“We Are Beggars,
That Is True”
by
Jason S. Heath
These
six words, the last words of Martin Luther, also encapsulate his vision
of the ground of Christian experience.
For Luther, man stands before God as a beggar with empty hands: a
man in need with nothing to offer.
And this is exactly where God wants him to be.
Early
in Luther’s life, as a monk, he became deeply conscious of his own
sinfulness before God. The
resultant feeling of Anfechtung – variously translated as
dread, despair, and anxiety – hung over him like a dark shadow.
He obsessively confessed sins for hours in the monastery, fearful
that he might omit some fault and incur God’s wrath.
As
Luther’s despair drove him to search the scriptures, he began to see
that God justifies people through faith rather than their works.
The righteousness of God, rather than something to attain through
good work. was “the passive righteousness with which merciful God
justifies us by faith.”
Rather than man attempting to work to appease God, he must
realize he is a beggar and humbly accept God’s gift of justification.
When Luther’s consciousness of his need was joined to a
knowledge of God’s gift to us, the result for Luther was so sweet:
“Here I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise
itself through open gates.”
And
so the role of the law was not to empower us to achieve righteousness
before God, but to help us understand just the opposite:
Although the commandments teach things that are good,
the things taught are not done as soon as they are taught, for the
commandments show us what we ought to do but do not give us the power
to do it. They are
intended to teach man to know himself, that through them he may
recognize his inability to do good and may despair of his own ability.
A man must be taught by the law to
know himself…. and [see] himself to be so great a sinner that he can
find no means how he may be delivered from his sin by his own
strength, endeavours and works.
For
many of Luther’s contemporaries, their consciousness of sin was
exceeded by their confidence in their own abilities to achieve righteous
lives. Thus, while they
were beggars, they were “beggars on the move”.
Sinners, yes, but getting better all the time!
One day, God would declare them righteous – because they had,
by their own efforts, already become righteous.
In the Augustinian model of progressive justification, “God had
committed himself to bestow grace on everyone who does the best he
can”
On
the contrary, for Luther no one could be justified or grow in Christ who
trusted in his own abilities. In
fact, The reverse was true – the man who despaired of his own
abilities only then comes to the point where God can actually reach him. And just as it is in justification, so in sanctification:
“It ought to be the first concern of every Christian to lay
aside all confidence in works and increasingly to strengthen faith alone
and through faith to grow in the knowledge, not of works, but of Christ
Jesus…”
Such
has been the teaching of many spiritual giants through the centuries: to
truly grow in Christ and be able to serve him, we must first see our own
inabilities. “Anyone who
serves God will discover sooner or later that the greatest hindrance to
his work is not others but himself.”
What these men are highlighting is the necessity of the Romans 7
experience of despair of self-effort that Paul describes:
I
have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out… For
in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at
work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind
and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.
What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of
death?
So
it is this understanding of the futility of self-effort which opens the
door to coming to God on his terms: as beggars, with nothing to
offer him but our selves. The
beggar is the only kind of Christian who is useful to God.
All others have as their agenda to impress God with their
performance, resulting in the dread and despair, the Anfechtungen,
that Luther felt. Consciousness
of his own sin was not enough to deliver him from this – he still
trusted in his own abilities and disciplines as a monk (his “monkery”,
as he called it) to overcome his sin.
And
so how does a Christian live a life of obedience to God’s commands?
Not first by striving, but by receiving what Christ has given:
If you wish to fulfill the law and not covet, as the law demands, come,
believe in Christ in whom grace, righteousness, peace, liberty and all
things are promised you. If
you believe, you shall have all things; if you do not believe you
shall lack all things.
Such
an approach to sanctification, while it irks the human pride which wants
to just exert its own effort, without dependence on anyone, in the end
brings freedom. Luther as a
monk strove hard by discipline and works to purify himself before God,
but doubts constantly plagued him:
Would it ever really be good enough for God?
Is there something I have overlooked?
It was not until he despaired of his self-effort that he found
true freedom, a freedom he describes in Freedom of a Christian as
“freedom from works”, that is, freedom from the harried treadmill
lifestyle of trying to be “good enough” for God, and freedom from
the fear of falling short.
This
healthy despair of self-effort and the understanding of ourselves as
beggars before God is surely the solution to many spiritual ills that
persist today. The
spiritual pride that infects many hearts – patting ourselves on the
backs because we are such hard-working, loyal followers of Christ (as
opposed to those other people…) – needs to be confronted with
this vision of “beggarhood” before God.
Many others, like Luther the monk, see themselves as falling
short spiritually, and focus on their failures, responding with vows to
do better, to try harder, to read more scripture, to pray more often,
when the first thing they need to do is to give up trusting in these
efforts and to come to God empty-handed, relying on his resources
to move forward, and confident of his acceptance in spite of their
failures.
May
we all recognize that true spiritual life starts here: with empty hands.
“We are beggars, that is true.”
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