Imagine my shock when I discovered God’s actual plan.
As it turns out, it’s a good plan (good meaning actually good here): send Jesus to change all the rules and set people free in every way (apparently Jesus was more than just the Side Guy!). By word and deed, example and instruction, Jesus would teach His followers to love the outcast and the poor, to embrace their communities and each other. He would give them distinct marching orders—generosity, humility, grace, inclusion, courage—and tell them it all boils down to two things: loving God and people. (He’d make this part super clear by saying it to religious leaders!) The plan had Jesus go on and on about what it means to be blessed in this life, making sure He included the upside-down stuff: meekness, mourning, community, simplicity, kindness. He gave honor to a bunch of folks in the right head space, like kids and widows and outsiders. He slayed at parties and dinners. Oh! And Jesus forgave His enemies while He was hanging on the cross, just to be clear about how forgiveness worked pragmatically.
God’s plan was smart, because obviously this sort of life would change people so dramatically and permanently, they would choose to live it out in their neighborhoods and cities and countries all around the world. They wouldn’t be able to help it. It’s too good, this good news. It would deliver them from their prisons and fix their souls and mend the fragile places and give them a new song. This hurting, lonely world would be drawn to these people and their Savior who gave them these ideas, because who wouldn’t be? Who isn’t looking for grace and belonging? Everyone wants to be loved and God loves everyone, so this was the very definition of a win-win.
Such a good plan, this gospel.
The redeemed would tell this love story with their lives because they’ve been told over and over that love is supreme, the most excellent way, the language of their tribe, the way of their God. They’ll know for sure to default to love. At least that part will remain clear through seismic changes across centuries and cultures.
This beautiful way to live seems obvious to me now, but for a couple of decades, fear kept me locked into the tidier terrain of religion and distanced from the wide-open spaces of grace. When I recall the story of God I told with my life—one of behavior and shame and elitism—I can only beg Jesus to redeem any confusion I created, stealing hope and belonging right out of the hands of people who needed it. I missed it, and consequently I caused others to miss it because no one wanted the story I was selling. I didn’t even want it.
If understood, believed, and lived out, God’s plan would naturally place Christians at the epicenter of their communities, like hope magnets, like soft places to fall, like living sanctuaries. We’d be coveted neighbors and trusted advocates, friends to all and enemies of none. Our reputation would precede us, and we would be such a joy to the world.
And often we deeply are. Without question, some of the bravest folks I know doing the hardest work in the darkest places with the loneliest people do so in the name of Jesus. If all Christian organizations and churches and individuals pulled up anchor, the ripple effect would reverberate to the ends of the earth. Millions of the marginalized would lose their advocates, victims would lose their defenders, hurting neighbors would lose their friends. An enormous amount of hope would vanish.
In many cases, our reputation precedes us and it is good.
But sometimes it’s not.
People are famously tone deaf regarding their own clans, so a good temperature check is to ask folks outside the faith community what they see. We should expect the same benchmarks Paul gave the early church: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (I sang it in my head. Cannot be helped. Thanks, Vacation Bible School circa 1981.) This observation would indicate the plan is in solid motion and a bunch of stuff is going right.
But when a watching world concludes the opposite, fundamentally, deeply at faith’s core, something has gone dreadfully off the rails. For a minute, let’s push issues and controversy and legislation and talking points aside. What does it mean when our communities construe Christians as mean, judgmental, hypocritical, and exclusive? What does it reveal? Something along the chain of command has broken down terribly. God did not order the Code Red, so we should not have this much blood on our hands. (“God, were you clear about the love thing?” “Crystal.”)
Is it because Christ-followers have famously preferred the fruits of the mind over the fruits of the Spirit? Do we cling too tightly to dogma and too loosely to love? When Being Right is our highest aim, our most intimate bedfellows are academics, apologetics, and rigorous defense, and we have to use the tools of the world to secure our rank. Within this paradigm, it is easy to believe God’s pleasure in us hinges on our aggressive defense of the kingdom, when, in fact, He told us repeatedly our chief identifier is how we love. (God managed to stay on His throne all these millennia, so I suspect He will not fall out of the sky on our watch.)
Or does this perception of Christians persist because we so greatly struggle to receive our own grace that we are unable to disperse it? It is difficult for human beings to accept unearned mercy. It flies in the face of our merit-based system. We want to earn our goodwill; therefore, we want others to earn theirs. But grace is an inside job first. God’s love compels us to do likewise, but it must first win a hearing in our own souls if it has any chance at an outward expression. Loved people love people. Forgiven people forgive people. Adored people adore people. Freed people free people. But when we are still locked in our own prisons, it is impossible to crave the liberation of others. Misery prefers company.
Or maybe it is because we sincerely, honestly, deeply want to please God, and this world confuses and scares us because it is so far away from the promised land. So in our worry and devotion, we lash out, hoping to reclaim what has been lost. We crave spiritual territory in dark places, but that desire presents as narrowness and anger and fear. I identify with this instinct so deeply. It is a complicated dance, and we easily confuse our place in the narrative. Desperately wanting God’s kingdom to come, we lead with the law, like a sixteen-year-old girl who thought a Bible on a desk corner would represent the story of God more than the warm, safe embrace of human connection.
But the law was never sufficient to make all things new. That is precisely why Jesus came. The law fell short for personal piety, societal restoration, and rightness with God. It didn’t build bridges toward salvation or set people free. It only made folks feel small and inept, outsiders to an ideology that proved impossible. The law was a heavy yoke upon tired necks, and people buckled under its weight.