The Supreme Climb

Oswald's devotional today made me think of Luther's quote, "Sin boldly," which sent me off on a bit of a tangent -- a valuable one on this journey of mine, but I'll get to that in a minute.

First, Oswald's focus: be extreme in your pursuit of righteousness. If you're off the mark, God will correct you. He will curtail your misconceptions of him. Don't hover indecisively -- pursue your vision of God's calling full bore, but keep your eyes and ears open for his possible intervention. In my obsessive desire to "get it right," I too often hover and fret, wanting only to pursue the road that leads to success. Abraham had it wrong in the most appalling of ways. He believed the physical sacrifice of his son was required, but God honored his earnest, ill-conceived pursuit of obedience and intervened in such a way as to both save his son and reveal his true nature to Abraham.

Now, Luther. The full quote: "If you are a preacher of mercy, do not teach an imaginary but the true mercy. If the mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not an imaginary, sin. God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides."

Now, I can see where this quote could be misinterpreted like crazy (Luther himself predicted it), and Romans 6:1 comes quickly to mind: "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!" But Luther was way more familiar with Romans than I am, so . . . I did a little more digging, and came across these excerpts from a blog entitled "A Luther Quote to Wake up the Sleepers" by Internet Monk.

"Luther has an ability to make the Gospel as outrageous as possible and to chase the rats of legalism out of the closet before they make a nest . . .

"Since encouraging people to try and not sin is a major occupation of confused evangelicalism, Luther sounds strange. But it's clear what he means: we can't get caught in the trap of trying to generate our own righteousness, even in the name of obedience. Luther's encouragement to sin just to spite the devil is his provocative way of suggesting a Christian TRUST CHRIST and have confidence in justification by faith. So much so, that instead of living in a state of perpetual self-examination, we live with the freedom to be less than perfect."

(If you're interested in reading the rest of this blog, go here.)

In very different ways, I think Oswald and Luther are encouraging me toward the same goal: freedom. The goal is not to get it right. The goal is to trust that Christ has already gotten it right.