Some Things That Are Not Sins

“ ‘So, after the tests, should we offer you a place here?’ Mac asked.

‘Probably not, I guess,’ James said.”

Robert Muchamore, The Recruit (2004)

There are some things that are not sins.

It’s not a sin, for example, to get up late.

 

I bet you anything she wasn’t really asleep when they took this.

We attach virtue to early rising, sort of by instinct, it seems to me, but the more I consider it, the less sense it makes. I mean, granted, scripture’s not very complimentary about people who laze around in bed all day instead of actually doing any work,¹ but it doesn’t prescribe that that work has to begin early in the morning. On the contrary, it is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.² We’re limited little creatures and we need to sleep. If we believe that God who neither slumbers nor sleeps is working out his plans for our good, then we know that we don’t need to be working every hour he sends to achieve our aims, as if the onus for making sure what needs to happen happens were on us rather than him. There’s massive relief in that, massive peace and certainty in an environment of frantic scrambling to Get Things Done, and our trusting God enough not to try to steal his job can be a powerful witness to his greatness and his goodness before the eyes of the world. But so often we forgo all that for the sake of indulging our own pride. Ever boasted about how early you got up today, how early you started doing Productive Things? Like, yeah, I’m that organised and self-disciplined, look at how together my life is, how terribly On Top Of Things I am. Ever proudly told people how few hours of sleep you’re functioning on as if it were some kind of achievement? Like, yeah, I’m that strong and capable that I can still behave like a normal human after a mere six, five, four hours; and moreover, yeah, I’m that Busy doing Extremely Important Things that Simply Can’t Wait, that I haven’t had the time to provide for my basic needs as a finite mortal being. Sleeping in late, then, carries the opposite significance: not being On Top Of Things, not being strong and capable, not proving my worth and importance by getting on with Productive Things from an early hour. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t sleep in late (I do, a lot – thanks, PhD lifestyle); it just means that it feels like failure every time I do. But getting up early is a standard I hold myself to because the world tells me that that’s what it looks like to be succeeding at life; it’s not a standard God holds me to.

It’s also not a sin, for example, for your room or house to be a bit of a tip.

Again, we attach virtue to tidiness, and insofar as that involves creating a safe, hygienic, and comfortable environment for us, our households, and guests to exist in, it seems a worthwhile goal to pursue, but there’s no demand that everything has to be pristine and perfect. When Martha, preoccupied with household chores, asked Jesus to tell her sister to help her, he rebuked her: Mary, in sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to him, had chosen the better portion, and it would not be taken from her.³ There are, we conclude, more important things to be doing than the washing up. If my room is a total mess but I haven’t prayed yet today, then I should go into my room and close the door and leave it a mess and blooming well get on and pray. And yet how often, again, do I let my pride usurp those priorities, because I want to convince myself that I’m On Top Of Things by having everything nice and clean and tidy? I want to convince myself that I have my life together, that I’m a Competent Human Being, that I’m in control of stuff; tidiness, somehow, in my head, represents all of that. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I actually keep everything nice and clean and tidy; it just means that it feels like failure that I don’t. But keeping everything perfectly tidy is a standard I hold myself to because the world tells me that that’s what it looks like to be succeeding at life; it’s not a standard God holds me to.

It’s also not a sin, for instance, to be poorly informed about significant cultural oeuvres, or indeed about anything, really.

We attach virtue to educatedness, and perhaps that begins from the entirely valid and commendable premise that it’s good to pursue truth, but it quickly turns into snobbery. God is not impressed by worldly learning; in fact, he deliberately chooses what is foolish in the world to shame what is considered wise. The gospel itself is folly to anyone who has not undergone the undeserved, unsolicited miracle of regeneration.⁴ When we stand before the judgement seat of the Lord Jesus Christ, it won’t make any difference what we do or don’t, did or didn’t, know, except as to whether we have known him. So why do I still get it in my head that having read, or seen, or listened to such-and-such a thing will make me a better or more worthwhile person? That doesn’t mean, of course, that I actually do read and see and listen to all these significant cultural oeuvres (there are far too many of them, ain’t nobody got time for that); it just means that it feels like failure not to have done. But being well-informed about certain aspects of worldly culture is a standard I hold myself to because the world tells me that that’s what it looks like to be succeeding at life; it’s not a standard God holds me to.

