CHAPTER 5

WHEN GOD’S STORY BECOMES YOURS…

YOU WON’T BE FORSAKEN

THINK ABOUT IT!

For a while there, it seemed like the only stories anyone was telling were vampire stories. A flood of books, TV shows, movies, and video games wanted to introduce us to their dark and brooding antiheroes, their “good vampires.”

We like these kinds of characters because they’re complicated. They’ve done a lot of bad things, but they want to do better. They agonize over their guilt and try to make up for it with heroic acts of self-sacrifice. Maybe you can relate to that impulse. Everyone can work up a good guilt over some terrible thing they’ve done, and guilt is motivating for a while.

But you are not a vampire. When you enter into God’s story through faith in Jesus, all those sins stop being yours. He suffered and died for them so you don’t have to. You might still feel the temptation, but your mission isn’t to make up for your crimes. It’s to accomplish God’s mission for you as a brand-new creature.

TENNESSEE GIVES DRUNK DRIVERS A NEW WARDROBE. THE Volunteer State has a special gift for any person convicted of driving their streets under the influence of alcohol. A blaze orange vest. Offenders are required to wear it in public three different days for eight hours at a time while picking up litter from the side of the highway. Stenciled on the back in four-inch-tall letters are the words “I AM A DRUNK DRIVER.”14

No doubt they deserve the punishment. In fact, given the threat they’ve imposed upon the highways, they deserve three days of public humiliation. I don’t question the strategy of the state.

But I wonder why we do the same to ourselves. Why we dress ourselves in our mistakes, don the robe of poor choices. Don’t we? We step into our closets and sort through our regrets and rebellion and, for some odd reason, vest up.

I DISAPPOINTED MY PARENTS.

I HAVE IMPURE THOUGHTS.

I MAKE BAD CHOICES.

Sometimes we cover the vest with a blouse or blazer of good behavior. Mrs. Adams did. She’s not the only person who ever came to see me while wearing a vest, but she was the first. I was only days into my first full-time church position in Miami, Florida. I’d barely unpacked my books when the receptionist asked if I could receive a visitor.

The senior minister was occupied, and I was next in line. I stepped into the conference room, where she sat stirring a cup of coffee. She was a slight woman, wearing a nice dress and carrying a designer purse. She looked at me for only a moment, then back at the cup. That I was several years her junior didn’t seem to matter.

“I left my family,” she blurted. No greeting, introduction, or small talk. Just a confession.

I took a seat and asked her to tell me about it. I didn’t have to ask twice. Too much pressure, temptation, and stress. So she walked out on her kids—ten years before she came to see me! What struck me about her story was not what she had done but how long she’d been living with her guilt. A decade! And now, hungry for help, she had a request.

“Can you give me some work to do?”

“What? Do you need some money?”

She looked at me like I was a doctor unacquainted with penicillin. “No, I need some work. Anything. Letters to file, floors to sweep. Give me some work to do. I’ll feel better if I do some work for God.”

Welcome to the vest system. Hard to hide it. Harder still to discard it. But we work at doing so. Emphasis on the word work. Overcome bad deeds with good ones. Offset bad choices with godly ones, stupid moves with righteous ones. But the vest-removal process is flawed. No one knows what work to do or how long to do it. Shouldn’t the Bible, of all books, tell us? But it doesn’t. Instead, the Bible tells us how God’s story redeems our story.

Jesus’ death on the cross is not a secondary theme in Scripture; it is the core. The English word crucial comes from the Latin for cross (crux). The crucial accomplishment of Christ occurred on the cross. Lest we miss the message, God encased the climax of his story in high drama.

The garden: Jesus crying out, the disciples running out, the soldiers bursting in.

The trials: early morning mockery and deceit. Jews scoffing. Pilate washing.

The soldiers: weaving thorns, slashing whips, pounding nails.

Jesus: bloodied, beaten. More crimson than clean. Every sinew afire with pain.

And God: He ebonized the sky and shook the earth. He cleaved the rocks and ripped the temple curtain. He untombed the entombed and unveiled the Holy of Holies in the temple.

But first he heard the cry of his Son.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

Forsaken. Visceral, painful. The word reminds us of abandonment, of desertion, of being left helpless, alone, cast out, of being completely forgotten.

Jesus forsaken? Does Scripture not declare, “I have not seen the righteous forsaken,” and assure that “the LORD… does not forsake His saints” (Psalm 37:25, 28 NKJV)?

Indeed it does. But in that hour Jesus was anything but righteous. This was the moment in which “God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong” (2 Corinthians 5:21 MSG). “GOD… piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong, on him, on him. He was beaten, he was tortured, but he didn’t say a word” (Isaiah 53:6–7 MSG).

He dressed Christ in vests. Our vests, each and every one.

I BETRAYED MY FRIENDS.

I LIED TO MY TEACHER.

I HURT MYSELF TO FEEL GOOD.

I CURSED MY GOD.

As if Jesus deserved them, he wore them. Our sins, our vests, were put on Christ. “The LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). “He bore the sin of many” (Isaiah 52:12). Paul proclaimed that God made Christ “to be sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21) and become “a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Peter agreed: “ ‘[Jesus] bore our sins’ in his body on the cross” (1 Peter 2:24).

This is the monumental offer of God. What does God say to the woman who wants to work and offset her guilt? Simple: the work has been done. My Son wore your sin on himself, and I punished it there.

“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18 NKJV).

On August 16, 1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed after taking off from the Detroit airport, killing 155 people. The lone survivor was four-year-old Cecelia from Tempe, Arizona. Rescuers found her in such good condition that they wondered if she’d actually been on the flight. Perhaps she was riding in one of the cars into which the airplane crashed. But, no, her name was on the manifest.

