I think one of the biggest problems with Christians or contemporary Christian thinking is the attitude that humans are wretched sinners.

Okay, wait, hear me out on this one - yes, I know the Bible says we are all sinners, and I believe it too, so don’t click away just yet.

What I’m talking about is the confused message we project with our own confused attitude about our moral state. We say, in effect:

Hey, YOU SUCK! But… hey, God loves you. But… YOU SUCK! So bad that God had to go DIE for YOU! But… HE is so good that he came back to life again… but, don’t you ever forget that YOU SUCK! so bad that he died for YOU! Because He loved you so much. Because YOU SUCK! And if it weren’t for him dying (for YOU! because YOU SUCK!) then there’s absolutely no chance you would be getting into heaven. Because YOU SUCK! But He is so good that He will let you into heaven if you believe that He died for you, because YOU SUCK!

We tell ourselves this over and over and over again, and we convince ourselves of this “spiritual truth” enough to then go tell everyone else: “YOU SUCK!” We get good at it, we learn how to tell them in their language: “YOU SUCK!” in Arabic, Hindi, Telugu, Chinese, etc etc. Using radio, TV, movies, etc etc.

Okay, then, someone says: “okay okay, fine, I SUCK! God damnit, I’m sorry!! Or God damn me, I don’t know, I’m confused, I’m just sorry, alright? I believe He died for me - now what??”

Right. This is where Christians start to get confused, but by and large most of us have told ourselves the following over and over enough times to say:

Have you made the decision to accept Jesus as your personal Lord and savior? Now you are a child of God. You are a new creation, the old has gone and the new has come. Now you are free from sin and can enter into heaven.

But even as we say that, we know the next question: “wait a minute, what about now, here, before I die?” Because that’s what we’ve been struggling with too, but we can’t let this newly converted heathen know that! So we tell him or her what we think about the purpose-driven life:

Well, now God is going to make you like Jesus, who doesn’t suck by the way. But YOU STILL SUCK! So you have to live life good now, and try not to SUCK! But YOU SUCK! So you will fail and fall but don’t worry, Jesus, who doesn’t suck by the way, will tell God it’s alright, he’s got you covered.

In his blood.

Because he died for you.

Because YOU SUCK!

And you still do.

And we might even buy this for a few years, believing that the purpose of the Christian life is to evangelize the rest of the world into seeing how badly they SUCK! and how much they need Christ because otherwise they are going to burn for their sheer SUCKINESS!

And all the while we wrestle inwardly with our own still-existent suckiness. Confused with our failings, with our brokenness, things that were supposed to have gone away because we are new creations now, damn it!

And we wrestle with believing whether God really created us, or whether we only have value in God’s eyes because we “made the decision to accept Jesus Christ as my personal packaged individual savior”, and whether we had any value in his eyes before that decision.

The decision-point, by the way, is what we loudly proclaim as the solution to the global problem of mankind’s suckiness, a problem so big that every single person has to make an individual commitment to follow Christ in order to solve it. Of course, this is a fundamentally flawed characteristic of Western thinking - to see everything in terms of problems that need solutions, solutions that only the West can provide, for $14.99 (but made in China) - but that’s a topic for another day. In any case, the attitude of seeing Christianity as a problem-solution philosophy leads to us wrestling with why our $14.99 Jesus Film didn’t fix our suckiness - why our decision-point left us wrestling with questions that the church won’t answer because they’re busy telling everyone that they need to make the same decision we made.

And at church we see a bunch of smiling people who don’t suck anymore, and we all learn together that the Christian life is about becoming like Jesus.

Even if you are a woman.

Or an artist.

Or gay.

So we wrestle with our identities, because frankly we don’t quite know what to make of our “selves” if we are to become like Jesus. We know we suck, because we have told ourselves that so much, and we know that is the root problem after all (isn’t it?), but we don’t know what to do with the things we are that we were before we became Christians that are so much a part of who we are - our particular gifts, talents, unique personalities, hearts of kindness or serving, ways of thinking. We are confused about whether they were who God made us to be, or whether they also suck and can only not suck if God wants us to use them to convince others that they suck.

We learn that individualism is frowned upon, individual glory or expression is bad because it exalts the self, which is bad because, hey, don’t you know, YOU SUCK! How can anything good come from your heart? You have to give Christ, the one-who-does-not-suck, all the credit everytime you do something good, and you get all the blame everytime you do something bad.

Even if you look back and remember that you were doing good things and had good motives in your heart before you became a Christian, proving the point that you don’t need to become a Christian in order to be a good person, but that’s not the biblical message, you are told.

So then we try very very hard to be like Christ in everything we do, although we don’t have the first clue as to what that looks like because Christ lived 2000 years ago, was a man, was a carpenter (maybe, we think), and looks Swedish and never smiled and never laughed and never wrote poetry and never drew paintings and never enjoyed music and never played basketball on the Nazareth Low-Lifes basketball team in the all-Judea championship league (Final score: Romans 97 - NLL 99, Jesus penalized for breaking and then healing the jaw of the Roman team pointguard for getting in the way of his buzzer-beating slam-dunk.)

So we feel very guilty about doing anything if it doesn’t have some kind of “Godly” aspect to it. And we feel very guilty about doing anything outside of the church or in a Christian organization somehow. And we feel very guilty if we don’t act or talk like the smiling Christians at church on Sunday mornings. And we end up being very fake and plastic and manipulative to our worldly friends and family, because we now do everything in “ministries” or “Christian-” prefixed hobbies: Christian music, Christian art, Christian literature, Christian clothing, Christian drama, Christian education, Christian college, Christian beer.

And all the while we hunger for wholeness.

Because somehow, even through all the refrains of “YOU SUCK!”, we somehow found the God of the universe who created us all, and somehow this God is now in our hearts, and somehow we feel this tug from within toward our God, this tug that He promises to restore us to reckless wholeness in the amazing Life he has for each of us, that our whole selves will be engaged, wholly, in the pursuit of His glory expressed in our myriad ways, like multi-faceted jewels in the sparkling living crown of our worship of God.