Transparent sinner

With this Q&A we start our 11th year of running biweekly interviews—and we’ll extend this one an extra page because author and conference speaker Elyse Fitzpatrick gets to the heart of what the Good News is. The director of Women Helping Women Ministries, she has authored 18 books and co-authored three children. Her latest gifts are six grandchildren and a just-published book, Good News for Weary Women (Tyndale).

Why did you write your latest? Primarily because as I’ve traveled around the country and spoken at women’s conferences, I’ve heard a resounding message from them about how overwhelmed they feel with all the things they think they need to do to be godly women.

What are some of those things? You have to eat organic. You need to have as many babies as you possibly can. You must never have an epidural or take any kind of pain relief for that. You must never interrupt your husband or even pray in a room where there are men because that would mean you are usurping their authority. You need to read X number of chapters in the Bible every day. You have to be the Proverbs 31 woman your entire life.

Doing it all at once? All at once. Then you have women in line at the grocery store—and there are magazines that tell you how to have great abs and great sex and great children in three easy steps. Then you have your own heart which continually pumps out to you all of the rules you need to follow to be good. So into that I wanted to speak the gospel, which is: It’s finished. Christ has lived perfectly in your place. Christ died shamefully in your place, and He has risen in power for you. That’s the message women need to hear.

They typically don’t hear that at conferences? I was just at a conference where part of the message to a very large group of students was: Figure out what you are really good at. Be the best at it in the world, and then people will listen to you when you want to talk about Christ. To which I responded, as gently as I possibly could, “No, that’s the message of the world, which is: ‘You have to be good to gain a hearing.’” The message of the gospel is: We’re sinners. We need a Savior and there is a Christ who has bought forgiveness for you. Live in the light of that.

You say conferences often communicate bricks and fluff. What are the bricks? The 15 or 18 or 42 things you must do to get your act together, to have a perfect marriage, to have perfect children, to have your house perfect all the time so if Jesus walks in you won’t be embarrassed. We smash our head against bricks. We need to flee to Christ because He has done it all. That’s the good news, whether or not I eat organic.

What’s the fluff? Fluff is what a lot of women’s ministries are made up of—and all the women here know what I’m talking about. You go to a conference where they teach you how to fold napkins, and you can make your napkin look like the empty tomb. Seriously.

You can’t make this stuff up. You can’t. A conference about fluff: Get your colors. This is how to decorate your house. This is how to be the new Christian Martha Stewart. Fluff is all well and good if you like to fold napkins: Have at it and post pictures of it on Pinterest, but that’s not the gospel. That’s bad news because we can’t keep our house looking like Good Housekeeping—not all the time.

Not unless you plan to make your children cower in the corner. My husband and I have three children who are all adults now. When our youngest son, Joel, was 12 or 13—old enough to be a smart aleck—I was rushing around the house vacuuming and yelling at my children to “clean up, clean up.” Joel looked at me and he said, “Mom, what’s wrong with you? Who’s coming over?” So we make our children crazy.

What was your childhood like? My father who was out of the home fairly early on was a nonpracticing Jew. My mother was at that point a nonpracticing Catholic. If you want to talk about a home with some rules. … When I was about 13, I asked my mother, “Why are we here?” She said, “I don’t know, I have no idea. I think it’s just so we can learn to get along.” With my 13-year-old wisdom I said, “That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”

So why not eat, drink, and be merry? That’s exactly what I did: threw myself into a life of debauchery, and in 1971 when I was 20, through a series of circumstances that were so obviously God, my little baby and I moved in next door to a woman named Julie Pascoe, still my very dear friend, and she talked to me about Jesus. She took care of me when I was too loaded to take care of myself and my child. She gave me tracts. In southern California in the summer of 1971, God saved me.

And then you met your husband, with whom you’ve now been married for 40 years. He was very, very good, and I showed up at church in overalls and bare feet. The families in the church were not thrilled about my hanging out with him. His grandfather told him that if he ended up marrying me we’d have to move to Alaska and live in an igloo because nobody would accept us because of my background, which was really, really debauched. But the Lord was so very, very kind to us. We eventually reconciled with his family, and his mother became a very, very dear friend of mine.

