Finding Jesus at the Nub End of Jared C. Wilson’s Fraying Rope
The guys at the church often tease me about being a fanboy of Jared C. Wilson’s writing. Last year they even took a picture from Wilson’s Instagram page and photoshopped my head into the picture as though I were just hangin’ with my bud. You might even say my relationship with Jared is as his relationship is to actor Mark Ruffalo. I just let the office guys tease me. They know I’m right.
I could mention a few reasons why I appreciate Wilson’s writing. I’ve done that in other blog posts—hence my reputation. This afternoon, I’ll just share one reason. Wilson seems to understand what it means for faith to wear thin and to know what it means to need Jesus, not theoretically but experientially. To say it another way, Wilson knows a Christian’s salvation rests in the strength of Jesus, not in the strength of one’s faith in Jesus. Knowing this difference matters a lot, especially as you suffer. And knowing the difference matters as you commend Jesus to others.
Wilson writes in his book The Gospel According to Satan, “When you get to the end of your rope, there is Jesus” (84). In his writing he doubles back over and over again to this theme of finding hope in God when all around our soul gives way. His words remind me of Paul’s comments about finding hope in God when Paul wondered if he would even live or perhaps if he even wanted to live. “For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia,” Paul writes. “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” This is the nub end of Paul’s rope, and he attributes trials of such severity to God’s desire that his children find their strength in him, not in their own ability. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:8–9).
“Until God is your only hope,” Wilson writes in another book, “God will not be your only hope. Utter brokenness is key to gospel wakefulness, because we will not be all-satisfied in Christ until Christ is all we have” (Gospel Wakefulness, 127). This quote comes from a transparent section where Wilson describes a terrible season in life and marriage. I’ll say more about that season in a moment. Wilson continues, “I was groaning in prayer in our guest room, flat on my face, wetting the carpet with tears the moment the Spirit whispered the gospel into my ear. That moment changed everything for me.”
Referencing this same, depression-filled season in another book, he writes, “It’s my conviction that God will not become your only hope until he becomes your only hope” (The Prodigal Church, 212). Wilson writes something similar in his earlier book Gospel Deeps, my personal favorite in the Wilson corpus: “I realized that God would become my only hope when he had become my only hope” (Gospel Deeps, 116). Then, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, Wilson adds, “Let the reader understand.”
I do understand. And the longer I walk with Christ and serve in pastoral ministry, I’m coming to understand better. This is the Christian life—knowing the goodness and grace and sovereignty of God and coming to know it deeper. I’m reminded of the line in the last chapter of Lewis’s The Last Battle, when the faun named Tumnus says to Lucy, “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”
“Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!”
Wilson repeats this theme in his latest book, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing (Baker Books, 2021). After writing two books about gospel-centered ministry mainly for pastors and church leaders, Wilson returns to writing for a broader Christian audience. While maintaining his faithfulness to biblical, gospel truth, he also writes with an artful, maybe even playful, prose that so many seem to have appreciated in his book The Imperfect Disciple. Love Me Anyway explores the key phrases in the great chapter on love by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, as well as our cultural fascination with love songs.
“It is at the end of your rope that we find Christ is more than enough.” Good writing only infrequently uses exclamation points, reserving them for only those sentences truly deserving. Wilson’s next sentence has one. “And I have come to believe that for a great many of us—if not all of us—Christ will not become our only hope until Christ has become our only hope!” (Love Me Anyway, 129). Later in the book Wilson adds, “I had come to the end of my rope and found there the sufficiency of Christ” (164).
But more than using similar phraseology as in his other books to repeat the theme of finding the strength of Jesus when faith wears thin, in Love Me Anyway Wilson gives his most extended recounting of the season in life which precipitated his wakefulness to the glory of the grace of Jesus Christ. The season brought him to a place of wakefulness not merely to gospel propositions about Jesus but a gospel encounter with Jesus.
Many years ago, as he lived for a long and lonely season in the spare bedroom of his house because his marriage was so poor that his wife didn’t want him in their bedroom, God showed up and began to warm cold hearts. You’ll have to get the book to read it. The details of the story are similar to what he wrote near the end of The Prodigal God, but in Love Me Anyway the story comes with more transparency. Wilson expected the marriage would dissolve, though he prayed it wouldn’t. And with his face wetting the carpet many nights he prayed God could change him.
God did. Because God can. And does. Our God loves to make his power perfect in our weakness and be there for his children when our hands slip from the nub end of our rope.
* Photo by Rui Silvestre on Unsplash