I had been brought up to believe that people were inherently good and that they could choose God, that only the worst heathens didn't live moral lives, and that there was no one beyond redemption if they'd just "give their hearts to Jesus". And here I was, day by day, suddenly surrounded by every possible evidence of the utter depravity of man on grand display. Their crimes, their imaginations, their defilements, their voices, their actions toward themselves, the staff (including me) and toward each other - I had walked into the bowels of hell on earth. I saw men who had become animals, men who were so numbed that they felt no physical nor emotional pain. Sociopaths. Psychopaths. Psychoses. The whole ball of wax. Later I worked in a youth detention center where I came into contact with a 13 year old boy who acted just like these same inmates - all the way down to screaming and beating and cursing through a holding room door and urinating under the door when he didn't get his way. The general spreading and distribution of their bodily wastes, fluids, and functions was a method of amusement and self-expression for many of them. Unadulterated anger spewed from behind the bars. Several were in specially constructed cells after physically disabling two officers. The officers in charge of them would arrive in the ER covered in boiling hot oil or sliced across the neck, injuries received as they passed out water and meals. Nurses would return from passing out medications with black eyes and ripped scrub tops or covered in urine or feces or - on some occasions - semen.
For a sheltered preacher's kid who had come from the small-town hospital and the nice Christian OB/GYN office, coming from sanitized American "Christianity," this was an outright systemic shock that my theological base could not handle.
And so it crumbled. Being based in a faulty concept of the nature of sin - still believing sin to be nothing more than a conscious choice that a "good person" makes and which then makes them "bad" ... instead of a root in and of itself that corrupts every man from his core - I was terminally curious and seeking for answers - what makes people choose this? What makes them become this? I began to dig into psychology and became fascinated with what made them "tick". I studied up on criminal profiling. I read books like, "Inside the Criminal Mind" that painted a near-hopeless picture of inborn sociopathy. I heard studies about how babies born to crack-addicted mothers are born without a conscience (I don't know about the veracity of those studies). All the information I gathered just made it sound like there were people who were "not like us" - born without a chance, without hope, and that couldn't correspond to what I had understood about the God and the Gospel that I thought I knew. I was faced with this hard cold reality, the studies of men used to explain away that hard cold reality, and a watered-down, sanitized American "gospel" that had no real room for these men...and that made me question the whole thing. It just seemed more and more hopeless. On the heels of a divorce and the beginning of a succession of betrayals, that shallow, faulty theological base was shattered. And so, as those who themselves have no real Light to shine will do in order to ensure their survival in the midst of such circumstances, I quickly embraced the darkness - with dark humor. And thus accelerated my own decline.
What I didn't know then was that Jesus didn't come to a nice, pretty world full of people who make bad choices in order to make it prettier and "churchy" and to teach us to make better choices; He came to a dark, violent, bloody, condemned world and gave Himself up for it so that in Him, through Him and for Him, a people might be redeemed so that they might also give themselves up so that the Lamb that was slain might receive the reward of His suffering. What I didn't know then was that sin is the root issue, not merely the fruit of something that made them somehow morally deficient as compared with "law abiding citizens". What I didn't know - until a year ago when the pages of Ezekiel 1 shone a light on my own heart - was that I was just as dead and depraved as they were. It may have expressed itself differently, but dead is dead - there aren't differing degrees of dead, there are just differing degrees of decay. Its accompanying smell may be just a whiff under the nose or it could be overpowering, but its source is the same. What I didn't know then was that God will have mercy on whom He has mercy and will harden whom He will harden; that while we were yet helpless Christ died for the ungodly, for His enemies so that through rebirth and re-creation, the resurrection of a dead, decayed soul, and progressive sanctification, that they might become godly, becoming brothers; that He who knew no sin became sin so that in Him dead, depraved, sinful man might become the righteousness of God. What I didn't know then was that if not for the common grace of God and certain systems in place that "prop us up" on our way to Hell, we all - including me - would fall to those depths - and deeper - on this earth, utterly deserving of the even worse hell that awaits on the other side. What I didn't know then was that I was no better than they, that my bones were just as dry, my spirit just as dead, my heart just as stony - as theirs. And that even now - because in my flesh there is NO good thing - I would fall to that depth if not for the keeping power and promise of Christ.
For that matter, at that point in time, if any of them knew that they were dead and broken and hopeless, then they were closer to the Kingdom than I was.
God, in His amazing grace, has brought out of such pits as those that currently lead men to fill up these prison cells, young men like Lecrae, Timothy Brindle, Shai Linne, who take seriously the word of the Lord that he who claims to know Jesus ought to walk just as He walked, who drink deeply of the Word, and they go to the streets from which they came and proclaim the word of the Lord to streets full of dry bones. They take their commission seriously. These guys have better theology than most "polite" CCM, which frankly is why I'd rather listen to them than to many other modern artists on "Christian" radio, where I hear a lot of celebration of self and angst rather than the crucifixion of it, thereby effectively embracing darkness instead of shining the Light on it (cf John 3:19-21, Matt. 7:21-23, 1 John 1:6-10). But these young men go straight to the cross. They proclaim the word of the Lord among men and women who have been given up on by the world and who have given up on themselves, yet who through the grace of God might actually hear a true gospel from somebody like them, who speak their language, where they wouldn't hear it from anyone else. There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still. There is no bone so dry that it can't be quickened by the Holy Spirit. There is no soul so dead that God cannot resurrect it, re-create it. And He does that. Every day. These gentlemen - my brothers in Christ - they get that and they go out there - As Lecrae says in his video, "Go hard or go home". "Young people who are not only confessing Jesus Christ with their lips but are shouting it loud with their lives", who asks a strikingly important question in one song, "after the music stops, what's next? Will there be fellowship, disciples, will you open up your Bibles, will you know that Christ is King, or will you just like the words that I sing, after the music stops?"
They impress and inspire and challenge me with their God-given heart and sold-out lives:
Lecrae's Testimony:
Lecrae Story from Adamson.TV on Vimeo.
Todd Friel's classic take on the subject:
