In our Sunday meeting this past week, a speaker shared what appeared to be on the surface a valid insight. However, as I thought about it, it unjustly ascribed to us the ability to control our own path and fate and eternal disposition. The man spoke of a cycling event in which they made an errant turn, checked a map, "repented" and put THEMSELVES back on the track. It is a very common misconception of Christianity that we put ourselves back on the path when it is and always has been Christ who makes that possible. When we go astray, we do not put ourselves back on the path. What we do that makes a difference is to humble ourselves, ask for help, and then make it stick.
Humbling ourselves is no mean feat. On one of my road trips in 2005, I visited American Flats just southwest of Virginia city. I watched another car drive down from the frontage road to the site itself and decided I preferred to do in kind rather than park up so high and have to scramble back out. When the time came to depart, I found that my car was unable to make a sharp turn in some soft dirt, and eventually concluded that I was stuck. I sucked up my error and walked several miles into town where I could use a phone to call for a tow. When he arrived, he looked down at where I was stuck, registered some words of chastisement, and then hoisted my car up some 20 vertical feet to safety on the frontage road. It was embarrassing, but it was the only way I was ever getting out of that predicament of my own making.
As in that moment, I had to ask for help later, this time from a divine source. On the way back to Reno from Berlin, NV, I took a "shortcut" through the mountains to US50. The map showed a four-way intersection which turned out to have six different roads, and although I picked the correct one, I soon found myself in the mountains on a snowy base of frozen powder. Just as I determined to stop and put on my chains, I slid off the road into the snow and found myself stuck. For a brief period, I tried my own devices, and then I knelt in the snow and asked God for help since I deviated from my original route and had told nobody of my actual destination. Within ten minutes of the prayer, a truck came up behind me. The driver helped me dig out around the car, cut branches from trees for friction, and then pushed me up on the road with his truck. For at least a mile, he stayed behind me while I crawled along to make sure I made it clear of the high country and then disappeared. I am not convinced that the man was not an angel, because to this day I remember not one whit of his countenance.
I had to make that stick. I stopped going places alone and stopped taking paths that I consider dangerous, because I know that the ultimate goal of every journey is to make it back again safely. Sometimes we think that safe returns are something that we do, and certainly there is work that depends on us. We need to go get help and then stay on the path. Ultimately however, like both of these trips, it is someone else, Christ, who puts us back on the road. After all I can do, I am still stuck if I try to save myself.
All we can do is repent. There are eight R's of Repentance: Recognize, Remorse, Recount, Recant, Restitution, Resolve, Rinse, and Repeat. Most people pick and choose the ones of these that they find appealing as if repentance is some kind of buffet where we agree to do the things we prefer. Repentance actually calls on us to cast aside our pride and humble ourselves so that we can be lifted by someone who can. You cannot lift yourself. In order to lift, someone must be above, and by definition we are no greater or lower in elevation than ourselves. To be lifted, we must appeal to a Being who really is above us.
Christ is not just a way, He is the only way. Far too often, we try to save ourselves, to exalt ourselves, even though we talk incessantly about Christ in our meetings. It's as if we think we must first be good enough to approach Christ when we can't get better without Him. It's like thinking we can't go into the banker for a loan until we no longer need one, in which case nobody would go to the bank. The bicycle analogy given was false because it showed how the speaker righted his own life. It forgot that he was given a map and the tools and the inspiration to consider that he might be off course, without which he might never have found the correct route in the first place. Without help from a higher power, he would remain lost forever and ever until he yielded to the enticings of the spirit and realized a change was necessary. People may change our lives, but Christ changes us. We remain stuck until He restores us to the path.
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