Soul Satisfaction
12 August, 2010 -
There is a story making the email rounds these days about a pastor driving home from church, tailgating the car in front of him. At a yellow light, the car in front of him hits the brakes. He goes ballistic. He hits the horn and makes non-faith-based gestures. While he is in mid-rant someone taps on his window. He looks up and sees a policeman. The pastor is invited out of his car to the station where he is searched, fingerprinted, and put in a cell. After a couple of hours they let him out. The arresting officer gives him his personal effects and apologises:
“I’m very sorry for the mistake. I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing the horn, using bad gestures and bad language - I noticed the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ bumper sticker, the ‘Choose Life’ licence plate holder, the ‘Follow Me to Sunday School’ window sign, the Christian fish emblem on your trunk...Naturally I thought you had stolen the car.”
I can, if I get good at it, plaster the outside of my life with programs and messages and vision-casts and mission statements that all say the right thing. But what drives my life is my character. Sooner or later the light will change, and my character will be revealed:
I am hurried and stressed and want people to think I’m a good communicator, so I opt to use someone else’s sermon material without attribution and hope no one will notice;
I want to get my way into ministry, so I use flattery or manipulation or intimidation to get other people to do what I want;
I want the church to get big so I can feel good about myself. I disguise this with spiritual sounding language and ministry best practices, but discerning people around me can smell the scent of fresh ego in the air;
I pout when I lose. I seek to punish people who cross me by withdrawing from them;
I colour stories or shade the way I exegete a text in ways that I think will make communication sound more impressive at the expense of accuracy;
I cheat my family out of time and energy that belongs to them in the name of serving God.
We sometimes say of a particular person: “she has character,” as if some other people don’t. But everyone has character. Character is the inner structure of self that is reflected by our outward patterns of speech and behaviour. It is our disposition to think and act in certain ways. The existence of character is why there are credit reports and resumes and reference checks. They tell us about the habitual tendencies of someone’s judgements and choices.
Over the long haul, we will behave in ways consistent with our character. “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit...” For a moment, or a conversation, or a meeting, I might be able to override my habitual tendancies with an act of the will. But good intentions cannot trump poor character formation.
Part of Jesus’ teaching, as Dallas Willard noted, is that we can never become who God made us to be if we simply aim at doing the right things. We must aim at becoming the kind of person who naturally does what is right. Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with a character statement that people love and often mount on plaques: “Blessed are the poor in spirit...You are the salt of the earth.” But then He hits a speed bump, “If your right eye offends you, gouge it out...If your right hand offends you, gouge it out...If your right hand offends you, cut it off...” Rarely do you see those on plaques. Is Jesus seriously proposing dismembering ourselves as a strategy for sin avoidance?
Our problem is not in our eyes or hands. It’s in our character. God’s goal in character formation isn’t simply for me to avoid sin; it’s for me to become the kind of person who actually wants to do right things. Sound character is this: to have a disposition to think and to do that which is loving, courageous, humble and true.
Doing church ministry does not automatically produce good character, and in some ways poses unique challenges. I can turn the Bible from a spiritual resource into a source for well-received sermons and personal success. I can begin to see church members as tools who can serve my career. I can think of worship as a program to be evaluated on its capacity to manipulate emotions. I can be blind to these dynamics because working at a church lets me paper over them with spiritual language. We all know people who have left church ministries because of sexual or financial misbehaviour. But it is not enough to aim at scandal avoidance. The formation of a Christ-like character is the most important task I have. Programs and messages will fade away. My character is eternal. “I beat my body and make it my slave,” Paul writes, “so that after preaching to others I myself will not be disqualified.”
Character is not the same as “skills for success”, and success is not necessarily a sign of moral integrity. In the church world, we can sometimes get a little blurred in equating success with “God’s blessing”. For our ultimate task is not the construction of a ministry. It is the construction of character. We cannot fail at what we are becoming and succeed at what we do.
God is in the character-formation business. “If anyone is in Christ they are new creatures; old patterns have fallen away, all has become new.” I cannot create a new character for myself. But there are ways I can open myself up to God’s work in my life. One of the classic means for this involves spiritual disciplines. When I grew up I thought of these simply in terms of Bible study and prayer. I thought of spiritual disciplines as unpleasant activities; a kind of castor oil for the soul designed to show God how committed I am.
But the reality is they are a means to an end. Spiritual disciplines are simply practices that stop the natural (“character-is-tic”) flow of fallen thoughts and feelings inside me, and make space for God to lead me into new and better ones. The goal toward which they lead is a character which allows me to live a rich, joy-filled, God-satisfied life. So one of the helpful questions I can ask is: Where is my character in need of God’s power these days, and what spiritual practices might help to strengthen it?
In general, when I struggle with a sin of omission (not doing what I ought to do - sins like joylessness or lovelessness), I will be helped by disciplines of engagement. If I’m crabby or lack joy, I will be helped by engaging in celebration and worship. On the other hand, when I struggle with a sin of commission (doing what I should not do - lying or gossiping), I will be helped my disciplines of abstinence. If I have a problem with an appetite, then fasting can help. For instance, in our day we’re bombarded with sexually provocative images. A friend of mine noticed there was a billboard on the way home from an airport for a restaurant that features servers in skimpy clothes, so a kind of discipline for him was simply not to look a that billboard when driving home from the airport.
The primary reason to pursue good character is not to avoid ending up in moral ditch. It is because the possibility of soul-satisfaction is available only to the human being of sound character. We cannot endure, long-term, with a deeply dissatisfied soul. Apart from healthy character, gratitude, poise, delight in small gifts, and freedom from guilt are impossible. Malformed character carries with it its own worst punishment. And it is always the failure to experience soul-satisfaction that makes sin look good.
Character is not the ability to get really good at saying “no” to what I really want to say “yes” to.
Character is the ultimate richness: richness of being.
John Ortberg is a teaching pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California. Excerpt taken from Willow Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 3.
