Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
When I first conceived of this post, the only two titles I could think of were “Do the Right Thing” and “I Can Do Bad All By Myself.” I’m not particularly sure why Tyler Perry and Spike Lee felt especially inspiring to me at the time, but there you go.
My oldest son has been having some very serious conversations with us lately. And all at meal times, no less! I enjoy eating with my kids and talking with them, but it gets hard to enjoy fresh bacon with questions like “Are you going to die, Daddy?”
Okay, so I can always enjoy fresh bacon, but that’s not the point.
He’s been asking us some difficult questions about life and death and faith lately. The other day, he asked me, “Why did Jesus have to die?” Before you think that this post is all about me bragging on my own ability to talk about faith with my kids, hang on. I promise you I won’t be portrayed so favorably in a minute here.
So I answered his question: “Jesus had to die so we could be forgiven. Do you know what it means to be forgiven?”
“Yeah…What does it mean?”
“Well, it means that if you hurt someone, they don’t hold it against you. Have you ever done anything bad?”
And that was my mistake. I could see the change in his face immediately, and his voice was filled with the deepest sadness I’ve ever heard from him. He couldn’t even look at me. He just stared at the floor and said, “Yeah,” in his flattest, most monotone voice. While trying to teach him about grace and forgiveness, I introduced him to the concept of shame.
“I am an unworthy sinner living in the mires of my own unrepentance!” (Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash)
Now I know that we have to travel through conviction and recognition of our own wickedness to get to a place of redemption in Christ, but…I don’t want my kid to deal with those thoughts quite yet.
While he was dealing with his sudden sadness and guilt, he said to me, “You make me cry when you yell.”
Told you.
I have to defend myself a little bit here. I love my children and I take care of them. We are not typically loud people. If you have two young kids, or perhaps more, I’m certain that you have raised your voice a little more often than you want to. It’s common. It happens.
When he told me this, my heart broke. Even knowing that I am generally justified in raising my voice, and that I generally have a lengthy degree of patience with my kids, it tears me up to think that I make my kids sad. So I took him into my lap and comforted him, while explaining to him the reasons we might yell.
“Sometimes, buddy, we yell because you’re doing something dangerous and we’re scared. We have to stop you from doing something that might hurt you,” I said, soothing him. “And sometimes we yell because we don’t know how to express our frustration when you or your brother don’t listen to us. But we love you and we never mean to hurt you or upset you. Do you understand?”
He said he understood, and soon we were back to talking about Paw Patrol and Rumbletop Island, which I refuse to refer to by name. If you ever hear me asking my children about Boobledoop Byfan, you know what I mean.
It was a sweet and touching moment, I guess, and I think I was able to teach my child something special and important. Later, of course, I was replaying this conversation to myself and thinking about other ways I could have handled it. What I realized that I wanted to say was, “Just stop doing bad stuff!”
And that was when I realized my mistake.
Or – perhaps more accurately – my many mistakes.
Fatherhood has taught me more about my Faith in Christ than a thousand sermons could. And I’ve heard some good sermons. Being a dad has opened my eyes up to just what that relationship is like, having to love someone so strongly while feeling so responsible for their education and growth.
I won’t pretend to be God. I know I am not God, but being a dad has helped me understand things from God’s perspective just a little bit better. Most of the time, preachers use this comparison to talk about the Father’s love for His Son and how they would never sacrifice their kids for someone else the way God did. That is so true, it is, but that’s not where the comparison ends for me.
In that moment, I realized that God is probably looking down at me in the same way. The Father must look at me several times a day, wanting to scream, “Stop doing bad stuff!” We sin every day. We know better. We know the Word, and yet we fail to live up to it.
The truth is, we can’t help but sin! We can’t help but do bad stuff. Just like my son can’t help but climb up on the kitchen table when he’s told not to, or punch his little brother for grabbing a toy that he wasn’t even playing with.
“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…”
Romans 3:23 (NIV)
That’s just the reality of our lives. We can’t help it. Sin is in our nature, it’s in our blood. And you know what? I can’t help but picture God as a frustrated Father, sitting there watching us saying, “I told you. I told you exactly what you should and shouldn’t do.”
My children are not perfect. I know this. But I love them.
As soon as they’re done messing up, we move on. We get over their little moment of indiscretion and we go back to being in good standing with one another.
If I am the kind of imperfect failure of a human being who can yell at his sweet, angelic children, and yet still forgive them and love them anyway, then how can we expect God to be any less capable of loving and forgiving His children?
You’ll notice the little ellipsis up there in that verse. There’s a reason for that. Primarily, I am not a fan of yanking verses out of context. Since this translation breaks up a sentence between two different verses, I felt it was important to include the ellipsis.
Now let’s take a look at this whole thing in the appropriate context.
But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Romans 3:21-24
Like I said earlier, we can’t find redemption in Christ without first acknowledging the simple fact that we need redemption in the first place. We can’t find salvation if we don’t admit sin. But we also can’t stop at acknowledging sin.
Think back to the interaction I described with my son. I have already described how low I felt when he told me that it made him sad when we yelled at him. It was a pretty awful moment. So what if I had just left it there? What if I had just left it with both of us being sad and feeling crummy?
“I see you speeding down there!” (Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash)
Man, that would’ve been a pretty miserable situation. We could have just spent the rest of the day being lowly and mopey, bellyaching about how sad and terrible everyone is.
But I didn’t leave it there. I already told you how I took my son in my lap and told him that I loved him and how if I yelled at him, it wasn’t out of me being mean. It was, in all honesty, specifically because I loved him. Even when any yelling was an outpouring of frustration, it was still coming from love. And that even when I was upset with him, I never stopped loving him.
God gives us the same pep-talk here in Romans 3. And God’s love is all over scripture.
Yes, God wants us to stop doing bad things. God wants us to live by His law. As the saying goes, “As long as you live under my roof…” and God’s house has a pretty big roof. There is no part of God’s grace that says, “Hey, you can go sin if you want and do all the bad stuff you want.” It’s quite the opposite.
At the same time, there is always grace. There is always hope. There is always forgiveness.
We can’t help but do bad, no matter how much we may want to stop. And God can’t help but love His children.