For God So Loved the World

One of my earliest memories is of 4-year-old me standing between my father’s legs as he helped me memorize my first Bible verse. John 3:16 - “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

When I tell that story most people think how wonderful and sweet that is. And in some idealized form of that memory, I can also see the sweetness of a father helping his daughter memorize her first Bible verse. And also I truly appreciate how much of the Bible is stuck in my head due to being required to read and memorize so much of it.  But the memory itself is not all pleasant and wonderful. The memory is tainted with fear, criticism, condemnation, expectation, and a feeling of being trapped.

I can feel his strong legs hemming me in and his hands on my back holding me in place as my little body tries to squirm and get free. but I cannot. He is much bigger and more powerful than me. And the more I squirm the tighter his grip gets. There is no escape. I am trapped and must comply with what he is demanding of me.

I am 4 years old trying to say the big words that I don’t even understand, like “begotten”. And trying to say them all in the right order. So of course I often fail. At which point my Dad’s patience also fails. I feel his disapproval in the tone of his voice as he corrects me, tells me to do it again, and expects me to get it right. I feel his frustration increase as time wears on. And I know that this will not end until I get it right. I can cry tears of frustration, but that will only make him madder. So I am already learning to suppress that side of myself. I am already learning that I need to be able to perform perfectly for him. That is the expectation. As an adult, looking back, I see that my Dad often held me, as a young child, to some very adult expectations. There was very little room to be human and make mistakes, or to just be a child.

I am afraid of failing. I am afraid of his anger or disapproval. I am afraid of his punishment. And I try my best to say it all correctly, both to appease him and to get out of this situation as quickly and harmlessly as possible. I finally get it all right. He makes me say it a few more times. It starts to become easier. And eventually, we are done. He releases me and lets me go play.

In the cult you end up having both a huge inferiority complex and a self-righteous complex.  They seem at odds with each other. It’s hard to understand how they can coexist in the same space until you start to examine it more closely.

The cult held up standards impossible to keep. This kept you constantly striving to be good enough. But you never could meet their standards. So you learned to see yourself as never measuring up, never good enough. A complete worthless sinner! Thus the inferiority complex. They heaped on the guilt and shame to add to this. And the answer was always to try harder to follow the letter of the law perfectly. It is legalism to the core! And your ability to follow the law completely and perfectly was your salvation. Thus it also fostered a type of self-righteousness as you saw yourself as better than the average Christian since you followed much more laws, and you knew much better what God wanted or required than the average person.

I was taught that God is so holy and righteous that he cannot be in the presence of unrighteousness. That he cannot even look on it! So great is the divide between God and Man. It is a divide that Man is not capable of crossing. Thus God gave his only son to die for our sins and take our place in the judgment meant for us so that the broken relationship between God and man could be repaired. But still, the only way God can look on us, or dwell with us is if we cover over our filthy unrighteousness with Christ Righteousness. So that when God looks at us he sees Christ not us.

I know there is a lot of good theology in the ideas of Christ as our covering and in the substitutionary atonement of Christ. I am not here to start a deep theological conversation. I only wish to talk about how these ideas were taught to me and how they affected my view of myself and God.

Bill Gothard does not deny this saving grace of God for salvation. But that is where his ideas of Grace ends.  After Salvation, he would have us do an about-face and turn right back to a life of works and law following to gain or earn our righteousness and acceptance in God’s eyes.  It gets all messed up from there. Gothard redefines the definition of Grace to be “an active force within us giving us the desire and power to do things God’s way” in Gothard’s redefinition of grace we can see how he turns grace upside down turning from something God does for us into something we must do to be right with God. its all about works.

As I've been working with a trauma coach I'm realizing just how hard it is for me to see myself as enough, as lovable in myself. And it all stems from this idea that what God loves is Jesus in me. Not me. I learned to see myself as not lovable or acceptable to God. The only thing God could love in me was Jesus. Not me. Jesus. I was still at my core unacceptable. Something that God would have to turn his face from. Something that I desperately needed to cover up and make it look like Christ.

So I better try hard to look like Jesus. This all goes right back to perception. How important perception was in the cult! You had to be perceived as righteous, perfect and holy whether you were or not. Only the perception mattered. This puts the emphasis in the wrong place and creates a hyper-focus on your works rather than your worth. It essentially distracts you from what is really important, what is going on in your heart and mind and keeps you on a hampster wheel of works and people pleasing. 1 Samuel 16:7 reads “…The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” Once again Gothard totally turns things around and gets us to focus on what people/human authorities see rather than on what God sees and what is important to Him, the inner man.

As I was contemplating all this and asking myself, can God love me? Me. the way I am? can he even look at me without disgust unless I’ve got my Jesus robe on? John 3:16 came to the forefront of my mind. Look! it says that God so loved the world. (And then I replaced the world with “Me”) God so loved me, that he gave his only son.  He loved me, he saw me, he was looking on little old sinful me and not turning away in disgust but rather figuring out a way to repair things between us. And he did all this before he sent his son to save me from this terrible predicament of sin I find myself in So that I could cover up and be acceptable to him. 

This has changed my thinking and perspective. I don’t think it is true that God is not able to look on or dwell with us in our sin. Yes, maybe he will not take part in our sin, but this does not seem to put up an impenetrable wall between us and God that I was led to believe. It seems to me there has never been a moment in time where God has not been with us. Or where he was incapable of loving us. or a time when looking at us was abhorant to him. And the stated reason for sending his Son was not to make us loveable or acceptable to God, but rather, it was so that we “should not perish”. It was to make a way for us to go on In this loving relationship for eternity. The righteousness of Christ might be the cause of our freedom, but it is not the cause of God’s love towards us. We seem to have some intrinsic value that our fallen state can not erase. And in the life of Jesus on this earth, I see more examples of God dwelling with, interacting with, loving, and freeing sinful men. Whatever state we are in, His face is turned towards us not away from us.

I recently saw a video clip of a man holding up a crisp new $50 bill. he asked the audience what it was worth. Then he got the bill really dirty in the mud and again asked what the bill was worth. The answer was the same. It was still worth $50. Then he crumpled it up and asked again how much it was worth. No matter how dirty or crumpled that bill got, it still held an intrinsic value that could not be diminished by anything done to it. In fact, I thought to myself, the only thing that can take away its value is to rip it up. Which is exactly what I feel the cult did to us. Its goal was to break your will and your spirit. it used all sorts of manipulation tactics to break us down until we were broken similar to a ripped dollar bill. I thought to myself, what if I had been taught to see myself in this way instead of being taught to believe I was lesser than for any and every infraction of the law? How greatly that would have changed my view of myself and my relationship with God!

Learning to accept that God Loves me (not just Christ in me), and always has loved me, has changed me. It has allowed me to love myself, and be more compassionate with myself. Where once I held myself up to the exacting standard of the law, and criticized and punished myself for any and all failures to comply, I now can show myself compassion and grace, (grace in its traditional meaning.) Just as God shows grace to me! God loves me right now in the messy middle and I can also love myself in the messy middle.