My Lawbreakin' Family

I had my first run-in with the law when I was just a young boy. At least it was the first run-in I can remember. You see, I was raised by a family of law-breakers. Every member of the clan was a criminal including my dear mother and my beloved grandfather. Ironically, we thought of ourselves as law-abiding members of the nation, but in truth, we broke some law at least once a day.

Specifics?

Well, the law says, “Don’t covet.” Despite our best efforts not to covet– we coveted. Before we would know it, a little voice would say something like, “Would you look at the Turners? That Sears and Roebuck truck sitting there unloading that new living room suit, and Bertha's grinning like a mule eatin' briars looking over here every few moments just to rub it in. I hate braggarts!"

OOPS! Another law broken.

But that’s just one example. There were the “bear false-witness” (gossip) violations and the “don’t dishonor your parents” violations, and the…, oh well, you get the picture. Law breaking was going on everywhere in my family - daily. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to us talk. Shoot, we didn’t even know we were lawbreakers. No sir, according to us, we were pretty good folks. Like the Pharisees, we knew the law. Oh yeah, we knew the loopholes too. In our culture of lawlessness where finding and using loopholes in the law is important, the greatest discussion always centered around the question, “How far?” You know, like in, How far can I go before I actually sin?

Now don’t confuse our particular brand of lawlessness with the run-of-the-mill kind of criminal. We were nothing like the prostitute or bar-hopping-drunk variety of criminal. We weren’t even like the Baptists down the street. To look at us, you would think we were the Lord’s finest. No alcohol was ever consumed by people like us…at least not in public. We were never openly promiscuous. In every public way, we lived good lives. But secretly, we were expert wrongdoers. It was like we had multiple personality disorders – in a spiritual sense.

I’ll have to admit, it was kind of fun while it lasted. But, living the life of the criminal comes at a price. For one thing, I don’t think I ever felt completely comfortable with the arrangement. There was that persistent, irritating feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

Like the time I was singing "It Is Well With My Soul" for the hundreth time, for example. Until then, I had trained myself to sing those "church songs" without ever really hearing the words (a good trick to know, by the way, if you ever want to live a life of respectable crime). But this once, I don’t know why, my mind honed in on that phrase – it is well with my soul. I got to thinking, right in the middle of the song, “Hey Gordo, nothing’s all that well with your soul. I know it, and surely God knows it, so stop pretending like it is!”

So for years I chose not to actually sing the words whenever the congregation sang that particular hymn, but I would move my mouth like I was so that the other members of the church wouldn’t think I had a problem.

My problem was, I was thinking all along that the song was about being legally right – sin and guilt free, if you will – in the presence of God, and being right in the eyes of others was just as important.

It was quite a few years later that the truth of that song finally hit me like a ton of bricks (and you know how that can hurt):

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
And sorrow like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul.

My sin, Oh the bliss of this glorious thought-
My sin, not in part, but the whole
Is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more
Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord, O my soul.


I felt both joy and shame at once. Shame because I had missed the point of faith altogether. My whole life had been wasted thinking that faith was about me. Honest enough to know that I could never fully measure up, I had invented, or inherited, the ability to put my life into little compartments, each unanswerable to the other. It was the only way a man like me could feel good about himself. I had to have something to insulate me from the gnawing feeling that I was condemned. So I had my social life compartment and my professional life compartment and my religious life compartment. One did not, in my mind, necessarily have anything to do with the other. And the religious side of me was obsessed with the function and organization of the law (religion). In other words, I was all about the correct doctrine and little about how my faith should affect my treatment of other people, for example.

Believing the right doctrines? You bet I could keep that kind of law. Admitting that I was a failure at keeping the weightier matters of the law? No way could I do that because I did not know anything about how to truly redeem myself from the guilt of being disobedient (lawless).

Then, BOOM! Like I said, right between the eyes that ton of bricks hit me.

My sin, not in part, is nailed to the cross. And I bear it no more?

I like that - I bear it NO more...

Redemption isn’t about what I give, but about what someone else gives? You mean I don’t owe a dime? Praise the Lord, indeed!

No, it never was about me. And I’m thankful for that - knowing my proclivity for criminal behavior. My sin, not in part but the whole? What a waste! Years, my entire conscious life, in fact, spent worrying about parting clouds and trumpet blasts because I thought it was about me. But that’s the best part of the story…about it not being about me, I mean.

And Lord haste the day, when the faith shall be sight.
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll.
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descent,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

Because it isn’t about me, I can pray, fervently pray, for the Lord's return. I am able to do that because I’ve put my faith in him now, not in myself. Clearly, I have an abysmal track record when it comes to keeping the law. He’s wiped my slate clean, though. Even then (when he comes back), as the song says, it will be well with my soul because it is about what he has done on my behalf.

When my eyes were opened and I could see this good news clearly, I was more than shocked – I was dumbfounded. Truthfully, I never did really like my life of crime, but it was all I knew. And, to tell the truth, it was a sort of comfortable thinking that I had a leg up on this forgiveness thing (if everything fell into place just right and I held to the right doctrines). But in my inner being, I knew the ugly truth about me and the law. And I shuddered in fear at the consequences.

It’s ironic, now that I look back on it, that a belief system that valued obedience to the law would actually lead to greater lawlessness. But that is precisely the path my life took. That’s because law can never do what an undeserved gift can. And that’s the story, as I see it, of the biblical record. Undeserving as I was and am of anything short of capital punishment, my sin, not in part, is nailed to the cross. And I bear it NO more.

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul!