A LETTER TO DADDY AND MOTHER

My heart almost burst with joy. My eyes and soul spilled over in gratitude. To think that I was really accepted not on the basis of my perfect obedience to law, but through faith in Jesus Christ -- the thought was incredibly glorious!

At the moment I was not concerned about arguments over "faith versus works." I needed no reminder that true faith lures a man to work far beyond all legal demands. I was seeking no easy way to pardon, a way devoid of effort. Gladly I

would have worked till I dropped dead, if only I could be sure of God's loving acceptance. Now I had it as His gracious Gift in Christ.

On the basis of being perfectly right in understanding and life I knew myself lost. Now, however, I knew of a man (the believer in Christ) to whom God would not reckon his sins. Here was a standing with God that did not depend on one's

perfection. I found peace in the midst of my imperfection. I knew that faith was far more than believing the facts of the Gospel. I could never have peace through that kind of faith. I knew that it was commitment in trust to Christ as Savior

and a full reliance upon Him, without stopping to hold up a single trait or deed of self.

Many, many truths had to be related to this central one that "in Christ" "through faith" we stand in right relation to God. I had to study the Scriptural relation of repentance to faith, of baptism, of grace, of works, of the Holy Spirit, of growth in

Christlikeness. But in

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all I could see that God deals with us as persons, not puppets, as sons in love and not sons in law.

My groping for God was really His grasping of me How clear it became. The Almighty wants a Family. He offers Himself to us as Father. The Gift is Himself -- in loving companionship. He cannot force Himself upon us. No amount of works on our part or marking through sins in some celestial ledger on His part will give to us Himself. Love can neither be purchased at the supermart nor created by juggling the entries in the account books of our lives. Our family was not so created, and neither is God's.

As I learned more about God it became crystal clear that what brought peace and the deep enriching of life was not mere information. The word "Father" was familiar enough. Only now it became more than a word. It was a window, a window in the Throneroom of the Almighty. I could see Him who ruled the world as "my Father." It was He who had come near in Jesus holding out His hands, grasping ours in His own and refusing to let go, taking us all the way to Calvary and there in the blaze of His Cross illumining the depth of our selfish, fearful pride and the height of His selfless, transfiguring love.

The joy of knowing Him who sees us as we are and accepts us anyway is a heady wine that bursts all the wineskins of words and spills through our souls. I wish desperately that there were some way of saying it so that you would have to understand. I not only want to know that God's Gift to us in Christ is Himself in loving friendship, but I want you to know the Gift is yours, as well as mine. May the Spirit of the living Christ breathe through these pitifully inadequate words something of His own Presence.

Please, let me labor this point, for it is a labor of love. You gave us many things at home: something to eat and wear, an opportunity to go to school, an extra something when it could be squeezed into the budget.

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But these were not your greatest gifts. Greatest of all was yourselves. Not just your protection or information about You, but you we received.

If all that I knew of you was that you were responsible for my birth, that you are older and much wiser than I, and that I must honor you, as a family we would be non-existent. What really made the home was to know you, Mother Sue and

Daddy. O, this was much, much more than having enough information to write a book about you, even as you know how much greater the joy to be with those you love than to hear from them.

How would you feel if your children never thought that it was possible to know you personally? What if they thought faithfulness meant studying feverishly the accounts of your movements, memorizing your letters and making a legal code

out of them by which to order their lives? What if they were scared to death that a mistake would cause you to cut them off forever? Would this make you supremely happy or break your heart?

What pains me terribly is that we generally in Churches of Christ are breaking God's heart while striving feverishly to be right, absolutely right. We should try to be right, but when we think that our relation to God is based on that rightness, we live under the constant threat of doom. We are not infallible. We blunder. If God will seize such error to damn us, then we are damned, for we are sinners.

