Estudio y notas
THE CONVINCEDest
Prologue
The Convincedest
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 like something a serious person would say, and it was the kind of sentence that got you invited to teach.
I moved well in the classroom and knew the phrases. But it wasn’t only that: I was somebody. Somebody’s grandson, somebody’s son, at least anywhere in the country. My grandfather arrived in Bolivia as a missionary in 1958; my father, in 1975; I returned in 1999.
It wasn’t exactly authority.
It was familiarity.
People believed the system.
I was an integral voice of that system.
I had two things going for me, and neither had anything to do with whether what I was saying was true: I spoke the language well, and I was the grandson. Between the two, there was nowhere to insert a question.
Because who is going to correct the grandson?
Nobody has to decide to stay quiet. The last name does it for them.
I saw their sincerity and put it on.
I learned their theology and never stopped to ask myself whether it was true.
I worked fourteen hours a day in ministry, and the more exhausted I felt, the more it seemed to me that I was making spiritual progress. I read the Bible every day, never less than a chapter. I served.
I knew the answers. Yes and no. Consider this position, consider that. My opinion was my authority and was offered as the final argument for anyone who asked.
And because the gospel was that I should give my life to God, being tired was proof that I was doing well.
Theology built my schedule.
Around those years I composed and recorded Christian music that, years later, I realized had been helping me cover something up.
I never knew what.
I wrote Mr. Terminology in college.
At the time, I didn’t realize I was writing about myself.
Or maybe more accurately, I didn’t realize I was becoming the man in the song.
Please excuse me, Mr. Terminology If I say that I simply can’t agree Righteous words don’t mean eternity All you’re doing is confusing me.
I thought I was singing against a kind of Christianity I could see in other people: complicated words, theological formulas, arguments that seemed to make faith less about knowing God and more about knowing how to talk about God.
I didn’t see that the very way of thinking I was singing against was already deeply engraved in me.
I could reject the terminology and keep the machinery.
You can stop using the words and keep the system.
And I did.
Years later, I would become exactly the kind of person I thought I was singing against.
My relationship with God went only one way.
I spoke and I answered.
Both roles.
I was completely convinced. I taught it passionately. I tried to live it faithfully.
And I failed.
Nobody fails at fixing something that was never broken.
Thirteen years after being here, I understood the gospel.
This isn’t a figure of speech. It was explained to me properly, I saw it, and it changed what I taught.
I stopped saying that the gospel was me giving my life to God and started saying what it says:
It is already done.
And here is the part I ask you not to skip, because if you skip it, this book reads like any other testimony.
It didn’t fix me.
My doctrine said finished, and my week said maintain.
Both came out of my mouth, and I couldn’t hear the difference.
I spent another thirteen years like that, with the right doctrine, teaching it well, and being the last person to find out.
When the theology is beyond reproach and life doesn’t work, there is only one suspect left.
And it isn’t the theology.
Everything told me I was doing well: the doctrine, the classroom, how well I spoke, my songs.
Only one thing was saying otherwise.
It wasn’t working.
And eventually I had to ask why.
That question is where this book begins.
Part One
The Life I Could Produce
Chapter 1 — The Christian Life I Could Produce
I was a slave to pornography while serving in Christian ministry.
That was not theoretical.
It embarrassed me. It frightened me. And I genuinely wanted to be free.
So I did what I knew to do.
I changed my habits.
I moved my computer screen so anyone walking by could see it. I installed filters. I put passwords on the filters. I built barriers around myself because I knew I couldn’t trust myself.
For a while, I thought that was the battle.
Then I discovered that the battle wasn’t only external.
It was inside me.
A bad thought would come, and I would shake my head violently, as though I could physically throw the thought out of my mind.
I walked down the street doing it.
People must have thought I had some kind of terrible neurological disorder.
I was trying to retrain my bad habits with Christian habits.
It was sincere.
It was disciplined.
And it was powerless against my human nature.
That distinction would take me years to understand.
Chapter 2 — Romans 6
Eventually I was introduced to what I considered at the time to be a clear presentation of the gospel, and I was taught Romans 6.
