From Rock Bottom--July 13, 2023

From Rock Bottom--July 13, 2023

[Paul writes:] "So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ our Lord!" [Romans 7:20-25a]

Spoiler alert: it's Jesus.

Jesus is the one who will rescue us from these lives of embodied contradiction.  Jesus, and the God with whom he brings us face to face, knows how we let ourselves get pulled in opposing directions, between our best impulses and our worst instincts, and he is capable of delivering us from that impossible tension.

In these verses from Romans (which, again, many of us heard this past Sunday in worship) Paul the Apostle rehearses the drama that plays out in each of our lives.  And you can tell, as he lets the tension simmer and then boil over, that he's building to a particular conclusion.  Paul knows it's not in his power--or in ours--to pull himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps, and that no matter how hard any of us tries to get it right all the time, we're going to fall back on our faces at some point.  It feels like captivity, or maybe, as those in addiction and recovery circles know, like "rock bottom."  

There's something to that comparison, honestly.  When you are struggling with an addition, whether to drinking, drugs, food, smoking, or whatever else, it's nearly impossible to be free from the power of the substance that controls you as long as you are trying to fight it with only your own willpower.  When you're dependent on your own ability to restrain your impulses, you've set yourself up for failure, because you've already learned how to give the addiction superior firepower and footing to stop you (that's how you got into the mess of addiction in the first place).  But those who have come through the Twelve Steps in some form or another know that the place to begin isn't with the brute strength of your willpower, but rather in just the opposite place: with our powerlessness.  Recovery begins with this place of surrender: "We admitted that we were powerless--that our lives had become unmanageable."  Boy, that sure sounds like Paul here, doesn't it?  "I see in my members... a war, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members."  He knows that it doesn't have to be a bottle or a needle or a pipe that takes us captive.  Sin has a power over us that we have a way of freely giving ourselves into, and we can't truly deal with that until we are ready to admit that we're in over our heads.  Only from there can we get to the point of surrendering our lives into the hands of the One who can set us free (which is exactly where Steps Two and Three of the Twelve Steps go next).

The thing I think is worth noting here is that, for both Paul and the Twelve Steps approach of Alcoholics Anonymous, recovery is possible precisely at the point of acknowledging that we need Someone Else who can bear what we cannot handle on our own.  For both the addiction-recovery mindset and the New Testament itself, our Rescuer doesn't wait until we've gotten our act together, tried hard enough, or done our part first--rather, it is precisely at the point of saying, "I can't do this on my own" that grace meets us.  Our only hope, in other words, is a God whose love bears with our failures, struggles, and limitations rather than demanding we take care of our own issues before we apply for divine help.

That's how it always unfolds in the Bible, if we take an honest look.  God doesn't tell the enslaved Hebrews, "Try your best first, and if I see that you've made a decent effort to escape from Pharaoh's clutches, I'll maybe give you a little leg up."  God doesn't tell old scheming Jacob, "I'll only be your God if you quick trying to trick everyone and bilk them out of their prosperities," but blesses the huckster while he's still working on his next con.  Jesus doesn't tell the "sinners and tax collectors" that he'll only come to their houses if they show a little initiative and moral improvement first, and he doesn't wait to raise Lazarus until the dead man shows some initiative--he can't.  God's love doesn't wait to accept us until after we've made ourselves presentable, but bears with all the flaws, failures, and wounds we carry around, and says, "I am here to set you free from your chains.  I have come to rescue you, here and now."  Only once we've been honest enough to see we can't do it on our own will we open our eyes and recognize that God has already met us at rock bottom.  God's not waiting for us to turn the corner toward good on our own first--God is the one who makes that turn possible in the first place.

So when Paul finally gets around to asking his climactic question, "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" he already knows the answer, and we do, too.  It has always been Jesus who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and it has always been this same Jesus through whom God bears our weakness and accepts us as we are... so that we might become God's new creation.  When we say love is "always bearing," it means just that--God doesn't wait until we're all sorted out to love us, but has chosen to love, save, and rescue us precisely at the point where we're prisoners of war in the conflict within ourselves.  It is at the point we can name our powerlessness that we finally see the One whose power can set us free, sitting right beside us.

Maybe today's the day for us to quit pretending, and to see the struggles in ourselves graciously--the way God does already.

Lord Jesus, enable us to believe that you see us as we are and love us as we are--and then make us brave enough to surrender ourselves into your rescuing power.