Rescued from Tragedy

God shook me up.  My life was upside down.  The status quo didn't cut it.  My spirit was restless.  But by most standards, I was winning.  Receiving saving faith in Christ, radically freed me from the chains of sin, and ultimately allowed me escape from mountains of guilt.  I could have sulked around and wallowed in the guilt of my past, but instead, I was able to embrace a theology of freedom from death, having been justified (punished and counted righteous by God) through Christ.

This put me in a position to accept an atypical lifestyle, at least by the standards of Western Christianity.  God used many people and events in my life to bring me on board, but I especially appreciate two books that I read back in 2007 and 2008.  One was John Piper's Let the Nations Be Glad and the other was Francis Chan's Crazy Love.  Both of these really got the ball rolling on my missionary endeavor.

Beyond the theological grounds for missions, John Piper's call to a "war-time" attitude of christian living has always challenged my secular lifestyle.  I was reminded of this today by an article that I came across (thanks Luke).  It's titled "How to Deal with the Guilt of Sexual Failure for the Glory of Christ and His Global Cause."  At first glance, you might wonder how these really fit together.  I'd encourage you to read this article and evaluate how past sin in your life is affecting your ministry.  If it is hindering you and your dreams of radical living for Christ, you had best reevaluate your understanding of justification.

Here's a few excerts that hit hard for me, now as well as when I was contemplating missions 3 years ago:

• The great tragedy is not mainly masturbation or fornication or acting like a peeping Tom (or curious Cathy) on the internet. The tragedy is that Satan uses the guilt of these failures to strip you of every radical dream you ever had, or might have, and in its place give you a happy, safe, secure, American life of superficial pleasures until you die in your lakeside rocking chair, wrinkled and useless, leaving a big fat inheritance to your middle-aged children to confirm them in their worldliness. That’s the main tragedy.
• The point is: This is what you do with your life. You don’t want always be sitting high in your SUV dropping nickels into other people’s dreams. Satan wants that for you. But you don’t! You want to dream your own dream for the glory of Christ. Why am I on this planet? What has God put me here for?
• And what is distinctively Christian about the teachings of these chapters is that our rescue was most decisively accomplished for us by another and was done outside of us. In other words, Christ did something in history before we existed that obtained and guaranteed our rescue and the transformation of all who would come to trust in him. The distinctive and crucial thing about Christian salvation is that Christ accomplished it decisively for us and outside of us and without our help. And when we put our faith in him we do not add to the sufficiency of what he accomplished in covering our sins and achieving the righteousness that counts as ours.
• Knowing how your punishment for sin has already happened in Christ and knowing how your perfect righteousness before God has already been achieved in Christ, and holding fast to these truths with heartfelt passion, is a tremendous weapon against the devil, when he rises to tell you that your sexual failures rule you out of Christ’s mission and condemn you to a life of meaningless, middle-class, American prosperity.

We all have to decide what inheritance we want to leave.  What's yours?