For the first time, I understood something about the problem itself.
The sinful nature wasn’t mine to conquer.
The Spirit would do that.
I knew the cause now.
But I turned Romans 6 into another thing I had to do.
I had to count on it.
Then count on it again.
And again.
I had turned the truth into an activity.
Believe it hard enough.
Count on it enough.
Make it a reality by faith.
I had been given a passage about what God had done, and I had somehow turned it into another assignment for me.
There was very little liberation in it.
Not yet.
Chapter 3 — Christian-Acceptable
It took considerably longer for me to see what I had been missing.
The work of Christ was finished.
Not mostly finished.
Not finished once I learned how to live it.
Finished.
Complete.
And the power of God unto salvation is not released when I finally become good at applying the right Christian principles. It is in the gospel itself, for the one who believes.
That realization exposed something I had been living for years without knowing how to name.
My Christianity was largely powerless.
Not because I didn’t mean it.
Not because I wasn’t sincere.
Not because I didn’t work hard enough.
Powerless.
I had been living the Christian life in the power of me, with me, and I was surprisingly comfortable with that arrangement.
My relationship with God wasn’t really a relationship in two directions.
It was me talking.
Me answering.
Me trying.
Me correcting.
Me believing.
Me counting on what Christ had done.
Even my dependence on God had somehow become something I was doing.
But then I kept finding verses that described the believer’s life in terms I couldn’t explain away.
The result of walking with Christ was supposed to look like Christ.
Not merely Christian.
Christ-like.
And there was a difference.
My results were Christian-acceptable.
They were recognizable.
They fit the culture.
They could pass in a classroom.
They could pass in ministry.
They could pass in a testimony.
But they were not Christ-like in the way the Scriptures described the life of someone who was actually walking with Christ.
That became harder and harder to unsee.
Part Two
The System
Chapter 4 — Mr. Terminology
I wrote Mr. Terminology in college.
I thought I was singing against a system I could see in other people.
I didn’t know the system was already in me.
The thinking I sang against had already been engraved into the way I thought about God, Scripture, and the Christian life.
I simply hadn’t learned to recognize it.
The song was asking questions I didn’t yet know how to answer.
And sometimes the song was closer to the truth than the theology I was using to explain it.
I didn’t know that then.
I would spend years becoming Mr. Terminology.
Chapter 5 — The Manual
There was a time when I began to see that the conclusions I had been taught did not always 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 admired, and 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 subject.
It wasn’t even the same book.
And it wasn’t that the answer was wrong.
It was that the letter wasn’t asking that question.
The notes are answers, and if the question comes from outside, the whole notebook answers something that isn’t on the page.
I wouldn’t teach that manual anymore.
It wasn’t accurate, and it kept putting theology into the text.
I left.
They took the manuals away from me.
I wrote my own.
A year later I realized I was doing the same thing.
Part Three
The Long Way Out
Chapter 6 — Thirteen Years
Thirteen years after being here, I understood the gospel.
Someone explained it to me properly.
I saw it.
It changed what I taught.
I stopped saying that the gospel was me giving my life to God and started saying what it says:
It is already done.
I thought that would change everything.
It didn’t.
My doctrine said finished.
My week said maintain.
Both came out of my mouth, and I couldn’t hear the difference.
I spent another thirteen years like that.
With the right doctrine.
Teaching it well.
And being the last person to find out.
Chapter 7 — The Thing That Wasn’t Working
Everything told me I was doing well.
The doctrine.
The classroom.
How well I spoke.
The songs.
Only one thing was saying otherwise.
It wasn’t working.
Around those years I wrote another song:
Everything passes so violently My life, silently Everything passes like the wind And here I am, slowly
There is no God in it.
None.
And the line that is hardest for me to read today is:
I just need a way to begin.
Even discouragement was asking for a method.
Chapter 8 — I Was Not a Hypocrite
There is one distinction I need to make before going any further.
I was not a hypocrite.
I was deceived.
There is a difference.
A hypocrite knows there is a gap between what he believes and what he does, and hides the gap.
I didn’t know there was a gap.
I believed what I taught.
