It's All In the "Want-to-bes"

After many years of experience in church, I have found that the problem in the church is not that people don’t want to be good, but that they want to be good and can’t.

When I talk about freedom and grace and how God has destroyed the curse of the law, people tell me I’m treading on dangerous ground. “Lou,” they admonish, “if you keep talking like that, Christians are going to go out and do what they want.” Good!! That’s really good!! I still maintain that most Christians, if they did what they wanted, would be faithful. I have never heard a single Christian say, “Now that I’m forgiven I can be as bad as I want.”

When St. Augustine said, “Love God, and do as you please,” he was getting close to God’s secret of living the Christian life. At the risk of correcting Augustine (which is highly presumptuous) let me say he got it wrong. He should have said, “Let God love you deeply and completely, and then do as you please.”

The problem is not “what we please.” Because He has loved us so deeply and completely, Christians really do want to please God. The problem is that we so often fail in our efforts to please Him. Is that bad?

No. That’s good!! Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6).

Let me give you a principle: Anticipating a promised reality is grounds for rejoicing in that reality. Jesus has promised that if you have a hunger and thirst for goodness, you will at some point be good. Because He promised, and because all His promises are fulfilled, you can rejoice as if you had already become good. If you know you’re going to get something, you can rejoice almost as much as if you had it.

Christians debate about how we can be assured of salvation. Some say the only way we can be assured of our salvation is to persevere in obedience, and as we obey, we will know we belong to Christ. This is called “works salvation”. Others say we can rest on the promise Jesus gave when we were saved – that is, “I accepted the gift of salvation when it was freely offered, and God doesn’t lie. Therefore I am saved.” This view can be called “easy-believism”.

Still others say we can’t know we have salvation – all we can do is hope and keep on trucking. When the game is over, God will tell us whether or not we are saved. This view could be called “daisy salvation”: He loves me, He loves me not; He loves me, He loves me not.

Now with as much humility as I can possibly muster, I’m going to settle the arguments: The way we are assured of salvation is to check and see if we desire to obey God. Please note: I did not say that you had to obey God 100 percent of the time – only that you have to want to. If you want obedience, you’ve got salvation. Scripture says, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we do know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. EVERYONE WHO HAS THIS HOPE IN HIM PURIFIES HIMSELF, JUST AS HE IS PURE” (1 John 3:2-3).

Do you see what John is saying? He is saying that the confirmation of our salvation is not in your being like Jesus now but in the hope you have of being like Jesus in heaven. When John gives us a future promise of being like Jesus (that is, obedient), our desire for the fulfillment of that promise is not only the assurance of our salvation, it is the motivation (that is, purifies himself) toward the fulfillment of the reality.

You see, just as hunger presupposes food, and thirst presupposes water, a desire for goodness presupposes its reality.

In your Christian life, have you ever felt like you tried – you really tried – but in the end you failed? You really wanted to do better, but you only did worse and you didn’t know how to fix it. Maybe you considered giving up completely. You said to yourself, “I’ll never get it right. I’m probably not a Christian at all.”

Rules and regulations are Satan’s way of reminding Christians that they have failed. But even worse, rules and regulations are the reason we do fail.

Let me give you a wonderful secret: When success isn’t the issue, success becomes the reality. In other words, success is always a side benefit of something else. You can apply that principle to lots of life’s desires, but let me show you how it works with freedom.

Holiness and righteousness is the desire of every Christian. The Scriptures say that we are made holy and righteous in Christ. When the Father looks down on us and sees Christ living in us, He sees us as holy and righteous in eternity. But many Christians say, “I’m going to be holy and righteous even if it kills me.” And it usually does. But, and here is the exciting thing: Holiness and righteousness have already been achieved for you by Christ. You have, in fact, a holy and righteous nature before God because of the cross.

That is a cold hard fact; you don’t have to try so much anymore to be holy and righteous. You are now free to fail and, more importantly, free to allow Him to love you and to love Him back. You enter a relationship, not between a criminal and a policeman, but between a loving Father and His child. When you enjoy that relationship, something wonderful happens: You find holiness and righteousness come tagging along behind. You find that you, almost without knowing it, are in a process that makes you increasingly more holy and righteous in your human parts.

This is the message. Obedience doesn’t lead to freedom. Freedom leads to obedience. If that is backwards, you lose both your freedom and eventually your obedience.

Yes, the key is in your “want-to-bes”. As often as we fail in our Christian walk, our assurance of salvation is that WE WANT TO BE GOOD.

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