When my son announced he wanted to order the new Jars of Clay album I was really excited. I love their music. They are excellent artists and deeply committed to living out the Good News. When he told me what the title of the album was (Good Monsters), I was looking forward to it even more. I instantly recognized the thinking of someone who has come to terms with their fallenness.
Looking back over my Christian life, I’ve had several “head reduction” (i.e. humility) experiences. The greatest of these was in 1989, at the start of our community. Our community began through a revival. Several of us were working as missionaries, and through some friends we knew and books we were reading, God started to convict us of sin and passivity. During that time I was able to dedicate a three day period to seek God for renewal in my life. Taking a cue from Charles Finney’s Revival Lectures, I did an inventory of my life, listing every sin I had committed that I could think of. I organized the list according to age-specific periods of my life. I then began to explore the whys behind my sins and the effect of my sins on others. This took quite a while. My wife and friends provided the time and space so I could have an uninterrupted schedule. This experience was both disturbing and liberating, and has since served as the foundation of my life.
St. John of the Cross talks about “the dark night of the soul”. Whatever he meant by that phrase, I have come to associate it with this three-day retreat. Several insights struck me during that time. I remember reading the passage in the Gospels where Jesus describes the Scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites. I felt God suggesting to me that I was a hypocrite. At first I doubted it was God speaking, but then I remembered several occasions (it wasn’t hard after making my list) when I had selfish or ulterior motives in the ministry. I then turned to Acts 8:9-24, the story of Simon the Sorcerer. Simon wanted to use the ministry for his own reputation and ambition. I felt God pointing His finger at me. Since becoming a Christian, I have had a sincere desire to serve Jesus with my whole life. Career and comfort were sacrificed in order to serve Him in the ministry, but now He was telling me that not all was as pure and noble as I thought. The passage that really shook me up was verse 22, “Therefore repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray the Lord that if possible, the intention of your heart may be forgiven you.” It was the “if possible” part that got me.
I distinctly remember during those three days confronting the idea of judgment. I never really had a revelation of hell or judgment before in my life. When I became a Christian as a teenager, I was so transformed by God’s love and forgiveness it never occurred to me how deserving of judgment I was. Well, that thought was pretty clear to me now. It was in this state of despair that I saw the cross as never before. I realized that if I was going to be saved, it was only going to happen if His grace and mercy touched me. There was absolutely nothing I could do to redeem myself. I can’t describe what this did for me. It cleansed and humbled me. It rekindled my love for the Bible and God’s people and His work on earth. I was now His son, His good monster.
Jean Vanier in Community and Growth tells us:
“Community is the place where our limitations, our fears and our egoism are revealed to us. We discover our poverty and our weaknesses, our inability to get on with some people, our mental and emotional blocks, our affective or sexual disturbances, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. While we are alone, we could believe we loved everyone. Now that we are with others, living with them all the time, we realize how incapable we are of loving…So community life brings a painful revelation of our limitations, weaknesses and darkness; the unexpected discovery of the monsters within us is hard to accept.”
Jars of Clay says it well, “Do you know what you are?”
