Estudio y notas
The gospel was that I should give my life to God.
No one was going to correct me on that. Said out loud, it sounded serious. It sounded like the kind of thing a person who meant business would say. It was also the kind of sentence that got you invited to teach.
I knew how to move around a classroom. I knew the phrases.
But it wasn’t just that. I was somebody.
Somebody’s grandson. Somebody’s son. At least anywhere in the country.
My grandfather came to Bolivia as a missionary in 1958. My father came in 1975. I came back in 1999.
It wasn’t exactly authority.
It was familiarity.
People believed me.
I had two things going for me, and neither had anything to do with whether what I said was true: I spoke the language well, and I was the grandson.
Between those two things, there wasn’t much room left for a question.
Because who corrects the grandson?
No one has to make a decision to keep quiet. The last name makes it for them.
I saw their sincerity and put it on.
I learned their theology and never stopped to ask whether it was true.
I worked fourteen hours a day in ministry.
The more tired I was, the more certain I became that I was making spiritual progress.
I read the Bible every day. Never less than a chapter.
I served.
And if the gospel was that I was supposed to give my life to God, then exhaustion became evidence that I was doing it right.
Theology built my schedule.
Around that time, I wrote and recorded Christian music that I would only understand years later as an attempt to cover something up.
I never knew what I was covering.
One of the songs said:
I can’t write a manual With rules for you to follow Or books for you to study Hiding behind knowledge
I recorded that song in 1999.
And it was true.
I wanted that.
I just wasn’t living there yet.
I sang those words while holding onto a gospel in which I gave my life to God.
The two things don’t fit.
The song was already more true than my theology.
I wrote something true at the beginning. Then I believed something else. Then I spent twenty-six years walking in the opposite direction, collecting, one by one, the four things that song had rejected:
Manuals.
Rules.
Books to study.
Knowledge to hide behind.
It isn’t irony.
It’s deviation.
My relationship with God went in only one direction.
I spoke.
I answered.
I played both roles.
The conference was about a Christian life built around the confession of sin.
But the moment that mattered didn’t happen at the conference.
It happened afterward, in a restaurant.
I was confronted for teaching something that wasn’t in the manual. I told them I had questions about the biblical text that I still couldn’t resolve, and that I was trying to be faithful to it.
They didn’t correct me with Scripture.
They corrected me with the manual.
And I didn’t leave that restaurant an integrous man.
I left afraid.
What I did with that fear comes later, in the chapter where it belongs.
But the questions kept getting louder.
I was completely convinced.
I taught it passionately.
I tried to live it faithfully.
And I failed.
No one fails at fixing something that was never broken.
Thirteen years after I came here, I understood the gospel.
I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.
Someone explained it to me clearly. I saw it. And it changed what I taught.
I stopped saying that the gospel was me giving my life to God.
I started saying what it actually says:
It is already done.
And this is the part I ask you not to skip.
Because if you skip it, this book becomes another testimony.
It didn’t fix me.
My doctrine said finished.
My week said maintain.
Both came out of my mouth.
I couldn’t hear the difference.
I spent another thirteen years that way—with the right doctrine, teaching it correctly, and being the last person to realize that something was wrong.
When the theology is flawless and life doesn’t work, there is only one suspect left.
It isn’t the theology.
Everything told me I was doing well.
The doctrine.
The classroom.
The way I spoke.
The songs.
Only one thing told me otherwise.
It wasn’t working.
Around those years, I wrote this song:
Everything passes so violently My life, silently Everything passes like the wind And here I am, slowly
There is no God in that song.
None.
And the line that is hardest for me to read now is:
I just need a way to begin.
Even discouragement wanted a method.
I began to see that my failures were also the failures of people who taught what I taught.
But it wasn’t only the failures.
I began to see where our conclusions came from.
They didn’t come from the text.
They came from the system.
Then we went looking for the verse.
It sounded good.
But it was deduction.
I began to see real hypocrisy in people I had admired.
Then I began to see the same inconsistencies in myself.
When I stopped defending myself, stopped defending my theology, and stopped trying to prove something to someone, I began to listen.
You don’t hear what you’re defending.
What I heard had nothing to do with the question.
It wasn’t even the same book.
The problem wasn’t that the answer was wrong.
The problem was that the letter wasn’t asking that question.
Notes are answers.
And when the question comes from outside, the whole notebook answers something that isn’t on the page.
I wouldn’t teach that manual anymore.
It isn’t accurate.
It keeps putting theology into the text.
I left.
They took the manuals away from me.
I wrote my own.
And a year later, I realized I was doing the same thing.
Today I’m accused of teaching hyper-grace.
And antinomianism.
I’m not going to defend myself against that here.
The whole book is my answer.
You will judge it better at the end than I can now.
I have much to learn.
Much to unlearn.
I haven’t arrived.
We will not conclude anything the text does not conclude.
Tension is tension.
And it remains tension for as long as the text leaves it unresolved.
The way forward is to rest in what the text actually says.
To listen.
That is the path.
1 John starts somewhere else.
It starts with the light already on.