Learning My Name

By Pete Gall

When the prodigal returns home, the real relational work between father and son begins. Learning My Name is the harrowing chronicle of a fearful prodigal putting family relationships on the line as he learns to trust the love of both his dad and his heavenly Father for the sake of putting neurotic, addictive thinking to rest.But this book is more than the author’s story; it is the story of humanity’s interaction with God. Desperation becomes discovery, and light floods onto both the prodigal tendencies of evangelical faith, and the character of the Trinity whose love beckons us home.This is the story of finding that “the love of the Father is far more durable than we’ve come to believe,” and discovering a new joy in God’s goodness and love. It’s a book for tired rebels, fearful followers, and anyone who longs to meet the God of laughter and adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780310562863

Pete Gall

Pete Gall is an author, speaker, freelance copywriter, brand strategist, and passion-driven gadfly whose clients range from Fortune 50 corporations to national denominations, tech start-ups, nonprofit organizations, and local churches. Pete and his amazing wife, Christine, live in Indianapolis with their two dogs.

Book preview

PART I

THE RUB

CHAPTER 1

CHRISTIANITY’S CASH COW

Books on grace sell huge to Christian audiences because so much of Christian culture has an incredible ability to make people feel like failures for their ordinary imperfections. In the light of what is commonly experienced in Christian culture, grace sounds like this sweet get out of jail free card I can play when I’m left with no other option but to admit defeat and look for the magical way out.

Ultimately, it’s not the books on grace that make me feel like a failure, and the problem is certainly not grace. The problem is not the churches or the Christian industries that generate a mixed bag of worthy and unworthy products; they’re just a reflection of the market. The problem is not even the Fall. After all, sin will continue to exist alongside redemption in this world—wheat mingled with chaff, sheep hanging out with goats—and Jesus said nothing could separate us from him. Truth be told, my sin isn’t what makes me feel like a failure. What makes me feel so lousy is the lens through which I see myself and the meaning of my sin. The problem is woven deep within the fabric of how I see the world, and it has everything to do with my ongoing refusal to truly—even indolently—allow myself to be loved by God.

Philip Yancey, one of the foremost authors on grace, includes this pearl in one of his books: We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyhow.¹ I want to find comfort with both halves of that sentiment. I want to be as okay with my fallen state as God seems to be, and I want to let God do the work of shaping me with his love.

Martin Luther, the booming voice of grace in the history of the Protestant church, understood something huge about our bastardly ways and sin’s inability to drive the love of God away from us when he wrote:

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner. (emphasis added) ²

St. Augustine, whose impact on Christianity can hardly be overstated, was maybe even more willing to let go of the fear of failure and risk humanity’s mess to the care of the love of God when he preached about how to deal with sinners and said, "And if you shout at him, love him inwardly; you may urge, wheedle, rebuke, rage; love, and do whatever you wish" (emphasis added).³

I don’t want to be broken. I hate the sin within me, and I do want God to reshape me. But when I look to people like Augustine, Luther, and Yancey, it doesn’t take long before I see that maybe I focus more on my sins than on God’s love for me. Something is broken with the way I interact with the world and with my sin, and it costs me the experience of God’s love. It leaves me trapped in my own fallen state. I want to experience the healing and freedom—in addition to the forgiveness—of God’s love.

I am coming to have this feeling that for all of us, in one way or another, God eventually lets the pressures of our sins pile up against our best efforts and most ardent attempts at faith so that we crumble, throw in the towel, and give the bastardly parts of ourselves to God to do with as he will.

And that is where the adventure begins.

LINGERING IN FRIDAY

The adventure is not about the finished, cleaned-up moral version of who I am, either. The adventure is about experiences that teach me who God is, and who I am in relation to him. It’s no trick to tell us apart: I’m the weepy broken one, and he’s the one who can’t stop laughing from the delight he feels in my company.

One source of ongoing struggle for me is that I’m really bad at lingering in Friday. For me, Christianity fails when in my haste and selfishness I fixate on a life of Easter Sundays, all victorious and pastel-clad, and I forget that the place where I was first afforded space in the embrace of God was on Good Friday at the foot of the Cross. Good Friday is where I return over and over, filthy and foolish and burdened by my failures, and where I see how God loves me anyway. Not in a way that ignores my dirt, but in a way that seems to almost value the dirt, because the dirt is what brings me to him. Good Friday is where I see the difference between myself and my sin. I think I would feel better if I spent more time lingering in Friday. And I bet my image of God would change a lot too.

But Friday was an ugly scene. We run into some pretty unsavory characters at the foot of the Cross—at their most unsavory. The drunk is still drunk. The adulterer still smells like perfume and sweat and whatever else. The envious neighbor looks us up and down, checking our clothes for brand names. And behind them, a million other people crowd around, every one sobbing and snotty in utter brokenness. That’s the truth of this kingdom of ours, and it’s beautiful; but it doesn’t package well and it doesn’t translate to television for jack.

Friday is the height of Jesus’ glory, because that is when the Godhead opens a space for us to be brought into the love that flows between the Father, Son, and Spirit. It’s when the curtain in the temple dividing the holy from the unholy rips, from the top down. The power and the love of the Lord is unveiled, and it is majestic. It’s majestic for God. But Friday is also the day the lights come on in a dark world full of sinners who’ve come to believe they own the place. Good Friday is the worst day in the long and storied history of Adam’s stolen glory, because it was the day our stolen glory truly died.

