Why God Cannot Be My Co-pilot

It is no surprise that the Dane Ortlund’s book Deeper begins with a chapter entitled “Jesus.” His whole point is that we grow spiritual not primarily by improving our behavior or sharpening our theology or experiencing deep spiritual emotions but by deepening our love for Jesus. Unless all those other things – behavior, theology, passions – flow out of and contribute to a deepening love for Jesus, they are worse than useless; it is actually dangerous to make behavior or knowledge or feelings the focus of our spiritual growth.

The title of his second chapter, however, is a surprise: “Despair.” Ortlund argues that so long as we try to hang on to our self-respect, so long as we imagine that God’s role in our spiritual lives is to help us improve on what we already have, we will never grow deep in our love for Jesus.

Despair, says Ortlund, is essential at the beginning of our spiritual life: “Fallen human beings enter into joy only through the door of despair. Fullness can be had only through emptiness. That happens decisively at conversion.”

This is true.

Jesus has nothing to offer the complacent and self-sufficient.

Before Jesus is good news, I must know the despair of my own sin. The truth is that the whole Gospel message actually begins with despair. You remember the familiar “Romans Road” plan of salvation. It begins with bad news: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23) and “The wages of sin is death” (6:23).

In other words, despair is the front door to Christian faith. Until I am ready to admit that I cannot manage my sin and guilt, I am not ready to hear the Good News about Jesus.

But, says Ortlund, that sense of despair must continue in healthy spiritual formation. Ortlund argues that despair “remains an ongoing rhythm throughout the Christian life. If you are not growing in Christ, one reason may be that you have drifted out of the salutary and healthy discipline of self-despair.”

Did he lose you when he used the expression “salutary and healthy discipline of self-despair”? There could hardly be a more counter-cultural notion in our secular culture of the Sacred Self.

Of course there is an unhealthy despair, but this is different. This is the healthy despair at our futility of our efforts; that despair prompts us to pivot toward healthy dependence on the work of the Spirit.

Why is this healthy despair necessary? Because the same sin that separated me from God before I knew Christ continues to infect my inner life even now. (Don’t I know it!) Puritans called it “indwelling sin,” and it will be a struggle for every believer so long as we inhabit these corrupt bodies in this corrupt world.

So I am just as dependent on Christ in my ongoing spiritual formation as I was at the moment of salvation.

This has not always been clear to me. For decades because I thought my dependence on Jesus ended once I was saved; after that, it was up to me to grow in Christ.

This is why I failed to understand Paul’s exhortation to the believers in Colosse: “As you received Christ Jesus the Lord [that is, in a posture of utter dependence], so walk in him [in the same dependence], rooted and built up in him and established in the faith” (Col 2:6-7).

My love for Jesus will be only as deep as my despair of ever managing things on my own.

If I think of God as my co-pilot, I am giving myself far too much credit and robbing Him of His glory.

If my arrogance keeps me from acknowledging the ongoing presence of sin in my life, if I vainly imagine that I can manage my spiritual life on my own steam, I will keep Jesus at arm’s length, and my love for Him will be shallow and insubstantial.

God isn’t my side-kick, someone there to bail me out only when I get into difficulty. No, my despair of ever managing things on my own is a constant reminder that I need to depend on His wisdom, grace, and power this moment, and the next.

Persevere, Paul Pyle Pastor of Discipleship