The Way Out

But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' ~ Luke 18:13

In our last devotion, The Blame Game, we talked about how we tend to hide in the bushes like Adam and Eve, ashamed and afraid of our failures. We don’t want to face the truth. We find it difficult to be honest. The pain of admitting our guilt and taking ownership of our shortcoming seems too difficult. It’s much easier to hide or divert attention away from it by blaming others.

One tactic I often use to divert attention away from my failure is to get angry. If I huff and puff like a child in a tantrum perhaps no one will press the issue. Also the anger feels powerful, when confession of failure feels to me like defeat. My clean exterior is shattered. My “Grade A” performance is marred. Admission of guilt is humiliation to the ego.

Michele shocked me on this subject. I had asked her to think of a time she was hiding. Instead of hearing about her trying to protect her ego, she shared this:

“For most of our marriage I did our finances, but recently Scott took over that job. Now I realize I had been hiding. If I bought something Scott might think was too expensive, I didn’t worry about it. I said to myself, ‘He’ll never know.’ Now I think twice because he will see the checking and credit card statements. It is a good thing to be accountable to Scott and my spending, but it’s based on fear…fear of Scott’s anger.”

I was saddened to hear that she feared being honest with me. When I asked what she was afraid would happen if I got angry, she responded that she’d just rather avoid the hassle. What a trap! And the truth is I am the careless spender! I was confronted by my hypocracy.

In our marriage relationships, anger as a means to keep a sense of power and control in the face of our sinful action and failures is not healthy. It is an abuse against your spouse and family. It is simply another way to hide. There is a way out.

What a freeing reality to know forgiveness and mercy in Jesus Christ! In Luke 18 Jesus told a parable to free those “who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else.” He told of a religious leader who prayed “about himself.” He expressed how glad he was that he wasn’t like all the other sinners and how good he was by his disciplines of fasting and tithing. He was hiding, trapped in the bushes of fear.

There was a tax collector near who, ashamed of his own sin, wouldn’t lift his face to heaven, but beat his chest in shame saying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said that this humiliated man went home justified before God and not the puffed up religious leader.

There’s an invitation here. The invitation is like God’s calling out to Adam hiding in the bushes, "Where are you?" (Gen 3:9) Where are you in relationship to God’s offer of mercy for your failures and shortcoming, your weakness and sin? Are you still hiding trying to maintain some sense of dignity? There is no dignity in hiding. God wants to free us from our fear of judgment. His perfect love will cast out of our hearts all fear of judgment (1 Jn 4:18) and give us the freedom to walk out from behind our hiding place, whether is be angry outbursts or false piety, and stand before him both humbled and at the same time exalted. God lifts up the humbled, but those who exalt themselves, well they stay stuck in their fear of begin found out.