Radio

I had cause to spend a couple hours in a car today, and I was hitting the “scan” button on the radio, hoping to hit something that I could listen to for a minute. I’m not a fan of most of what’s on the airwaves, but occasionally I’ll hit a classic rock song that I don’t hate. Somewhere in Augusta County, I bounced onto some Christian contemporary station and caught a few seconds of a verse.

Contemporary Christian music is horrible. It’s like somebody took the most cheesy elevator music they could find, bleached it and added synths. The lyrics are even worse — trite, threadbare cliches loosely based on some Bible verse taken out of context. The snippet that caught my attention today was a standard trope along the lines of “I’m so not worthy, oh mighty Lord, but you love me anyway”. This is pretty typical of the genre. I skipped on to the next station.

In my own personal Bible study at the moment, I’m going through Psalms, looking for references — places where the psalmist has quoted or referred to earlier parts of the Bible. I’m also looking for places in the NT where Jesus or Paul or whoever quotes or refers to a psalm. There’s a lot of internal cross-referencing in the Bible and I’m using Psalms as a way of getting started understanding all that.

There are numerous points in Psalms where David or whoever acknowledges that they are a loathsome worm, unworthy of the grace of God. It’s a thing. But it isn’t the most important thing and it isn’t even a major thing. Yes, you and me and everyone we know are wretched sinners, and none of us deserve God’s grace — if we deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace — and once we’ve acknowledged that, we can move on. Humility before God is important, but groveling in your own crapulence doesn’t do anybody any good. Nowhere does Jesus instruct His followers to write really bad muzak with squeaky clean production about how unworthy they are.

Once we accept Christ, and begin to seriously try to live out His teachings, we become members of His body. Sniveling and whining about how much you don’t deserve God’s love is a waste of everybody’s time. It’s also a very thinly veiled form of conceit. You’re not that bad. I assure you, if you’re in any way connected to CCM, you don’t have sins of any import. Get over yourself.

This whole business of pretending to be humble by bragging about how unworthy one is comes from Paul, who referred to himself as the “chief” — or “foremost”, depending on the translation — of sinners — 1 Timothy 1:15. Before he was converted, Paul was a professional hunter of Christians. He found people worshiping Jesus, had them arrested, tortured into giving up names, and killed. I don’t know if that makes him the actual chief of sinners, but he was owning up to having done some bad stuff. And he only mentioned that in the process of making a point — that Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

We all sin. It’s a fact of our existence. If you’re actually harming other people, stop. Otherwise, acknowledge your fault to God and move on. There are a lot of poor people, orphans and immigrants who could use a little help.

While I’m on the subject of things that Christians really don’t have to waste time on, I want to mention death. Death is even less important than one’s own unworthiness. It doesn’t matter at all. Write a will if you want, but otherwise, there’s no reason to spend a moment thinking about death. What happens after death is equally not worth thinking about. You can’t possibly imagine what the Presence of God is like, and it’s unlikely that the descriptions of heaven as a cloud city with gold streets are meant to be taken literally. You’ll be fine. You’ll get a resurrection body and it’ll be great.

When you stop wasting time on things that don’t matter, you can use that time for things that do matter. Jesus didn’t go around making lists of things to do, but a face value reading of the things He said should indicate that He was concerned about marginalized people — the poor, the sick, immigrants, widows, orphans, ethnic minorities and so on. He was pretty clear that He expected His followers to help those in need.