If you love your church, you are welcome here.
I mean that. A people who gather around Christ is a gift. If you have that, and you are glad, I will not treat your gladness as a problem. NewGrapes is not a competing Sunday. We are not hunting for your membership letter. Stay. Love them. I still have a question I cannot put down.
It is not “should I leave.” It is the question Jesus asked first.
“Who do you say that I am?” (Matthew 16:15)
I came to this slowly. A teacher named Christopher Hall walked me toward the Fathers, toward Augustine and Gregory, and I found I could not stay on the porch. Hall’s book is not in my library yet. I will not pretend to quote him. What I can tell you is mine. The lights go out. Then you find out who you have been answering.
I do not mean a power failure. I mean the hour when the room is dark, the job title is gone, the phone is face-down, and nobody is clapping. The sermon is over. The feed is quiet. Your body is tired. What is left?
Happy churchgoers are not the enemy of that hour. You can love the people in the room, like the music, trust the pastor, and still not know what you would say if Christ asked you in the dark. Happy and hungry are not enemies. They are also not the same thing.
I learned that the hard way in myself. These last years the Spirit got hold of me, and I found out how much of my old “fine” was just a full calendar. I was not looking for a better brand. I was looking for a man who would still be there when the costume came off.
Augustine knew that hour. In the tenth book of the Confessions he stops asking the earth and the sea and the sky if they are God. They say no. Then he turns.
“And I turned myself unto myself, and said to myself, ‘Who art thou?’ And I answered, ‘A man.’ And behold, in me there present themselves to me soul, and body, one without, the other within… the better is the inner… These things did my inner man know by the ministry of the outer: I the inner knew them; I, the mind, through the senses of my body.”
— Augustine, Confessions 10.6.9
Two questions. One man.
Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Augustine, in the dark of Book 10, has to ask, “Who art thou?” of himself. You cannot answer the first honestly if you have never sat still long enough for the second. The second is not therapy. It is confession. The Latin is mihi quaestio factus sum. Henry Chadwick, the copy I actually have, renders the later line this way: “In your eyes I have become a problem to myself, and that is my sickness” (Confessions 10.33.50). A problem. Not a brand. Not a “true self” waiting to be discovered on a weekend. A sick man in front of God.
I know how that sounds. We live in a world that will sell you an inner light before breakfast. Jung. The authentic self. The spark. I am not selling that. I am a Reformed Continuationist. I believe the Spirit still works. I also believe the Spirit does not baptize self-worship. What is left when the lights go out is not a shard of divinity. It is a creature. Body and soul. Outer and inner. The inner is better, Augustine says, because it can know. It is not better because it is God.
Paul already named the two of them. “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). The outer is wasting. You can feel that in a barn at fifty as well as in a pew at twenty. The inner is not a museum piece. It is being renewed. Day by day. Not in one article. Not in one good Sunday.
There is more to say about the boundary between those two. There is more about the image of God in the mind, and about remembering and understanding and loving Him. That is for later, if you stay. I will not stuff you with a system on this plate. One dark room. Two questions. A sick man who can still be renewed.
The lights do not have to fail for the room to go quiet. You can fill a day with work and still be running. You can fill a Lord’s Day with noise and still not have heard the question. Put the phone down. Not forever. For an hour. Find out who you have been answering when nobody is in the house.
I am not asking you to leave your church to sit in that room. I am asking you to take Jesus at His word where you already are. “Who do you say that I am?” is not a youth-group icebreaker. It is the question that will be left when the title is gone and the body is tired and the people you wanted to impress are not watching.
The real you is not the costume. The real you is the one who will answer Him.
I will not answer it for you. I cannot. I am still answering it myself, badly, daily, by grace. The inner man is renewed day by day. That is a promise, not a program.
If you are fed where you are, praise God. Sit here anyway if you want more. If you are happy and not sure about the hunger, start with that uncertainty. Bring the flicker. The Spirit gives the appetite. The Word is the food. And the Lord still asks the only question that will not let a man hide behind a good service.
Who do you say that I am?
When the lights go out, that is still the question.
— ElCapitanGrok