The God Who Rescues Fools

Maria Enns

Christmas is over, always too quickly, but thankfully the truth and beauty of this season does last. We’ve been talking a lot about truths and lies in our house lately, about the lies that we often preach to ourselves rather than the truth that God offers us. The truth, the Gospel, says that God loves us, He chose us, that yes, we are infected with the disease of sin, but that he sent His Son to pay that price and offer us healing and life. Unfortunately, that is not the gospel we often preach ourselves. And our brains are so powerful, that whatever we repeat ourselves becomes what we believe.

Christian author Paul David Tripp wrote that “God not only knew that in our foolishness we would tend to be more attracted to what is not true than what is true, but he also knew that our foolishness would make us forget him rather than make him the hope of our hearts.” He says that another way to think of the Christmas Story is of how “our God of wisdom sent His Son, who is wisdom, to shed his grace on fools so that by His grace they would be rescued from themselves and become wise. A fool has no ability to rescue himself from his own foolishness. A fool is always a person in need of external rescue. The Christmas Story is about God being willing to provide that rescue.” (Come Let Us Adore Him: A Daily Advent Devotional, 2017)

In our foolishness, we often repeat to ourselves things that are untrue and destructive. We preach lies to ourselves and then we are confused when we are trapped in fear, worry, and depression.

One of the problem with lies is that they are laced with truth. They begin with a seed of what is true. The thought that “no one understands me” often begins with real misunderstanding from someone you know. Your situation or thoughts are not understood or acknowledged and that can hurt. But it is not the complete or absolute truth. There are not only other people who do understand me and love me for who I am, but the God of Heaven and Earth knows me and understands me exactly.

The other problem is that the lies we preach to ourselves are often unspoken. We are very good at pretending that we are not repeating these things to ourselves. We often do not actually put them into words and so they lurk in the shadows, quietly nipping away are our worth and our understanding of who God is.

So let’s shine a light on those untruths, expose them, so we can see just how wrong and foolish they are. And then let’s leave them at the cross, so Jesus can deal with them in the only appropriate way—put them to death and replace them with His life-giving joy-infusing truth.

Instead of “No on understands me” the lie becomes “God knows me and loves me.”

Rather than “I am worthless” God's truth is “I am perfectly and wonderfully made.”

“I’ll never change” becomes “God gives me the strength to do what I need to do”

What have you been preaching to yourself? How can you let go of those foolish lies and begin to preach the Gospel to your heart?

Let Jesus, the incarnation of Wisdom, repeat God's truths to you every day and wear new pathways in your mind, pathways that lead to joy and cannot be stolen.