While the exact nature of events may never be known, Cecelia’s survival may have been due to her mother’s quick response. Initial reports from the scene indicate that, as the plane was falling, her mother, Paula Cichan, unbuckled her own seat belt, got down on her knees in front of her daughter, and wrapped her arms and body around the girl. She separated her from the force of the fall… and the daughter survived.15

God did the same for us. He wrapped himself around us and felt the full force of the fall. He took the unrelaxed punishment of the guilty. He died, not like a sinner, but as a sinner—in our place. “By a wonderful exchange our sins are now not ours but Christ’s, and Christ’s righteousness is not Christ’s but ours.”¹⁶ His sacrifice is a sufficient one. Our accomplishments don’t enhance it. Our stumbles don’t diminish it. The sacrifice of Christ is a total and unceasing and accomplished work.

“It is finished,” Jesus announced (John 19:30). His prayer of abandonment is followed by a cry of accomplishment. Not “It is begun” or “It is initiated” or “It is a work in progress.” No, “It is finished.”

You can remove your vest. Toss the thing in a trash barrel and set it on fire. You need never wear it again. Does better news exist? Actually, yes. There is more. We not only remove our vest—we don his! He is “our righteousness” (1 Corinthians 1:30).

Baxter, 15 — As teenagers we walk around with guilt, pain, or feelings of imperfection. Some carry more than others, but most of us have something we constantly regret. Only through Jesus Christ can we find our true happiness and contentedness with ourselves. It says in Philippians that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. In reading this I know that no matter what my choices and decisions, I can overcome anything through the Lord Jesus Christ. We just have to know that no matter what we have done or not done, Jesus died on the cross for us and our sins. So we don’t have to wear our vests of imperfection, because in Jesus we are complete.

God does not simply remove our failures; he dresses us in the goodness of Christ! “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Galatians 3:27).

Think about this for a moment. When you make God’s story yours, he covers you in Christ. You wear him like a vest. Old labels no longer apply—only labels that would be appropriately worn by Jesus Christ. Can you think of a few phrases for your new vest? How about

• royal priest (1 Peter 2:9)

• complete (Colossians 2:10 NKJV)

• free from condemnation (Romans 8:1)

• secure (John 10:28)

• established and anointed one (2 Corinthians 1:21 NKJV)

• God’s coworker (2 Corinthians 6:1)

• God’s temple (1 Corinthians 3:16–17)

• God’s workmanship (Ephesians 2:10 NKJV)

How do you like that outfit?

“Now you’re dressed in a new wardrobe. Every item of your new way of life is custom-made by the Creator, with his label on it. All the old fashions are now obsolete” (Colossians 3:10 MSG). Don’t mess with the old clothes any longer. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). How far is the east from the west? Farther and farther by the moment. Travel west and you can make laps around the globe and never go east. Journey east and, if you desire, maintain an easterly course indefinitely. Not so with the other two directions. If you go north or south, you’ll eventually reach the North or South Pole and change directions. But east and west have no turning points.

Neither does God. When he sends your sins to the east and you to the west, you can be sure of this: he doesn’t see you in your sins. His forgiveness is irreversible. “He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:10).

Headline this truth: when God sees you, he sees his Son, not your sin. God “blots out your transgressions” and “remembers your sins no more” (Isaiah 43:25). No probation. No exception. No reversals.

He did his due diligence. He saw your secret deeds and heard your unsaid thoughts. The lies, the lusts, the longings — he knows them all. God assessed your life from first day to last, from worst moment to best, and made his decision.

“I want that child in my kingdom.”

You cannot convince him otherwise.

Look on his city gates for proof. In the last pages of the Bible, John describes the entrance to the New Jerusalem:

She had a great and high wall with twelve gates… and names written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel….

Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

—REVELATION 21:12, 14 NKJV

God engraved the names of the sons of Jacob on his gateposts. More ragamuffins than reverends. Their rap sheets include stories of mass murder (Genesis 34), incest (Genesis 38:13–18), and brotherly betrayal (Genesis 37:17–28). They behaved more like lowbrow reality stars than a wholesome TV family. Yet God carved their names on the New Jerusalem gates.

And dare we mention the names on the foundations? Peter, the apostle who saved his own skin instead of his Savior’s. James and John, who jockeyed for VIP seats in heaven. Thomas, the dubious, who insisted on a personal audience with the resurrected Jesus. These were the disciples who told the children to leave Jesus alone (Luke 18:15), who told Jesus to leave the hungry on their own (Matthew 14:15), and who chose to leave Jesus alone to face his crucifixion (Matthew 26:36–45). Yet all of their names appear on the foundations. Matthew’s does. Peter’s does. Bartholomew’s does.

And yours? It’s not engraved in the gate, but it is written in the Book of the Lamb. Not in pencil marks that can be erased, but with blood that will not be removed. No need to keep God happy; he is satisfied. No need to pay the price; Jesus paid it.

All.

Lose your old vest. You look better wearing his.

DON’T JUST SIT THERE…

Thank God that Jesus paid the penalty for all of your sins once and for all on the cross. Ask him to help you to believe that so much that you don’t try to take them back.

This week, notice any stories that are built on the idea of someone trying to make up for something wrong they’ve done by doing something good. Think about why that can never work in real life for Christians.

Ask a friend who may or may not be a Christian if they believe we can “pay off” our evil choices by doing enough good. Be ready to tell them what you think about that (after reading this chapter).

Make a quick list (in your head, maybe) of the three worst things you ever remember doing. Put an X through the ones that Jesus completely paid for on the cross; circle any that you think are too bad for God to forgive. Then put an X though those too.

Make your Facebook, Twitter, or other social network status Romans 8:1 for a whole day.