Grace and Cigarettes

I’m thinking of taking up smoking as a spiritual discipline. Maybe I’ll sit with God and have a cigarette. I’ve just been very struck this week with my need to embrace my humanity, my limits, my imperfection. It’s so easy for me to get into a brand of Christianity that is all about image, saying and doing the right thing, having it all together. I think of the saying, “don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls that do,” and I want to radically break out of a Christian culture that would whittle the Christian life down to that.

Most Christians I know don’t think that way, but I just don’t get enough reminders sometimes of my need for Jesus, my humanity, and my brokenness in the Christian culture. Sometimes it seems more like it’s not okay to be a sinner …or a smoker. Often I experience an expectation of perfection—maybe it’s just my own expectation of myself. I wonder if a cigarette with God now and then could be the reminder I need not to bow to those impossible expectations, but to breathe in grace (and tobacco ...and toxic chemicals).

I think my problem comes when I regard holiness over grace. Only through grace can we ever be holy, so a pursuit of holiness must never come first. (And I’m not convinced that holiness has anything to do with not smoking, not swearing, not drinking, etc.) I wonder what it would be like if churches looked more like AA meetings sometimes—no pretense, everyone aware of their own failure, confessing openly, admitting our need, holding each other up, but full of grace and understanding for everyone’s broken condition.

I want to love and accept others as Christ did, but a preoccupation with personal holiness prevents that. I have such a hard time loving people when I’m perfect. My desire for perfection makes it impossible to love because love is messy. Perfection is my point of need. And it is the very thing that keeps me from admitting my need. I am resistant to receiving grace because I don’t want to need it—to be limited and imperfect. So, I don’t want to be human. I want to be God. How like Eve. How human.

On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." Matthew 9:12-13

John MacArthur on smoking, drinking, etc.