Peace is found in Christ, not personal sacrifice
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1991.
Thank you for your letter, and for the beautiful poem that you have written. It is very courageous of you to open your heart in this manner, and I found it very moving to read and think about the deep emotions and heart-searching which you have expressed.
You certainly have caught sight of, and grasped with all your heart, what our Lord said about the cost of becoming a true disciple and of following in his steps; and your poem eloquently expresses your desire to find our Lord's will, to follow it, and to seek him with all your heart. I find it all the more poignant, therefore, that your first stanza seems to indicate that you do not yet enjoy peace with God; and that, in your second and penultimate stanzas, you confess to uncertainty and doubt as to whether you will at last find acceptance with God.
Therefore, I can well understand that, after all the sacrifice you have made, you will find it exasperating that some of your friends claim to enjoy acceptance with God, although, as you see it, they have never made such great sacrifices as you have. The gospel that they preach, understandably seems to you to be a very cheap gospel. And yet, if I have caught the tenor of your poem aright, I sense the anxiety of your heart, that, having made your costly sacrifice, you have found that it is not sufficient to bring your own heart peace.
Naturally, I ask myself why that is so. Indeed`—and please excuse me for saying this—a God who demanded such painful sacrifice from you, and still would not give you any assurance of his love and acceptance, would seem to me to be a very cruel God indeed. Why is it that, after all your sacrifice and your attempt to bear the cross, you do not have the peace that Christ bequeaths to all his people (see John 14:27)? If I were a non-Christian I would at this point taunt you with your Christianity, and say, 'Your Jesus Christ assured his hearers that his yoke was easy and his burden was light; and guaranteed that, if they came to him, he would give them rest for their souls. But, after sincerely trying to follow him, you have found that he does not give rest for your soul, nor any peace or certainty; and on your own confession the burden he has given you is very grievous, painful and costly. How, then, can your Jesus Christ be true?'
For my part, I would certainly not attempt to answer the non-Christian's criticisms by denying what our Lord taught about the cost of true Christian discipleship (see Luke 14:25–35); but what I should want to question very strongly is where Christ ever taught that the path of discipleship is the way of salvation and acceptance with God. Indeed, I would want to assert that, according to Christ and his apostles, you cannot begin the path of discipleship until you have been saved and have been granted acceptance with God.
On the one hand, true Christian discipleship is certainly a 'narrow way'; but on the other hand, true Christianity involves also entering a gate (see Matthew 7:13–14). The gateway is, of course, the new birth and salvation. As our Lord remarked to Nicodemus, 'unless you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God'. This gateway comes first, as you will notice from Matthew 7:13–14; and only after you have entered the gateway can you begin to travel the path of discipleship. It does seem to me that you imagine that the gateway of salvation lies at the end of the path. And that is why you are uncertain whether you will ever get through the gateway and be accepted by God, even though you are doing your best to progress along the path of discipleship. But that, surely, is to put the cart before the horse. The gate lies at the beginning of the pathway and not at its end.
I come to the same conclusion when I think of the great saints of God, and in particular the life of the Apostle Paul. I think you would agree with me that the sacrifices he made for Christ's sake were even greater than any sacrifices that you have made. He can honestly say, 'For [Christ] I have suffered the loss of all things' (Philippians 3:8); and from his writings we can gather what he means by the loss of all things. He was an up-and-coming rabbi before he got converted. Indeed, he was one of the most brilliant rabbis of his generation. When he was converted to Christ he lost his position in Jewish society, and in all probability his wife deserted him. He was persecuted everywhere he went and more than once he nearly lost his life. He had no settled home; he not only took no salary for preaching, but worked with his own hands to pay for his own living, for the expenses of his preaching tours, and for the expenses of all his fellow-workers (see Acts 20:33–35). He was often subjected to the most intense public abuse, punishment and imprisonment.
I do not belittle any sacrifice that you have made, but I think it unlikely that your sacrifice has been as great as those of the Apostle Paul. I ask myself therefore, what was Paul trying to get out of all this sacrifice? What was he doing it for? The answer is clear enough. He was not doing it in order to try and gain acceptance and peace with God, salvation and forgiveness and an assured entry into heaven at last. All these things he had received as a free unmerited gift through the sacrifice of Christ. Hence, he enjoyed complete peace with God and found Christ's burden light and easy, just as the Saviour said he would. Indeed, it was gratitude to God and to Christ for the wonderful gift of salvation and peace and acceptance with God that as a consequence led Paul to devote his life entirely to the service of Christ, cost what it may (see Philippians 3:8–9; Romans 5:1–11; Colossians 3:11–14).
When, in contrast, I turn to your poem, it seems to me that you have things the other way around. Unlike Paul, you are not making your sacrifices in gratitude for the salvation you have received; you are making your sacrifices in order to merit salvation, which you hope one day you may be given. You are making your sacrifices not because you already have peace with God, but in the hope that you may thereby achieve peace with God. And that, it seems to me, is why you find your Christianity so burdensome. Valid as your desire is to follow Christ and to make sacrifices for him, you will never gain peace with God by that method.
A person can stand for righteousness, integrity and just practice in business, and in doing so incur enormous cost, suffering and privation. To do so is exceedingly noble, and I do not want to belittle it. But in doing all this, they are only doing what God's law demands. If, to avoid suffering, they had acted wrongly, they would have broken God's law. To keep the law is very noble; but the Bible constantly tells us that we cannot gain salvation and peace with God by keeping the law, because in fact we have all broken that law. Is that not true? And if you yourself have in fact broken God's law in many particulars, like we all have, you cannot gain salvation by keeping it in one particular. The Bible says that if you keep the whole law and break it in one point, you are guilty of all (James 2:10).
Since, then, we have all broken God's law, we must get the matter of forgiveness and peace with God settled, and know ourselves accepted by God before we start out on the path of discipleship. Nothing that we can sacrifice for Christ can pay God for the sins that we have done. But therein is the wonder of God's love and of his gospel—we do not have to pay God anything for his love and for his salvation. They are both free and given to us solely on the ground of the sacrifice of Christ.
Please take these remarks not as carping criticisms or as devaluations of your spirituality. I admire your willingness to sacrifice for God's sake; but it distresses me to see you, on your own confession, so burdened, so uncertain and so lacking peace with God. You seem to me to resemble very strongly Saul of Tarsus before he got converted. He was exceedingly zealous for God. He too found the early Christians irritating in the extreme, when they claimed to know they were saved, especially since he himself, for all his religious zeal, had no peace with God.
But he tells us how he came to see things differently. He discovered that all his attempts to keep God's law and to sacrifice in God's cause could never gain him salvation and peace with God; and he was brought to the point, as the bankrupt sinner he was, when, surrendering all his own goodness, he learned to trust Christ. But as we see from his writings, when he received salvation as a gift it did not make him less devoted to God than he had been before: it made him even more devoted. Only now his devotion to God sprang from an altogether different motive. Not the mercenary motive of sacrifice for God in order to achieve and merit salvation; but rather, out of gratitude and love to God for God's infinite grace in giving him salvation as a free gift.
Now this has been a long and rambling letter. You must try to find it in your heart to forgive me. But take it as the thoughts and concerns of one brother to another, and from one heart direct to another.
Yours sincerely,
