2015-college-conf-recap

On my high school church retreats, we used to have something called the Cry Chair.

The premise of the Cry Chair was simple. All of us tiny, hormonal teenage campers sat in a circle with one chair in the middle of the room. Everybody was invited to sit in the chair and come clean about the sins or troubles that had been preventing them from having a meaningful relationship with God. The Cry Chair was always a cathartic event, and a typical sharing normally went something like this:

“I WAS SO DEPRESSED AND I FELT SO ALONE AND I HATED MYSELF SO MUCH AND I DIDN’T THINK I DESERVED GOD’S LOVE BEFORE THIS WEEKEND AND NOW I REALIZE I DO DESERVE HIS LOVE AND HE IS SO AMAZING AND YOU ARE SO AMAZING AND I LOVE YOU ALL AND I LOVE GOD.”

Campers would then crowd around the person in the Cry Chair as their tears mixed with their mucus, and after the group hugging subsided, everybody sat down feeling infinitely closer to God. In hindsight, it was kind of a silly, childish process, and the authenticity of each confession was questionable. I don’t need to sit in the Cry Chair to know God loves me, I thought smugly to myself. Life gets hard, but God and I are doing just fine.

Here’s the thing, though: last week, two months into my junior year of college, I needed the Cry Chair.

Technically I’ve needed it all semester. To say it’s been a rough one is the understatement of the year. Balancing 15 hours of class, a 12-hour internship, a side job as a writing coach and an editor position on a student-run magazine is hard; trying to maintain an active social life and church life while holding onto a shred of sanity is nearly impossible.

It all came to a head last week, right before we left for the College Conference. This is nothing new: Satan always attacks us with all his might and tries to distract us when there are huge spiritual events on the horizon. I’ve handled these attacks pretty well in the past, but this time, Satan caught me at my most vulnerable. I’ve barely had time for Bible studies or appointments this semester, and I haven’t been praying nearly as much as I know I should. By the time I hopped in my car for Latham Springs on Friday afternoon, I was feeling exhausted, defeated and downright unworthy to even stand in God’s presence.

And within minutes of reaching the camp, I saw how stupid I was to think He could ever not love me.

God and the Flesh

It would be impossible to recap the entire conference in one blog post. That would take… well, a whole weekend. I will, however, talk about Christ as God incarnated in the flesh. First of all, the juxtaposition between God and the flesh is staggering. God is literally perfect. He is our love, our peace, our wisdom, our joy, our strength… I could go on forever. Meanwhile, our flesh is pitiful and teeming with sin. Why do humans seem to screw up at every possible chance we get? The flesh. Why do we hurt our friends and family when all we ever really wanted to do was love them? The flesh. Why do we constantly fall away from the Lord despite our best intentions to stay in fellowship with Him? You guessed it: the flesh.

Paul aptly sums up the human condition in Romans 7:24:

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?

A pretty grim sentiment to end a chapter full of grim sentiments, in which Paul basically explains why we are failures on every fundamental level. But thank God, he gives us a hopeful answer in the next chapter!

For that which the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh. –Romans 8:3

Let’s process that a little more. God knew how pitiful the flesh was. He knew the divide between Him and His people was far too vast to reach them by any normal means. There was only one solution: God had to literally become flesh in order to abolish it, in the form of his Son, Jesus Christ.

It’s important to note the precise language in Romans 8:3. Christ was God incarnated in the flesh; He was 100 percent God and 100 percent man. However, He was only “in the likeness of the flesh of sin.” This entire phrase is necessary because it shows that in appearance and likeness, Christ was genuinely a physical man, the flesh. In reality, however, He was not the flesh of sin, because He lacked sinful nature of the flesh.

The Divine Mousetrap

This dichotomy in Christ makes His crucifixion even more profound. When Christ was crucified on the cross, He was essentially functioning as a divine mousetrap. Before His death, sin was everywhere. It infected every person to his or her core, putting a veil between them and Christ. But when He bore the sin of the world upon the cross, He was also trapping it. Christ put on the flesh, which is related to sin, so that it had nowhere to go. When Christ was crucified, sin in the flesh was crucified. When Satan realized this, he tried to reverse the process by way of the people watching the crucifixion: “If You are the Son of God, come down from the cross!” they shouted in Matthew 27:40. But it was too late. Sin was dead, and we were no longer held captive by it.

If you spent a minimum of 47 seconds in Sunday school as a kid, you’re probably familiar with this principle. It’s one of the first things every Christian learns. But that does nothing to diminish its impact, and it remains one of the most profound concepts in my entire Christian life. I need to be constantly reminded that Christ loved me—that Christ loved us­—unto death, and that His death nullified sin and freed us from Satan’s bondage. Without Him, we were doomed to be enslaved to the enemy. Now, we are free to bask in His love, and none of our shortcomings will ever separate us from that love.

I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter reminder last weekend. For the first time in years, I had felt utterly undeserving of God’s love. Why would He ever take the time to love a lowly sinner like me? And then I remembered: He already paid the ultimate price specifically for lowly sinners like me. The incarnated Christ put the flesh to death so that we could live with Him in spirit. I was the embodiment of Romans 7 before the College Conference. Now, praise the Lord, I’m feeling much more like Romans 8.

I guess I didn’t need the Cry Chair after all.

Bryan Rolli
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