I closed yesterday’s Daily Article with Philip Yancey’s quote, “Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.” I had no idea at the time that his statement would be so relevant to his personal life.
I have followed Yancey’s work for years and consider him one of the most thoughtful and authentic writers in the evangelical world. It was therefore devastating to learn yesterday that he engaged in an affair with a married woman for eight years and is now retiring from writing and speaking.
In an emailed statement to Christianity Today, an outlet for which he has written for decades, he confessed the affair and added:
I am now focused on rebuilding trust and restoring my marriage of fifty-five years. Having disqualified myself from Christian ministry, I am therefore retiring from writing, speaking, and social media. Instead, I need to spend my remaining years living up to the words I have already written. I pray for God’s grace and forgiveness—as well as yours—and for healing in the lives of those I’ve wounded.
His prayer highlights one side of the Christian life, the “amazing grace” about which Yancey wrote so often. In The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Tim Keller famously wrote, “The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.”
But Yancey’s confession also points to a dangerous downside of evangelical faith as many understand it.
“The one secret of a holy life”
Think of history as an hourglass lying on its side. The story begins with the cosmos, expansive beyond our imagining and created by the God who pronounced it “very good” (Genesis 1:31). It narrows to the human race, then to one nation within that race, then to one surviving part of that nation, then to one teenage girl and her newborn Child.
When this Child grows to adulthood, the story begins to expand again: to twelve disciples, to 120 believers in an Upper Room, to three thousand baptized souls, to a movement that expanded to include Samaritans (Acts 8), Gentiles (Acts 10), the West as well as the East (Acts 16), and ultimately the “ends of the earth” (Acts 28). Today, this movement numbers more than two billion believers living in virtually every nation on earth. It is a movement fueled by the divine grace that forgives all we confess and saves our souls for eternity.
For many evangelicals, this is how the story ends. Now we try our best to do our best and we confess our sins when we fail, all the while waiting for heaven and the day our struggle is done.
But God’s ultimate purpose is not just that all people might be forgiven and granted eternal life with him in heaven. It is that the flourishing and beauty with which God began our story might become our story once more.
To this end, he does not just pardon our sins—he remakes our very nature. When we are “born again” (John 3:3), we “become children of God” (John 1:12), a “new creation” as “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
As God’s recreated children, we are intended to demonstrate our Father’s spiritual “genetics.” His Spirit works to manifest his “fruit,” the character of Christ, in our character (Galatians 5:22–23). It’s not that we try harder to be more like Jesus—it is that Jesus makes us like himself.
This is not a new concept. “Theosis,” the belief that Christ is working to make us like himself, has been central to some theological worldviews for centuries. Oswald Chambers gave it full and practical expression when he asserted:
Sanctification is an impartation, not an imitation. The one secret of a holy life lies not in imitating Jesus but in letting his perfections manifest themselves in my physical body. . . .
Jesus gives me his patience, his love, his holiness, his faith, his purity, and his godliness. All these are manifested in and through every sanctified soul. Sanctification isn’t drawing the power to be holy from Jesus; it’s drawing his own holiness from him. It’s having the very same holiness that was manifested in him manifested in me.
“Make me love you as I ought to love”
I recently found a hymn by the Irish Anglican priest George Croly (1780–1860) that gave me new insight:
Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart,
wean it from sin, through all its pulses move.
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as you are,
and make me love you as I ought to love.
I had not thought about asking God to “make me love you as I ought to love.” Since our Father honors the free will with which he created us in his image, how can he “make me love” him or anyone else? But then I realized: if I exercise my free will to ask him to change my free will and my heart, he does not violate my freedom in answering my prayer.
Such a prayer is not only theologically permissible—it is spiritually essential. As Henri Nouwen warned, “Anyone who wants to fight his demons with his own weapons is a fool.”
But when we ask Jesus to change our hearts, he transforms us into our best selves as we fulfill his perfect will for our lives. This is because he now lives his life in and through ours (Galatians 2:20; Colossians 1:27) as we experience the risen Christ himself (1 John 1:1–4).
Our Father wants to be as real to us in this world as he will be in the next. This is the greatest need of the human heart: to experience personally the God who made us and made us for himself. Otherwise, “our hearts are restless until they rest in him,” as St. Augustine testified personally.
More than anything else, we want and need to know that God is real. And we learn that he is real when he becomes real in us.
“My heart an altar, and your love the flame”
If Philip Yancey can fall into sin that devastates his marriage and his ministry, so can I. So can you. Let’s therefore use his confession as a call to seek the moral and spiritual transformation only Christ can effect in our lives. Let’s take time even now to pray, “Make me love you as I ought to love.” And let’s do whatever the Spirit leads us to do as we partner with him in answering our prayer and manifesting the character of our Lord.
George Croly’s prayer continues:
Teach me to feel that you are always nigh;
teach me the struggles of the soul to bear,
to check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh;
teach me the patience of unceasing prayer.
Teach me to love you as your angels love,
one holy passion filling all my frame:
the fullness of the heaven-descended Dove;
my heart an altar, and your love the flame.
Is your heart his altar yet today?
Quote for the day:
“With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack? Surely we are the most favored of all creatures” —A. W. Tozer
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