Did you feel you had to prove yourself to them? I wanted to always be proving that I was one of the good ones, not the person I used to be. One of the ways I tried to prove that was through my children in getting them to behave perfectly. As I’ve come more and more to rest in Christ’s proclamation “It is finished,” I find myself much more transparent, much more able and willing to admit my failure, ask for forgiveness, and be more patient when people sin against me.

It’s taken you many decades, and I feel the same. Thinking of the Patrick Henry College students in front of us here: Any way to speed up the process? Well, the work of the Holy Spirit is in the hands of the Holy Spirit, but on the other hand, if we can come to the place where we say, “I’m done pretending to be better than I am. I’m done pretending that I don’t need a Savior,” that’s very helpful. We all say that we love Jesus because He’s our Savior, and then we pretend like we don’t need Him anymore. With young people it’s very helpful to realize you don’t have to pretend anymore.

As they become more independent, they start to perceive their parents differently. They’ll see more and say, “This was good. This was them trying to love me.” You might say, “I don’t think I would have done things that way”—and you might ask God to remind you to be humble because you’re still young. In my heart and my life there have been times when I’ve had to go to my children and ask for forgiveness for things I’ve done when I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wasn’t. It came out of love, but I don’t say that everything I did with my kids came out of love for them. A lot of it came out of love for me and my reputation. We all understand what it’s like to love our own reputation. So learn to be very patient about that and begin to see your identity in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Seize that.

And none of us is consistent. Do you hear people tell parents that their children’s salvation depends on their consistency? When I hear that, the top of my head wants to blow off. Listen, if the salvation of our children doesn’t depend on Jesus Christ and Him crucified and the sovereign work of God through the Holy Spirit, if it depends on anything else, then nobody will be saved. I have never been consistent doing anything in my entire life. I write books about the gospel and I consistently forget it. That’s the only consistency I’ve got.

I’ll read one provocative passage that’s in your book Comforts from Romans: “God loves to display His mercy by wrecking ‘good’ people. That seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? We think that God loves to wreck bad people, to strip them of their badness and of course He does, but God also delights in wrecking those who seems good, at least outwardly.” The interaction of Jesus with the rich young ruler is interesting. I homeschooled my kids and my daughter homeschooled her kids. I’m not against homeschooling: I think it’s wonderful. But let’s say that the rich young ruler would have been a homeschooled kid. His mom would have had a poster up on the wall, and he would have stickers on every one of those character things he was supposed to do. His problem was not in believing that he should obey the law. His problem was that he didn’t, but he didn’t know it.

We press our kids to be good outwardly? I’ve heard parents tell kids that if you say “please” and “thank you” and you say you’re sorry, you make God smile. But self-righteousness was at the heart of why that rich young ruler went away sad that day. Jesus wasn’t saying none of us should own property. Jesus knew that the man really didn’t love his neighbor and really didn’t love God. He was able to perform all this stuff outwardly, but inwardly his heart was set on himself.

The prostitutes knew they needed help. Zacchaeus knew. And Matthew knew. But the Pharisees didn’t know, and the thing that guaranteed Christ was going to die on the cross was His love for sinners, because the Pharisees didn’t think they were part of that group. Yes, of course, we might sin somewhat if we take too many steps on a certain day, but we’re not really sinners. The thing that drove them to crucify Him, of course in God’s sovereignty, was that He didn’t pander to their religion. He told him their religion was the very thing that kept them from God. So we have to not only repent of our badness (I didn’t make this up) but also our goodness. There is nothing more difficult to accept than the truth that you bring nothing to the table except your sin, and He has to bring everything else.

It’s hard for good kids to hear this. You have to die to your own ability to merit God’s love. You have to die to your goodness. One of the ways to learn to do that is to be transparent about your sin and to hang out with people who are transparent about their sins. Not that we encourage each other to sin. Nobody has to encourage anybody to sin: We’re all doing pretty well at it as it is.

We have natural talent along those lines. Yes we do. But hallelujah, we’ve got a Savior.