To avoid despair we must shout loudly (until we believe ourselves, whether or not anyone else believes us) that we are right on the things that really count. We can take the easier things: immersion, weekly communion, "Church of Christ" name, and contend that these are the things that make us true Christians. Even if we don't love God or our brothers as we ought, we have kept the greater commandments. If we insist loudly enough, we generate a type of assurance, but

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the very shouting and stamping of our feet reveal that we are yet anxious and insecure deep inside.

Among many of our brethren the sense of God's acceptance is based upon everybody's else's rejection. Where people disagree, somebody is wrong. People who are wrong cannot be saved. Therefore, it is not merely pride and arrogance that

make us shout frantically that we are right. Whatever security of soul we have is at stake. We must be right. We cannot afford to admit otherwise. If we are wrong, we are utterly lost.

This view makes it necessary to fight fiercely those who disagree with us. Not simply because we love them nor because we love the Kingdom, but because our soul security trembles in the balance. Only in the insistence that we are right and all other groups wrong are we able to find sufficient assurance of God's acceptance to make life bearable. We must cling to it at all costs.

Should we consider the possibility that people in the "denominations" may be saved, our very faith would be shaken. How startling a revelation is this! It shows that our faith is grounded wrong. It is not really faith in Christ as God's redeeming sacrifice for us. It is faith in our rightness and everybody else's wrongness. Of others like us Jesus once said, "They trusted in themselves that they were righteous and set all others at nought" (Luke 18:9).

We have come to illustrate in devastating fashion what is meant by "self -righteousness." It does little good for us to be deeply offended when outsiders say so. Our denial is far from convincing. It has become impossible for us to smite our

breasts and cry, "God, be merciful to me a sinner!" for that confession would put us on the level of other sinners. Nothing that we have, or are, or know, would give us any advantage. We simply cannot afford such humiliation, and it proves beyond doubt that we really are "self-righteous."

When one realizes that God accepts him, not because he is good or smart (better and smarter than others),

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but while he is a sinner, he wants to sing of the mercy of God. He wants others to know of such a Savior. He finds that he has a security in Christ that does not rest upon the damnation of those with whom he disagrees. For nearly twenty years I have seen that "The Church of Christ" is not the whole family of God. It can be only a part. All those everywhere who have been "born over from above" are in the family. Jesus said, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved" (Mark 16:16). There are millions aside from us who have done just this. How on earth can we assert, "We are "The Church of Christ,'" excluding these whom Jesus declares "saved?"

We must deny Jesus' words or grant that all baptized believers are in "the Church." Some brethren will admit it but refuse to recognize them as brethren by contending that they are "in error." Self righteousness prompts us to say, "We are the true Christians not in error." When our own Brotherhood is split some twenty odd ways, we are obviously "in error." None of us has hope apart from God's over flowing mercy. We all have the privilege of prayer and forgiveness. "In Christ" there is continual cleansing. I know not why we should declare that in Christ is continual cleansing for us alone.

The thought seems to be that as individuals we sin constantly, but as a group we are perfect, "without error." We fool no one else, and we hardly fool ourselves, for we then hasten to add, "We are without doctrinal error." When we have run out of breath asserting our doctrinal purity, our divisions stand there mocking us.

The Church of God on earth is always "in error," morally and intellectually. We ever stand under judgment because of sin. But also through faith we stand under God's mercy. If we decide we do not need to stand under His mercy, but can now rest on our own

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perfection, we are "fallen away from grace," (Galatians 5:4). If we knew what it meant to be saved by grace, we could catch a glimpse of God's greater Family.

A long bitter road has led us to believe that God forgives every kind of error but "doctrinal" error. What makes us think that He forgives stinginess, lust, character assassination, worldliness, laziness everything but instrumental music in worship? Such shallowness of heart and head is not born of the New Testament nor of the Restoration Fathers. It is the bitter end of a sectarian spirit that thrives on division and ministers to pride. It destroys us spiritually.

I doubt that we come to see God's larger Family by pointing out how good and right people in other churches are. Judged by Christ's perfect love and obedience they are all lost. And so are we! It is by seeing how we are put right, though unrighteous, that we come to see how other unrighteous souls are also "through faith" "reckoned righteous." At least, so it came to me.

