given, supernaturally potent, and gloriously fragrant gospel.

And if you belong to Him, then you have it too.

So, use it. Because of who, and Whose, you are.

Next time, I’ll finish up with the cornucopia of questions I’ve gotten when I’ve told people my story. Feel free to add yours.

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