Today, and over the next few days, I’m going to explore with Marti’s help, some of the ramifications of a very destructive belief system that most Christians partake in without ever knowing it. It’s destructive because it sets them apart from others and apart from that which can ultimately set them free. Marti is the one to talk about this because she has, for the most part, operated without being influenced by it. She never has been far enough inside as a cultural Christian to pick up all the unnecessary baggage that gets attached to those, like me, who have grown up inside the evangelical Christian cocoon. Marti is simply and beautifully conscious of nothing but herself and other sinners. That’s it. For her there is no alternative breed of “good Christian person” to contend with.  For something that only exists in the mind, it is a very powerful image.

Sometimes I wish we could just kill and bury forever that good Christian person, because that good Christian person is me, and I’m so good at being that person that I don’t even know when I’m doing it, and if I don’t know when I’m doing it, I don’t know who I am.

Marti only sees people who are sinners like her. She doesn’t see insiders or outsiders, “us” or “them,” she only sees sinners like her for whom Christ died.

Everyone recognizes their own wretchedness.

“There are many people in the world who are very familiar with their dreadful sins,” she writes, “grieving in the consequences. Yet, I want you to think about why we tend to refer to others instead of ourselves when describing reprehensible, worthless, and rotten sin as juxtaposed against our minor imperfections, mistakes and errors in judgment? Why are we so quick to acknowledge the horrific behavior of others but rarely speak openly about what we hide behind in our well played performances?

“We need to take note that when we think our sins are less despicable than our neighbors’, we are greatly deceiving ourselves, and worse, those around us. When we see our sins as mere flaws needing improvement, we are hiding behind a self-made mask that prevents onlookers from looking into the wicked sinner we truly are, and from seeing and knowing that which can set us both free if there were nothing separating us.

“When we embrace the significance of the cross in our own lives, and for all people, His glory is seen in contrast to the horribleness of our sin. Contrast being the key word. When we hide our sins, we are replacing the Lord with the darkness of masquerading all the ‘right’ things we do ‘for God’ but nothing ‘through God.’

“Something is wrong in the hiding and others know it but don’t understand it. Yet they wait for us to recognize them in our mirror’s reflection of wretchedness, revealing that we are no different. We both are nothing apart from the Lord. It’s a good place to begin, and never leave.”

It truly does simplify the picture doesn’t it? There’s just you and me and a bunch of other sinners out there, and the Christ who died for us all. I think we could get along fine without that good Christian person, whoever that is.