But the fact remains that while the Gospel tells us that Jesus has borne all the punishment our sins deserve or ever will deserve, we still fear punishment. More realistically, we read that God disciplines those He loves, which He does. So we distrust God. We live our lives in servile fear as if God were going to "get" us for a misstep rather than lovingly use the most beneficial and usually mildest possible way to bring our attention to a spiritual problem.
Dr. Ian Osborn, a Christian psychiatrist and author on the subject of OCD who also suffers from it, says that the answer is finally turning responsibility for our sins and their consequences to God. By that, he doesn't mean that we should "sin the more that grace may abound," or not care about sin, but rather that we should seek to live our lives in such a way as to please God out of gratitude and love and let God clean up the mess afterward. Theologically, he's talking about the Third Use of the Law rather than the First: living under the Gospel, living by God's promised, faithful and trustworthy forgiveness, living under grace rather than living lives of fear and coerced obedience under the Law. The Gospel actually motivates obedience, along with peace, joy, and the other fruits of the Spirit; the Law, on the other hand, kills. It drives us to despair, depression- and obsession.
He and Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, another Christian psychiatrist and expert on OCD, recommend identifying an episode of OCD and firmly defining it as such as the first step in dealing with it. One way of doing that is by bearing in mind Dr. Schwartz's maxim that "if it feels like OCD, it is." Healthy concern about pleasing God with our lives feels nothing like the fear-filled oppressiveness of an OCD spike. We can use that familiar, fearful feeling as a warning to ignore what follows, and instead to follow the advice of the Word of God and our consciences. After all, by definition, our problem is that our emotions lie to us and get us to believe things which are not true, and live as if they were.
And bringing sin to our attention is the Holy Spirit's job, not ours. He can be trusted to do it. There is no need for rumination and introspection, which can actually interfere with our hearing His voice. Every time we experience a spike, we need to identify it for what it is, and then confront the fact that we have a choice to make. Will we believe what we're told by a known liar, our broken limbic system, or the most truthful One of all? Will we believe OCD's message of fear and distrust or the Word's assurance that Jesus has already borne all the punishment our sins deserve on our behalf, and that there is none left for us? Will we believe scrupulosity's vision of an angry, vengeful God Who is "out to get us," or the Gospel's blessed assurance that in God we have a kind and loving Father whose discipline is gentle, always administered in the way most beneficial for us, and never more painful than it has to be? Will we live our lives in dread of that gentle, loving correction, and in the process experience the far greater pain of a distorted spiritual life filled with fear and distrust and misunderstanding and the distortion of God's Word, or in the much more pleasant knowledge that when God's correction comes, it will be as gentle as he can make it and always turn out to be something for which we can be grateful?
Yeah, I know. Letting go and trusting in God's love is easier said than done! Not only our broken brains but our fallen natures struggle against it. Yet the repeated recognition that OCD is telling us a lie and misrepresenting God, coupled with the conscious decision to disbelieve it and believe the word of the Gospel instead, is the only way to defeat scrupulosity. It takes time. It takes effort. But it involves infinitely less pain than simply believing the lies our brains and bodies tell us and living fearfully under the Law.
Martin Luther said that whatever we fear, love, and trust the most is really our god. Joshua 24:14-15 tells us that when the Israelites crossed over into the land of Canaan, the land God had promised them, Joshua offered them a choice. They could serve the Lord, or they could serve some other god. "Choose this day whom you will serve," he told them. "But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."
The alternatives weren't pretty. The gods of Canaan were savage, petty, and spiteful. To serve them was to enter fearful slavery. There was very little of grace about Baal. Moloch demanded that his worshippers throw their first-born babies into a fire. But our God is the One Who had brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt and into freedom. He's the One Who became a Baby to suffer himself everything we deserved so that we could receive everything only He deserved as a free gift.
I am very far from suggesting that people who suffer from scrupulosity lack faith! And yet, just as is the case with every temptation (and every Christian fails to resist temptations many times every day), an OCD spike confronts us with the same choice with which Joshua confronted the children of Israel: which god will we follow? Will it be the God of grace and love who cancels our sins, washing them away with his own blood and the water of our baptism or the vengeful, capricious Baal which scrupulosity tells us is our lord? Which one, really, is God?
Will we believe Jesus or the Moloch of OCD? We will not always make the right choice. Both our broken brains and our broken natures are working against us. But every time we choose to believe that Jesus is telling us the truth and behaving with courage and trust in His love and His grace rather than with rumination and servile fear, old neural pathways are extinguished just a bit, and new pathways of peace and love and hope replace them. And at last we, like the children of Israel, will be led out of bondage and into the peace and joy and freedom the real God wants for us.
Let's pray: Lord Jesus, forgive us for believing the false god of OCD rather than you. Forgive us for believing the lies it tells us about you. Give us grace to courageously believe that the God we worship is Who He says He is, and to trust rather than fear the gentle nudge of your Shepherd's staff, so that we may live in the peace and joy which you bought for us with your love and escape the lies of the deceiver and his ally, OCD. Amen.
"Will it be the God of grace and love who cancels our sins, washing them away with his own blood and the water of our baptism ..."
ReplyDeleteIt could be the wording that is confusing, but are you saying that baptism in physical water saves us, or are you talking about spiritual baptism (being born again)?
I am saying that Scripture knows of no "spiritual baptism." It knows only baptism- being born again "of water and the Spirit." I am saying that we are saved by Jesus, not by anything we do- but that we are saved THROUGH faith in promise God has connected to a physical act in time and space involving water, as embodied and historical as the Incarnation itself. I am saying that the Gnostic and Nestorian seperation between the physical and the spiritual which is a hallmark of Reformed Protestantism- and alien to historical Christianity before Calvin and Zwingli- amounts to a rejection of the whole logic of the Incarnation and a denial of what Scripture consistently says about baptism, faith, and salvation.
DeleteI am saying that a person who has never been baptized at all, like the thief on the cross, but who has faith in the promise is saved, but that the rationalistic human idea which divorces the God-ordained physical act from the reality to which God has connected it deprives itself of a blessed and objective act to which the soul can cling when doubts arise and "what ifs" threaten to overwhelm us.
I am saying, in short, that what Reformed Evangelicalism does to the Sacraments in rationalizing them into unscriptural categories of "physical" and "spiritual" is based on Plato and human philosophy, is totally alien to the teachings of the New Testament, and is based on a logic which ultimately denies the Incarnation itself. God has been pleased to make the promise we have faith in just as historical and objective and concrete as the Incarnation itself. We rob ourselves of a precious comfort and support when we rationalize it away on the basis of Greek philosophy.