When I realized that faith is personal rather than creedal, I could say, "I do not know how right or wrong my brethren are on attitudes or doctrinal points, but I do know that I am trusting Jesus Christ as Savior. My relation to Him is personal and not legal." I could see my weakness and His power, my folly and His wisdom. I was gloriously free from the law's condemnation, but Love was there binding me to Him in a glad servitude that I would not escape if I could.

Similarly, I knew that others who laid themselves at Jesus' feet for mercy, as I had done, were as truly saved as I. If He did not "reckon" my sins, He would not reckon theirs. Since both are imperfect, neither of us can afford to boast. This doesn't mean that we can't teach one another, point out the other's faults, if we discern them. If the same Spirit dwells in us both,

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then He is patiently trying to lead both to the light and mercifully covering our failures.

Because our family has been one where we have attempted to be understanding and forgiving, I am counting on you to glimpse what God is trying to do with His Family and how He feels about His children. He is not trying to send them all to hell, anymore than you are watching jealously to find some reason to sever all relations with your children. Surely, we break His heart when some of His children will not even recognize others in the same Family.

Here is the bend in the road for me -- I cannot go on acting as if we are the only Christians, refusing fellowship to others because my "Church of Christ" brethren will not allow it. I cannot continue the kind of church life that rends the Father's

Family and breaks His heart. I must protest. Whether it does little good, much good, or no good, I must be faithf ul to the right as God gives me to see the right.

I wish that I could widen my fellowship without being cut off by those in Churches of Christ. No one can possibly know how much I care for these people, how much I have suffered with them and by them, nor how much more I would try to take, if it would help. But as Paul once had to turn the larger part of his ministry away from those he loved most dearly, I must turn, too. I do it not without months and years of wrestling with my own soul and with God.

Several months back I wrote concerning my health and the killing pressure under which l have worked for years. I do not wish to flee any Divinely appointed task, but I don't believe that God wants me at this time to sacrifice either my life or my sanity in what seems a fruitless endeavor. Believing also that He does not want me to give up the ministry completely, I must do the best that I know to do, trusting in His guidance.

How much I hope that you can understand. How much I would like to make you proud of me. But I

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surely will only make you ashamed, unless you can understand what I am saying.

There is no easy way for God to take us, break up the old cemented patterns of thought and lead us into new paths, even when they lead to freedom and peace. I am sure, Mother Sue and Daddy, that when you left the Baptist Church before most of your children were born, you did not find it easy to do. You had family and friends to consider. You did it because you had to do it, because you believed God wished it and that Scripture led to it. Now we must be as faithful as you were. It is excruciatingly hard for us, but we wish that it might be easier for you.

The awareness of your pain is a knife thrust in my own heart. It seems a tragedy to come to the place where one must bow his head in his arms and weep because he cannot spare a cross to those whom he loves. But I cannot lay a heavier one upon my Lord. In all His compassion, He still turns on us with blazing eye if we let those whom we love better than life itself come before Him.

I have tried harder than ever before to come back across the miles and the years to let you walk with me down to the bend of the road where I now stand. If you can look up and see with me, I shall fall on my knees in gratitude to God. If you cannot, I must hold you a moment and walk on, praying God to keep His promise of strength to us all, trusting some day that He will remove your cross and mine and make the dark things plain.

Above the storm is God's bow of promise, His covenant of grace with us. He promises to receive us and to hold us "in Christ," all of us who will really accept Him. We must trust Him to do just that. He has also promised to hear our prayers

when we come to Him in faith. Though I have prayed for a long time about this decision, one day I went down on my knees and didn't come up until I had it out. I had to come to the place

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where I could say "Thy will be done," and mean it. I ask you to do that now. I am claiming God's promise in this matter. I am asking you to join me in it. He will not fail.

With all my love and devotion,