I’m embarrassed about the mess and ugliness of Good Friday. I hate how I was. How, to my chagrin, I still am—even if in lesser or different ways. I’ve experienced enough of my own need for the Cross that I tend to feel pretty sure I can’t trust a person who’s on their way up that hill; I know what depravity exists in people who go there. Those people have issues. I don’t want to be lumped in with them. I don’t want to pay the social cost I’m sure to pay if other people see me in my desperate need and brokenness. Besides, the Cross was once and for all, right? It’s finished, right? We can’t crucify him again, right?

It’s kind of gauche, and certainly not appropriate for mixed company, to dwell upon the Cross. We’ve been forgiven, set free, loosed, named more than conquerors. It’s time to figure out what’s next and get on with it. To God be the glory—leave the snapshots from Golgotha in the closet.

It doesn’t work, does it? As dutiful Christians who’ve come to believe that Jesus only heals all at once and often only to the level of our faith, many of us refuse to give each other permission to admit it yet, but the embarrassing truth is that we need to return to the Cross again and again, even if it’s only a brief visit under the cover of night or because a profound momentary crisis drives us to cry out for Christ’s mercy once more.

We are powerless against our sin. It has seeped into our bodies and become a disease. The filth returns. We still eat too much, or lust too much, or drink too much, or control too much, or put ourselves in harm’s way in a nearly infinite variety of ways. We will forever stumble back into the need for the Cross, whether it’s for salvation or relief from our burdens. The horrible bottom-line truth is that the Cross is the only place where we make sense.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK

I think Christians gobble up books on grace because the books give us permission to experience a love that’s happy to see us even if we arrive absolutely covered in our failures. We’re desperate for any bits of comfort about grace because the best our Christianity has been able to say to us about our failures—much like a football coach yelling to his players on a hot day in training camp—is to go grab a cup of grace, then come back and redouble our efforts.

This much I do know: You will not get better at this because you try harder. You will not get better at this because you double down on your bets. You will not get better at this, and continuing to tell yourself otherwise will only drive the pain deeper. You will continue to move from personal failure to personal failure, church disappointment to church disappointment, drama to drama. And at the end of a long trail of what will surely feel like dutiful searching for wisdom and the application of right answers, the time will come when this whole thing will break in thorough, painful, irrevocable fashion. On that day you will have to decide who lied about your pain and the ways you responded to it. The answer you’ll have to confront is that it was you—you lied—and you were lied to, and you worked in concert with the liars to ride the lies as far as you could.

But it’ll be much easier to blame the breaking on God. Or to give up on him. Or to walk away from church, blaming the jokers whose advice only made matters worse. And if you’re like me, that’ll be what you do.

That won’t work either. Maybe you already know it, though I pray you know it from wisdom rather than experience. Walk away from God and his Church, and after a while the quiet moments catch up with you. The small confessions. The small admissions. The small truths. The flickering evidence of a good thing discarded. At some point you see that you lied to yourself and that you chose the words of liars over the counsel of the Lord.

You’ll have to figure out just how the wording of the lies strings out in your world, but the truth I think you’ll find—the truth I think I’m finding—is this: Easter Sunday looks good on TV, but it belongs to Jesus.

Good Friday is for us. And it is good.

GOOD FRIDAY

On Good Friday, because Jesus takes the lower, more accursed position than ours, reaching deeper into—and overcoming—sin to make room for our sin within the loving relationship between Father and Son, we’re afforded a new identity and a new safety in the merciful love of our Lord. That makes Good Friday the day that’s most profoundly ours, however disgusting and deeply humbling the pain that drives us there may be. And we know it’s an invitation to a divine relationship, where all glory is reflected to another, because even though the day is ours, we never gain control over it. We’re not the stars. The star is Jesus, human and dying tragically with an invitation for us to heap all of our mess upon him as he goes, and to thereby cast our fate—namely what will become of us for the rottenness we feel within ourselves—into his care.

Good Friday is the day we are taken into the embrace of the God over and against whom we’ve previously forged our identity. Until Good Friday, we know ourselves only as independent beings. We measure ourselves independently, with thoughts of God being somewhere out there, removed and distant. Until Good Friday, we live an absurd illusion as created beings, somehow convinced that a created being can make sense on its own, independent from a creator. Until Good Friday, we are bullets who deny the existence of a gun. We are echoes who deny the existence of a voice. We are children who deny the existence of parents. Until Good Friday, we live an irrational lie that argues independence from a God upon whom we are wholly dependent.

On Good Friday we experience dependence. That doesn’t mean we experience the elimination of self. It means we experience the ultimate harmony that comes to created beings when they yield themselves up to their Creator. We remain, but whatever irrational evidence we’ve used to measure our independent selves in the past disappears. On Good Friday, the only context we know is personal and immediate and eternal, complete and without gradient. On that day we experience ourselves within the context of God’s delighting, laughing, whole, and all-powerful love.

On Good Friday, we see our true selves for the first time, and we cannot help but respond. On Good Friday, we finally make sense. We see that we do not have to continue berating ourselves for our failures because the whole idea of independent success is absurd within the context of God’s embrace. Within the relationship of the Godhead, there is no failure. There is no success. There is only God and his searching love, always present and complete and encompassing. The world falls into place, and the world is good. On Good Friday we finally sigh, soul deep, and relax into the love of