The Gospel versus “You always…”

Once a possible failure, always a possible failure.

This has rankled since I wrote it in my answer to the question, Could Jesus have sinned?

What I said is true about Jesus because He does not change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever; so, if Jesus could have sinned during His three decades among us, then He can sin anytime. Who knows but what He may eventually regret His Gethsemane prayer and insist, “My will be done, not yours.”

Thank God, He never will. He can’t. Rebellion is not in Him. Jesus never fails.

But what about us?

In our case, once-always reeks of despair, and leaving the thought out there left me unsettled because the Gospel frees us from inevitable failure.

You know the sting when someone insists, “You always…” or “You never…”. The words hiss condemnation: once a bad apple, always a bad apple. You can’t change and you never will. You are hopeless.

The Apostle Paul encountered this thinking and bristled. Christian converts in Crete lived in the shadow of their national reputation and whole households were turning away. Teachers were reminding them of what one of their own poets observed 600 years earlier, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” This conviction threatened the gains the Gospel was making on Greece’s largest island.

Paul wrote sternly to Titus, the young pastor he left in Crete, “Rebuke them sharply.” “Them” were teachers who wrapped this slander with other deceptions. Paul branded them insubordinate, deceptive, subversive, and even abominable (Titus 1:12-16).

Strong words, but Paul was defending the power of the Gospel to change lives. Throughout his letters, Paul confronts the behavior he encountered on his mission trips with two words: But God. He met gossip, malice, envy, hatred, and a host of other ungodly practices, but God had swept into the believers with a new Spirit.

Paul knew, because the power of God for salvation had changed him. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man” he wrote to another pastor, Timothy. “But…”—there’s that word again—”But I obtained mercy, and the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant” (1 Timothy 1:13-14).

So Paul bristles when the lapse of the Cretans recalls that of Israel when the prophet Jeremiah appealed, “Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your deeds.”

The Israelites responded, “That is hopeless! So we will walk according to our own plans, and we will every one obey the dictates of his evil heart” (Jeremiah 18:11-12).

The converts of Crete were sliding into the same despair: “We can’t. We always…”

Without the Gospel, we are doomed to think like the Israelites and Cretans: Change is hopeless; we will be what we are.

But we are not without the Gospel. Jesus assures us, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3, NIV).

So powerful is this Gospel that Paul saw its effect on another group of Greeks—the Corinthians—whose reputation was perhaps more sordid than Crete’s. “Immoral, adulterers, thieves, drunkards, swindlers: Such were some of you,” Paul reminded them. But no more. “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

The Gospel never strands us in the Slough of Despond, as John Bunyan called it in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Gospel does not mock, “You always…” or “You never…” but throws a lifeline, described beautifully by the Psalmist,

He also brought me up out of a horrible pit,
Out of the miry clay,
And set my feet upon a rock,
And established my steps. —Psalm 40:2

My friend, has the slur, “You always…” or “You never…” stung you? Jesus will remove it, just ask Him. Jesus promises, “With God all things are possible.” When Jesus does His work, you’ll be able to say with the Apostle Paul, “I was…but now I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13).

May the Lord bring His promise to life in you, “So I will save you, and you shall be a blessing” (Zechariah 8:13).