Offerings

You know, we choose most things in life based on what it can offer us. A car, a job, a home, a city, a college, a spouse, a church, a friend. In the same way, we are chosen based on what we have to offer—as a spouse, as an employee, as a friend, as a leader. So, we begin to think that this is where our value lies, in what we have to offer. In beauty, in wisdom, in wit, in skill, in knowledge, in charm, in character. And we go about trying to prove what we have to offer, to prove our value.

And, of course, we want to keep concealed those things that we consider shameful—the things that we fear might reduce our value, the things that might give us away by revealing we’re not worth as much as we first appeared to be because we offer ugliness with our beauty, brokenness with our charm; the package of who we are includes what is wounded, scarred, insecure, and selfish. These things reduce our likelihood of being chosen. They reduce our worth.

This is how we are programmed to think of value and worth. It’s as if everyone has a price on their head. Maybe this is why it is so difficult to accept a love that isn’t based on what we have to offer.

I want to prove to God what I have to offer—my moral record, my faith, my ministry efforts, my spiritual maturity, my insight, my good choices, my penitence, even my suffering on his behalf. It all becomes part of my attempt to prove my worth. It also becomes part of my self-salvation project, as Tim Keller calls it. It is an affront to the cross and is anti-gospel. I can’t accept God’s love because I want to be my own savior, to be enough on my own. Yet I never will be. It takes accepting this to receive God’s love.

I was reminded today of Brennan Manning’s words that I read back in April, but they have taken this long to sink in. He said, in essence, forgiveness doesn’t follow repentance, but repentance follows forgiveness. This is so essential to grasp. All my penitence, and faith, and character, and beauty comes as a response to God’s love and grace, as a result—not as a way to earn it or be worthy of it. God’s love and grace and acceptance and forgiveness is offered before I wallow in contrition or say the right words or fix myself up.

We so badly want to offer something. Yet Christ is the only reason we have anything to offer. As Eugene Peterson says from Ephesians 5, “Christ's love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her, dressing her in dazzling white silk, radiant with holiness.” Christ’s love gives us our value and worth—it doesn’t require our value and worth. This means we can accept His love without concern for what we have to offer Him.

For most of us, we’re not used to being loved like this. We’re used to being loved for what we have to offer. Perhaps we’re even used to being cut off from love when it seems we have nothing to offer. Being loved by God requires reprogramming. We have to learn to be loved freely. Once we can accept that love, we can accept our true value, our true identity—an identity and value that comes from the assurance of His love. A value we don’t have to prove to anyone.

I think our reprogramming has to be constant because it’s so easy to go back to default mode. I wake up in default mode, and it’s not like I can press a few buttons and be assured once again that I am loved. It’s like having to do a total system restore—wiping clean what’s there and writing program all over again. I have to be convinced all over again of God’s love for me, not just to know it, but to taste it. Without that assurance, everything else is warped. Maybe Manning is right when he says, “There is only one thing God asks of us—that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough.” I’m finding that without this, nothing else matters.