At Chapel, last night, Brother Ben McDavid, the Chaplain, in his homily made the statement that we should forgive ourselves of our previous sins. He said that we should forget them as God has forgotten them. That comment resonated with me, as I am frequently unable to forget previous sins.
I once told Pastor Alan Cross that I had a sin that I could not forgive myself for. He asked me a series of questions. He asked whether I had acknowledged the sin before God. I stated that I had. He asked whether I had asked God to forgive the sin. I again replied affirmatively.
He then asked whether I believed that God could forgive sin. I began to equivocate. Erroneously, but Honestly, sometimes I have thought that my sins were too great even for God to forgive. (Before you condemn me for my lack of faith, think about your own sins. Think about that particular one – yes, that one, the one that YOU are not sure even God can forgive.)
He asked if I believed that God had answered my prayer in forgiving my sin. Again, I equivocated. He told me firmly but gently, that the previous sin had been forgiven and was remembered no more by God.
But now . . . But now I was committing the continuing sin of refusing to accept God’s forgiveness. Alan advised me that I should repent of that new and ongoing sin. Good pastoral counsel – memorable.
Meanwhile, at that same Chapel service, a friend sitting next to me commented upon my singing the hymns with great gusto, as I am wont to do sometimes. She commented that I should be in the choir. I took that as a great compliment.
Later last night, as I lay sleeping, I had a dream. In my dream, I was sitting just off stage at an orchestral performance. Standing right next to me on stage was a lovely young lady playing the tuba. She was holding it in a funny position, though, having it sit on the floor rather than hold it. As she was playing on, her fingers rapidly moving the valves, I, knowing the song from my trumpet playing days, was fingering air valves along with her. I was very conscious yet proud of myself for remembering the song. (This is a dream, remember. In my dreams, I can play the trumpet like a combination of Al Hirt, Myles Davis, and Doc Severinsen.)
During the young lady’s performance, she received a cell phone call apparently through an earpiece. I could hear a male voice on the other end of the call saying to her that she was holding the tuba wrong. He stated that if she were playing a baritone horn, she could play it with her clothes off. She then finished the song and put down her tuba. As she walked off the stage, she took off her clothes. I take it that she wanted people to see her just as she was. I’m not that free of self-consciousness.
Fast forward to this morning. I was walking and praying rather than listening to music. I believe God just wanted to have a conversation about my self-consciousness, and so we did.
During the walk, God pointed out someone else working in his or her yard. I don’t remember if this was male or female, and it doesn’t matter. God asked me what I thought about this person. My first thought about the person was to criticize something about the way he looked.
God inquired as to why I felt the need to criticize this person. God asked me whether I could accept this person as he was without judgment. I was not sure. Then God asked me whether the reason I could not accept other people just as she was had to do with the fact that I cannot accept myself just as I am. “Perhaps,” He suggested, “I could not even accept Him as He is for the same reason.
Harkening back to the homily at Chapel, I was being reminded of the hymn, “Just As I Am Without One Plea.” The hymn points out that God accepts us just as we are. I’m afraid that I have indulged the fiction that God accepted me the way I wanted him to see me, not the way I am.
I suspect that I am not alone in this fictional indulgence. If I am to be able to truly accept other people as they are and to truly accept God the way He is, I must first accept myself just as I am.
That is a big struggle for me. I do not want people, or God for that matter, to know the real me because I think that if they do know the real me, they will not be able to accept the real me. The fallacy with that thinking is that it sells short both the other person who thinks about me if in fact he or she does even think about me and more importantly, it sells God short. It denies His omniscience, more importantly, it denies His great love.
In Luke 12:7, Jesus said that God knows so much about us that He even numbers the hairs on our head. In other words, he knows everything about us on the sub-atomic level. And yet, knowing that much about us – about me – He made the Supreme sacrifice of giving up His deity so that I might enter into relationship with Him.
Such a love as that will surely overshadow my fear of being “found out” and will allow me to accept myself as I am. Yes, that is the key. I cannot be self-conscious as long as I am “God-conscious.”
The Apostle Paul writes in Philippians 2:5-8:
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
Now that love so overwhelms my need to be accepted or liked, or to be impressive (in my own eyes,) as to cause it to disappear. When I can accept myself as I am, I can accept God for who he is. And, if I can accept God for who He is. I can accept people for who they are without any judgment. (Besides, being everybody’s judge is exhausting.)
Charlotte Elliott wrote the beautiful hymn, “Just as I Am” in 1835. Writing about the composition, the 19th-Century writer John Brownlee noted Charlotte’s utter sense of despair at being viewed by her peers as “useless.” I have taken the liberty of quoting Brownlee’s description in its entirety.
The night before the bazaar she was kept wakeful by distressing thoughts of her apparent uselessness; and these thoughts passed by a transition easy to imagine into a spiritual conflict, till she questioned the reality of her whole spiritual life, and wondered whether it were anything better after all than an illusion of the emotions, an illusion ready to be sorrowfully dispelled.
The next day, the busy day of the bazaar, she lay upon her sofa . . . set apart for her in Westfield Lodge, ever a dear resort to her friends. The troubles of the night came back upon her with such force that she felt they must be met and conquered in the grace of God.
She gathered up in her soul the great certainties, not of her emotions, but of her salvation: her Lord, His power, His promise. And taking pen and paper from the table she deliberately set down in writing, for her own comfort, “the formulae of her faith.” Hers was a heart which always tended to express its depths in verse. So, in verse she restated to herself the Gospel of pardon, peace, and heaven.
Probably without difficulty or long pause, she wrote the hymn, getting comfort by thus definitely “recollecting” the eternity of the Rock beneath her feet. There, then, always, not only for some past moment, but “even now” she was accepted in the Beloved “Just as I am.”
So let it be written, so let it be done.
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