One thing I have read – if you’ll permit me a digression to construct this week’s fictional analogy – is the CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore, and if I were to try to pitch it as a significant cultural oeuvre, I might describe it as a game-changer in the children’s/young adult genre in that it dared to deal with mature topics without treating them as carefully curated centrepieces in a moralising frame, and also broke new ground with the sheer unsanitised realism of its narrative voice, such that it made you believe that there really might be a secret wing of the intelligence services devoted to the training and employment of children as spies.⁵ The first book in the series, The Recruit, follows our young protagonist James as he finds himself first orphaned and in care, and then in trouble with the police, and then, sudden and inexplicably, at a secret facility undergoing a series of tests under the supervision of someone called Dr. McAfferty, or Mac for short, to see if he might be a suitable candidate for the CHERUB programme. There’s a martial-arts match with a current CHERUB agent (James gets pulverised), a written intelligence test (he doesn’t finish), a bit where he has to kill a chicken (he does, reluctantly), a suspended obstacle course (he gets through it but not without wanting to throw up), and then they ask him to retrieve a brick from the bottom of a swimming pool (he point-blank refuses; James can’t swim).

 

The CHERUB logo. Apparently in the Hebrew translations of the books, CHERUB is called מלאך (malakh), which means ‘angel’ - bit random given that ‘cherub’ is a Hebrew word anyway.

James really wants to join CHERUB, but after that performance, his hopes of being allowed to do so aren’t exactly high. This is what happens next:

James was back where he’d started, in front of the fire in Doctor McAfferty’s office.

“So, after the tests, should we offer you a place here?” Mac asked.

“Probably not, I guess,” James said.

“You did well on the first test.”

“But I didn’t get a single hit in,” James said.

“Bruce is a superb martial artist. You would have passed the test if you’d won, of course, but that was unlikely. You retired when you knew you couldn’t win and Bruce threatened you with a serious injury. That was important. There’s nothing heroic about getting seriously injured in the name of pride. Best of all, you didn’t ask to recover before you did the next test and you didn’t complain once about your injuries. That shows you have strength of character and a genuine desire to be a part of CHERUB.”

“Bruce was toying with me, there was no point carrying on,” James said.

“That’s right, James. In a real fight Bruce could have used a choke-hold that would have left you unconscious or dead if he’d wanted to.

“You also scored decently on the intelligence test. Exceptional on mathematical questions, about average on the verbal. How do you think you did on the third test?”

“I killed the chicken,” James said.

“But does that mean you passed the test?”

“I thought you asked me to kill it.”

“The chicken is a test of your moral courage. You pass welll if you grab the chicken and kill it straight away, or if you say you’re opposed to killing and eating animals and refuse to kill it. I thought you performed poorly. You clearly didn’t want to kill the chicken but you allowed me to bully you into doing it. I’m giving you a low pass because you eventually reached a decision and carried it through. You would have failed if you’d dithered or got upset.”

James was pleased he’d passed the first three tests.

“The fourth test was excellent. You were timid in places but you got your courage together and made it through the obstacle. Then the final test.”

“I must have failed that,” James said.

“We knew you couldn’t swim. If you’d battled through and rescued the brick, we would have given you top marks. If you’d jumped in and had to be rescued, that would have shown poor judgement and you would have failed. But you decided the task was beyond your abilities and didn’t attempt it. That’s what we hoped you would do.

“To conclude, James, you’ve done good. I’m happy to offer you a place at CHERUB. You’ll be driven back to Nebraska House and I’ll expect your final decision within two days.”