I taught what I believed.
I worked at it.
I defended it.
I tried to live it.
When I failed, I assumed the problem was me—not the thing I had been taught to believe.
That is what made the deception so difficult to see.
I wasn’t pretending.
I was convinced.
And I wasn’t merely convinced.
I was the convincedest.
I had the doctrine.
I had the Bible verses.
I had the answers.
I had the ministry.
I had the songs.
I had the testimony.
I had the discipline.
I had the explanations for why the Christian life was supposed to work the way I said it worked.
And when my life didn’t match what I was teaching, I didn’t question the system.
I questioned myself.
I tried harder.
I added habits.
I added discipline.
I added faith.
I added Bible.
I added ministry.
I added whatever I thought was missing.
I was sincere all the way through.
And I was wrong all the way through.
That is why this book is not the story of a hypocrite who finally got honest.
It is the story of a convinced man who slowly discovered that conviction and truth are not the same thing.
I had been convincedest.
And I had been wrong.
Part Four
Listening
Chapter 9 — You Don’t Hear What You’re Defending
There is a particular kind of blindness that doesn’t feel like blindness.
It feels like certainty.
I had spent years defending what I believed.
Then I discovered that defending something and hearing it are not the same activity.
You don’t hear what you’re defending.
So I stopped.
Not perfectly.
Not permanently.
But enough to begin listening.
And what I began to hear was uncomfortable.
The text was not always asking the questions I had brought to it.
Sometimes I was answering questions Scripture had never asked.
Sometimes I was solving problems Scripture had left unresolved.
Sometimes I was forcing harmony where the text had left tension.
I had been trained to make everything fit.
The text did not always fit my system.
So something had to give.
Chapter 10 — The Question the Text Is Asking
This is where the book begins to move from my story into the text itself.
Not to replace one system with another.
Not to prove that I have finally arrived.
I haven’t.
There is still much to learn.
And there is much to unlearn.
The goal is simpler than that.
We will not conclude anything the text does not conclude.
If there is tension, the tension remains until the text resolves it.
If Scripture gives an answer, we will take the answer.
If Scripture does not answer the question we are asking, we will resist the temptation to manufacture one.
The point is not to make the Bible fit us.
The point is to listen.
Part Five
What Christ Produces
Chapter 11 — The Believer’s Life
The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know what Christians were supposed to do.
I knew.
The problem was that I had built a Christianity around what the Christian could produce, while Scripture kept pointing me toward what Christ himself produces.
There is a difference.
Once you see it, it is hard not to see it.
The Christian life is not merely a better version of the life I was already capable of producing.
It is the life of Christ expressed through the believer.
That changes the question.
It changes what faith means.
It changes how we understand sin.
It changes how we understand obedience.
It changes how we understand failure.
And eventually, it changes how we understand God.
Chapter 12 — The Gospel Is Not an Assignment
The work of Christ was finished.
Not mostly finished.
Not waiting for my cooperation.
Finished.
The gospel does not begin with what I can give God.
It begins with what God has already done.
That sounds simple.
I spent years making it complicated.
Chapter 13 — The Light Is Already On
There is a reason 1 John starts where it does.
It starts somewhere else.
It starts with the light already on.
I had spent years trying to figure out how to turn it on.
That was part of the problem.
Conclusion
Rest
This book is not an account of someone who finally figured everything out.
It is an account of someone who spent a long time trying to make the Christian life work from the wrong source.
I believed.
I taught.
I worked.
I defended.
I tried.
And I was sincere.
But sincerity did not make the system true.
Eventually I had to stop.
Stop trying to produce what I had been taught God would produce.
Stop treating finished work as unfinished work.
Stop turning truth into another assignment.
Stop answering questions the text was not asking.
And listen.
The hope of this book is not that you will leave with a better system.
It is that you will see more clearly what God has already provided in Christ.
That those truths will permeate the way you think about God, yourself, sin, faith, and the Christian life.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way, you will stop trying to produce what God has already promised to produce.
You will rest.
And from that rest, you may begin to enjoy something I spent years trying to manufacture:
a living, blessed relationship with God.