Sinners before the Throne

I am new to twitter, but I already love it. I can follow people, famous or ordinary, and get updates on what they're doing or what they're into without rummaging through all the extra crap of Facebook. That might seem lame, but if your list of people you follow is interesting, you get to read and watch some pretty interesting things that you normally wouldn't be privy to.

Recently I was on Twitter and my good friend Matt Nightingale had tweeted a link to the I Am Second website. I Am Second is a website primarily for people to share their testimonies about God. Some people are famous, but others are just ordinary people like you and me. This particular tweet sent me to the conversion story of Anna Rice, the author of Interview with a Vampire. At first I didn't know who she was. The name sounded familiar, but I wasn't quite sure why. After she said she wrote Interview with a Vampire I was very curious to her story. I have not read the book, but I enjoyed the movie very much.

Towards the end of her video, Anne Rice is asked what it means to be saved. Her reply was, "What does it mean to look at the cross and think Christ has saved me... It means that your sins are forgiven. That everything you have failed to do, everything you've done wrong... All of this has been forgiven by God. Understood, witnessed by God and that you are forgiven. There is no barrier to you being one with Him."

I love the simplicity of that answer. It's to the point and without all the academic jargon I have been cluttering the gospel with. It's a simple/complex person's understanding of a simple/complex gospel. The phrase that really struck me, though, was 'understood and witnessed by God'.

I am a youth pastor in Tulsa, OK. Having been a youth pastor for 4 year, I have heard a lot of the Christian clichés. One that I hear often, concerning prayer or thinking before you sin, is to picture God with you, because He is always with you. While that is true, we use this in order to guilt teens into not doing things we have deemed "bad." But the way Anne Rice uses it here, I believe, is much more real and beautiful.

It is true that God is with us and knows all we have done, but instead of using that as some sort of guilt trip (which is another thing God has freed us from) maybe we should expand that in the way Anne Rice sees it. In her explanation, grace, what was offered on the cross, is made more complete because God understands and witnesses.

It is a little weird to picture God with you as you commit a sin, but take that even further and think about when you step up to His throne and are humbled by his grace IN THE MIDST of Him knowing the things you have done.

There is a movie called Defending Your Life that I loved watching as a kid. I don't know why I liked it so much. Maybe the thought of everything tasting good and you can't gain weight was appealing? Anyway, in this movie the two main people have just died and they are taken to a place that is in between the earth and their final destination. The final destinations are either Heaven, or you go back to earth. The basis of this decision is how you led your life on earth before you kicked the bucket. Each person is paired with a lawyer who looks through events in your life to plead your case, while the plaintiff cross examines. As they talk about these events, either showing courage or some other virtuous quality, or not, there is a TV screen behind the subject in which those events in question are played back like a movie. As a kid, I hoped this was how the afterlife was... Not so much because I was a courageous kid, but because there was no hell and you could eat whatever you wanted and it would be the best meal you had ever had.

Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because it falls in line with what Anna Rice was talking about. She says that God understands and witnesses our "stuff," good or bad. And instead of having to sit and be subjected to people fighting over whether or not you have good character, God has watched the game film and knows no one has done it well.

As I approach the throne of God, I don't do it as someone who needs to confess things to God as if He doesn't know them already. God has watched our movie and knows everything we have done. If this is the case, we have to ask ourselves, why confess? If we're confessing to a God who knows all, doesn't that seem pointless? This is where Anne Rice gets brilliant. Confession is not just for the one receiving the confession, but also, and maybe more importantly, for the one giving the confession.

There is nothing we can do ourselves to forgive the sins we have committed. Only through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross can we be forgiven our sins. But God already knows this. I believe confession is for us to get off our shoulders the things that hinder us from people the people we were meant to be. We were made with much more in mind. We turned our back on God and have tried to do it our own way for so long. All along the way we have screwed it up even more than before. There is a truly humbling experience in the life of a Christian when they first realize this truth. But something we fail to realize, and churches fail to teach, is that we walk up to the throne of God not to pour out our secrets and things we've never told anyone... No, God has "witnessed and understood" those. We walk to the throne of God to express gratitude. Gratitude for the fact that 'while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.'

My church loves this idea, but never practices it... Our words say that we are all sinners, but our actions tell everyone that we must work out our own salvation before we enter the throne-room of God. These people will continue to carry around the weight of guilt because there is nothing we can do to forgive our sins. I  am humbled at the throne room of God because I know God knows what I have done. I know God has seen the darkest, grossest, ugliest things I have ever done, said, thought, etc. and yet He continually asks me into the throne room because He has witnessed and understood me.