James thought he’d failed the final test, but he was wrong. Why? Because he hadn’t comprehended what he was being tested on – the standard to which he was being held. To his surprise, it wasn’t his swimming skills that were being assessed, but his self-awareness and decision-making. And to be fair, he had an excuse for that: nobody had told him the criteria, for the sake of obtaining an authentic and accurate result. I have no such excuse for thinking I’m somehow Failing At Life because I often get up late and have an untidy house and am uninformed about great works of culture, and so on and so on and so on. I know that none of those things play any part in the standard to which I am held by the only one whose assessment of me really matters in the end. In fact, I know that, unlike James, my acceptance into the place where I want to be – for him, CHERUB campus; for me, the presence of God – is not conditional on anything I do or achieve. I know that it would have been impossible for me to pass any test that would rightfully earn me that privilege, but that another took the test in my place and gifted me his top marks across the board.

But maybe that explains why I keep running back to these false standards: because I want to have rightfully earned some kind of meaningful success for myself. I know that the moral standard necessary to warrant God’s approval – you must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect – is light years beyond anything I could achieve, and I don’t like that, because I want to achieve something. So I hold myself to other standards instead. I nick them from the world, mostly, tweak them a bit to suit my particular inclinations and values, and set about trying to achieve them – because they, unlike moral perfection, seem achievable, and that means that I’ll be able to hold them up as proof that I’m Competent and On Top Of Things and Not Failing At Life, which I have come to realise is basically a way in which my subconscious articulates the idea of having worth. A person who is On Top Of Things is a worthwhile person. Trouble is, I never do manage to stay On Top Of Things. There are moments, brief flashes, of smug pride, but mostly it’s just a constant nagging sense of failure. I know God’s standards are impossible to meet, so I set my own instead – my own stupid standards that bear no resemblance to his – but it turns out I can’t even meet those.

And do you know what, it’s just as blooming well. If I could meet my own standards, I might be able to kid myself into thinking I didn’t need the cross. As it is, every avenue leads to failure except the one where Jesus takes on my every failure, my every sin and shortcoming, and pays the penalty for them, crediting me his perfection in return. You must be perfect – well, in him, I am. In him, I meet the impossible standard, because he has already met it for me.

I so often, like James, imagine that I’ve failed, simply because I haven’t comprehended the standard to which I’m being held. It isn’t my being On Top Of Things, my being a Competent Human Being, my fitting with the worldly ideas of what success looks like that I’ve imbibed; nor is it even my own moral character and conduct, because God knows I could never pass by that criterion. Rather, it’s Jesus’ moral character and conduct. That is the criterion according to which I am assessed. If I don’t doubt his perfection, I have no cause to doubt my position. It’s only my pride – my determination that I have to prove myself worthy of something – that creeps in and tells me otherwise.

So if you see any echo of yourself at all in what I’ve been describing, I exhort you as a fellow beggar who’s been lucky enough to learn where the bread’s at,⁶ let’s stop holding ourselves to these meaningless, invented standards; let’s stop wasting our time and trouble and emotional energy on pursuing goals that God has not asked us to pursue; let’s stop letting things of our own creation leave us feeling like failures (can you see how much of a classic case of idolatry this jazz is?). Let’s throw down our pride, and replace it with awe and gratitude and love towards the one who met the impossible standard on our behalf. If his sacrifice for us has not failed according to God’s standards, then neither, adelphoi, have we.

Footnotes

¹ Try Proverbs 6, from about verse 6, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+6&version=ESVUK. Proverbs’ main point about laziness is that it leads to financial ruin, in which respect the ‘sluggard’ definitely belongs to the category of fool rather than wise.

² That’s from Psalm 127: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+127&version=ESVUK.

³ As we’re told in Luke 10: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10&version=ESVUK. Try that response the next time your housemate complains that you aren’t pulling your weight in terms of chores. (I jest, obviously. You do have time to both read your Bible and show your housemates the love and honour due them. And if you don’t, neither of those should be the first to drop off the to-do list.)

⁴ 1 Corinthians 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+1&version=ESVUK. What a chapter. Massive implications here for how we preach and teach, and engage with the world on an intellectual level.

⁵ They’re a rollicking good time, and so utterly readable than you can devour a whole book in an afternoon without really having to think: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Robert-Muchamore/CHERUB-The-Recruit--Book-1/848678.

⁶ A cursory Ecosia search tells me that the famous quotation to which I allude is attributable to someone called D. T. Niles. No, I’ve never heard of him/her either.