Some of you might be old enough to remember the opening montage of the classic television show, ABC’s Wide World of Sports. And if you remember that, you undoubtedly remember hearing the phrase “the agony of defeat.” You can probably still see it in your mind’s eye: the downhill skier careening off the right side of the ski jump, only to plummet down the hill like a floppy windmill. Every time I saw it, I cringed.
That skier was Vinko Bogataj. At that time, we all knew him; we just didn’t know his name or anything about him. What we knew was that he was one of the most famous failures in the history of sports. And we had weekly reminders of just how badly he had failed. Jim Spence, former ABC Sports executive, said, “I felt that perhaps, maybe, we were being exploitive in showing that spill week after week after week and that maybe we oughta remove Vinko from the billboard.” Imagine if all your failures were replayed on the TV screen every week for people all over the country to watch in vibrant color!
What do you do when you finally realize the depths of your sin, when “the agony of your defeat” just keeps playing over and over in your mind or when, worse yet, it’s right out there for everyone to see? When you have no question in your mind that you are a nobody and you have lost all shreds of somebody-ness? In one sense, it’s actually not a bad place to be—but only for a brief moment.
Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was a monster. I just looked his name up on Wikipedia, and I don’t want to write down even a tenth of the horrible things that he did. It gives me the chills just to think about it. However, just before Mr. Dahmer died, I remember hearing him read a personal statement after he had been convicted and sentenced at his trial. The local radio station played the full recording of it as people listened in disbelief.[1] I stood there dumbfounded as Mr. Dahmer quoted the apostle Paul, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:15). He then professed his faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord. Not long after that, he was brutally beaten to death in prison.
At the time, I remember many people debating the sincerity of his confession. Could such a horrible man really repent? Did he really believe, or was he using Christ as a way to garner sympathy from people or even God himself? Did he actually believe that he could somehow earn his way into God’s good graces by becoming a Christian after all he had done?
As hard as it is for us to hear, we need to realize that Mr. Dahmer had one advantage most of us will never have: there was no possibility of Mr. Dahmer ever thinking that somehow he could earn God’s acceptance by his own righteousness, and there was almost no danger of him thinking that he was better than anyone else.
It’s like the parable of the lost son (Luke 15:11-32). Both of the father’s sons were spiritually lost, in a sense—the one got lost in a distant country; the other managed to get lost right at home. Both disdained their father. It was just more apparent to the younger brother that he desperately needed his father’s mercy. And it was that realization that led him back home. The older brother was still trapped in the slavery of thinking he was somebody because of all the good that he had done. It was his pride that prevented him from partying with the rest of the family.
There’s an advantage to knowing that you are a nobody by nature.
When we finally get to the place where we despair of our own righteousness, when we finally decide that we need to stop trying to be somebody, that just means we may be in a perfect place for God’s gospel work in our lives. God can’t work through somebodies, that is, through people who think they are somebody because of who they are or what they have done. So if you know you are a nobody by nature, you’re in a good place.
But there is a warning here too. Once you recognize you’re nobody by nature, there’s the danger that you will think yourself beyond redemption. Once you are in that dark and lonely place, you need to get out. You can’t stay there. God doesn’t want you to stay there; God wants you to lay hold of his grace and walk into his love.
Consider the difference between Jesus’ students, Peter and Judas. Judas betrayed Jesus and handed him over to the authorities for 30 pieces of silver. Peter denied knowing Jesus three times to save his own cowardly carcass. Their arrogant illusions of courage and success were both shattered in a single, fateful act. But Peter repented and was restored as one of Jesus’ disciples while Judas went out and hanged himself. It wasn’t that Peter was a good man at heart and Judas an evil monster—both were devastated by their failure. The difference was this: To Peter, Christ was bigger than his shame. To Judas, Christ was smaller than his shame. “God couldn’t ever forgive a person like me” is the talk of an arrogant person who thinks that he knows better than God. “Even though Jesus says, ‘Whoever comes to me, I will never turn away,’ I already got this all figured out, and I am beyond salvation.”
Martin Luther’s friend Spalatin once committed a sin that he was certain could never be forgiven, and he refused to be comforted with the good news of Jesus. Luther wrote to him:
To be sure, the devil has now plucked from your heart all the beautiful Christian sermons concerning the grace and mercy of God in Christ by which you used to teach, admonish, and comfort others with a cheerful spirit and a great, buoyant courage. Or it must surely be that heretofore you have been only a trifling sinner, conscious only of paltry and insignificant faults and frailties. . . .Therefore my faithful request and admonition is that you join our company and associate with us, who are real, great, and hard-boiled sinners. You must by no means make Christ to seem paltry and trifling to us, as though He could be our Helper only when we want to be rid from imaginary, nominal, and childish sins. No, no! That would not be good for us. He must rather be a Savior and Redeemer from real, great, grievous, and damnable transgressions and iniquities, yea, from the very greatest and most shocking sins; to be brief, from all sins added together in a grand total.[2]
As long as we cling to our shreds of self-righteousness, we will always wonder if we really are somebody. Only when we realize that we come to Christ empty-handed—or better yet, Christ comes to us—will we be in a place to fully embrace the splendor of God’s salvation through Jesus and realize with true joy in our hearts just how deeply we are loved. We will be real sinners, and Christ will be our real Savior.
There is no need to fear when you go empty-handed to Jesus. I love Paul David Tripp’s definition of the gospel in his book Dangerous Calling: “The gospel declares that there is nothing that could ever be uncovered about you and me that hasn’t already been covered by the grace of Jesus.” That’s the perfect message for somebody who is afraid of being a nobody if people find out who they really are.