Being Kicked Into Freedom
I used to be what some would say was a successful pastor. In addition to coming from a famous family, I used to lead a large, well-known church. I was writing a book a year, traveling extensively across the country speaking at conferences, churches, colleges, and various events. I was on TV every week around the world and on the radio every day. However one wants to define a “celebrity pastor,” I was one.
And then it all came crashing down.
Apart from my relationship with God, I once considered two things to be secure forever: my twenty-one-year marriage and my calling as the senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in my hometown of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I lost both in 2015 due to my own sin and selfishness. I was unfaithful to my wife and duplicitous with those who trusted me, and I therefore deserved to lose both my marriage and my ministry.
With those two losses, however, came a thousand others. The loss of peace and security on my kids’ faces, the loss of close friendships, the loss of purpose, the loss of public (and private) credibility, the loss of confidence in God’s goodness, the loss of financial stability, the loss of hope, the loss of joy, the loss of opportunity, the loss of life as I knew it.
In addition to being the cause of my own losses, I was also the cause of many other people’s losses. I not only broke my own life, but the lives of those who depended on me as a husband, a father, and a spiritual leader to love and protect them. I violated their trust, betrayed their confidence, injured their hearts, and damaged their lives. I am deeply sorry for the pain I caused and the severe consequences others have suffered because of my self-centered decisions. The Church of England's Prayer Book places in the General Confession a line asking God's forgiveness for the sins done "through my own deliberate fault.”
That is now a confession I can honestly make.
I say I can make that confession now, because it was far from my lips at first. You would think that after all the damage my wickedness caused to myself and countless others I would fall down to my knees in confession. But I didn’t. Instead, I ran. I ran from honesty, I ran from repentance, I ran from God. Rather than feeling sorry for my sin, I was feeling sorry for myself. As is often the case when we get caught, things got worse before they got better. Flight from God oftentimes accelerates before it stops.
I accelerated into full self-salvation mode. I did everything I could to “rescue” myself from the destruction I’d caused. I selfishly, frantically wandered in the wilderness of lies I’d chosen to inhabit. I was a lost sheep who fled from the Shepherd. Rather than blaming myself for all the hurt I caused, I pointed fingers in every direction, including heavenward. I was withholding truth from people and spinning the story as manipulatively as I could, frenetically trying to manage my image and minimize my culpability. My life was a shattered pile of wreckage, and instead of seeking to make amends with those that I hurt, I was intent on putting myself back together by getting my everything back.
But everything I did to try to salvage what I could and fill the gaping void created by my own sin caused even more damage to myself and others. I was still on the run. I was still hiding. I was slipping deeper down—getting worse, not better. I was an emotional and functional wreck. The self-pity, the rage, the rationalization, the resentment, the deep selfishness, the perverted sense of entitlement—it was all there. What should have been my wake-up call to a newfound humility and sorrow became an excuse to dig in my heels even deeper. Rather than clinging to the cross, I wasted time building yet another tower of vanity.
I suppose these ugly things that crawled out from deep inside me shouldn’t have been surprising. After all, I had tried to be up front in my speaking and writing about my own messed-upness. I had strived to talk openly about my sin and selfishness, my faults and fears, my pride and pains. I’d never pretended to have it all together. In fact, one of the most common refrains I would hear from people who wrote to me was how much they resonated with my willingness to talk about my brokenness and the amazing grace of God that covers us at our worst. I was known for saying that God loves bad people because bad people are all that there are. So I knew I was bad.
I just didn’t know I was that bad.
What was wrong with me? Why was I so quick to abandon the message of Jesus in the face of this personal catastrophe?
What I see now that I couldn’t see then is that the implosion had been building for a few years. A subtle shift had come on like the slow creep of the tide rather than a sudden tidal wave. It was a shift from locating my identity in what God had done for me (the message of the gospel) to locating my identity in what I could make of myself (my success as a messenger of the gospel). I may have been preaching and writing that Jesus + Nothing = Everything, but I was living “Tullian + Nothing = Everything.”
In other words, my worth, my value, my deepest sense of who I was and what made me matter—my identity—was anchored in my status, my reputation, my position, who my friends were, my skill at communicating, my ability to lead, the praise I received, the opportunities I had, financial security, and so on. And because of this, my losses did not simply usher in grief and pain and shame and regret. They ushered in a severe identity crisis. Without the things I had come to depend on to make me feel valuable and important, I no longer knew who I was. It wasn’t just that I lost everything—I myself was lost.
When I was at my absolute worst and most desperate—lost, confused, bitter, angry—my friend Paul Zahl said something to me that I will never forget. He said, “The purpose behind the suffering you are going through is to kick you into a new freedom from false definitions of who you are.”
I don’t know what you’re going through or what you’ve lost. I don’t know what you’ve suffered or what you’re guilty of. I don’t know your background, what makes you afraid, or what your deepest insecurities are. I don’t know your shame, and I don’t know your secrets. But what I do know is this: who you ultimately are has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t have to do with how much you accomplish, who you’ve become, what you’ve done or failed to do, what other people think of you, the things you’ve accumulated, your behavior (good or bad), your strengths, your weaknesses, your family background, your education, how your kids turn out, how many times you’ve been married, your looks.
Your identity is firmly anchored in Jesus’ accomplishment, not yours; his strength, not yours; his performance, not yours; his record, not yours; his victory, not yours. You are not what you do (or don’t do). You are what Jesus has done for you. That is the truth.
However, knowing this to be true in our heads doesn’t mean that we always believe it in our hearts. I still struggle with knowing who I am without some of the people and things that I had for the first half of my life. I still struggle with trying to recover some measure of what I used to have and who I used to be just so life could feel more familiar. There is still much that I miss. I often feel like a man without a home—a wanderer trying to find a recognizable sight or sound, something that I used to know. At times I feel myself wanting nothing more than to go back.
But there is no going back.
God, as it turns out, is still setting me free from false definitions of who I am. Despite my intense efforts to resist, he is still kicking me into new vistas of freedom from my romanticized notions of who I used to be defined by the life I used to have. So far, he hasn’t shown any signs of backing off of his loving mission to set this stubbornly sentimental captive free.
This is why I need the message of his grace every day. It’s a message that none of us ever outgrows or gets past. Most of the people I meet these days are people like me.
· People who live with guilt and shame and regret and sadness because of what they have done or failed to do;
· People who would do anything to go back in time and make different choices but are presently plagued by the realization that they can’t;
· People who live in fear that they will never hope again;
· People who have lost everything and wonder whether they will ever experience joy and peace like they used to;
· People who battle suicidal thoughts because they'll never outrun or outlive the consequences of their sinful decisions and the people they have hurt;
· People who endure the painful, inescapable void of broken relationships;
· People who struggle with believing that anybody (even God) could love them because they have done so many bad, destructive, and hurtful things.
For me, for you, for each of us, there is no going back to a past that we have lost or spoiled or outright destroyed. There is no going back, but there is a going to: going to the God who has forgiven and forgotten the sins of our yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. There is a going to the God who continues to liberate us from ourselves and who reminds us that despite our past, he has promised us a future. There is a going to the God who won’t stop pursuing us, no matter how far or how fast we run. And there is a going to the God who won’t stop kicking us into the freedom of being nothing so that Jesus might be everything for us.
This is my only hope. This is your only hope. This is our only hope—together.
