On Being Gospely Without Having Gospel-Wakefulness

A couple years ago Jared Wilson coined a helpful term for an experience that many of us have had. He called it gospel wakefulness. And he defined it as “treasuring Christ more greatly and savoring his power more sweetly than before”.

It’s not conversion but it sure does feel like it. Wilson further summarizes,

“Because the experience happens at the intersection of profound brokenness and proclaimed gospel, it involves seeing one’s own depravity and helplessness in stark clarity and therefore truly seeing grace for all that makes it amazing.”

My Gospel Wakefulness

For me gospel wakefulness happened when Psalm 103 intersected with what I might now call a nervous breakdown. (See more here). I found myself sitting in a bath tub uncertain of whether I believed anymore. I had so much darkness in my heart and soul that I just wanted to disappear into the drain of the bathtub. I felt the weight of my sin and I couldn’t handle it. I felt like I was running on a treadmill spiritually and just getting nowhere.

And then a few simple words from Psalm 103 caused the lights to click on. He knows our frame. He remembers that we are but dust. The gospel came alive to me. I mean really alive. I’d be listening to worship songs and start crying about the beauty of the gospel. I remember shortly after this trying to read Psalm 103 to the group of teens we were leading. I couldn’t do it. I just keep crying at the beauty of it.

I started talking about the gospel more and more and more. My sermons started to be less about our absolute surrender and the stuff we needed to do  and it became more and more about what Jesus had accomplished for us.

The Birth of the Parrot

Now I’m not one of those big name dudes, but I’m pretty firmly entrenched in this gospel-centered movement. What I saw happening around 2007-2008 was that a ton of other people started talking about the gospel. Over and over and over again.

At one point, back in 2011, I shared an Andrew Fuller quote and my concerns about the gospel-centered movement. Jared Wilson responded with a great article but the core of it was in these words: “It is a very real danger to be gospel-centrality-centered rather than gospel-centered, just as it’s a very real danger to talk for miles about Jesus without following him an inch.”

I’m not able to read the hearts of anyone and so I don’t know if folks are truly gospel-centered or gospel-centrality-centered. But I see in my own heart a tendency to parrot gospel terms without the gospel actually exploding out of gospel wakefulness.

It’s like what Edwin Hatch said:

No sooner is any special form of literature created by the genius of a great writer than there arises a class of men who cultivate the style of it for the style’s sake. No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with Christianity. –Edwin Hatch, quoted by MLJ

Form becomes more important than substance. Again maybe this is just something going on in my own heart. But I’ve learned how to be a gospel-centered writer and to write in such a way that it can sound like I’m drinking deeply from the fountain of Christ without even taking a sip. What once flowed out of being enamored with Jesus now has simply become a default language. The parrot is fed and the heart slowly dies.

My gospel-centrality starts growing worms and stinking. It’s as Newton said:

he truths by which the soul is fed,
Must thus be had afresh;
For notions resting in the head,
Will only feed the flesh.

However true, they have no life,
Or unction to impart;
They breed the worms of pride and strife,
But cannot cheer the heart.

Nor can the best experience past,
The life of faith maintain;
The brightest hope will faint at last,
Unless supplied again.

Our experience of the gospel is like the manna in the wilderness. It needs to be daily. Otherwise we’ll just start parroting stuff and trying to make yesterday’s manna be our meal for today. You can get away with that for awhile but eventually the stank and worms start to jack with your stomach.

There are two solutions, Which is really one.

Kill the parrot.

Stare at the glory of God until I see it again.

A parroted gospel is a false gospel. It’s a hollow gospel and it leaves you hearing words like “Depart from me, I never knew you”.When I say I want that parrot to be gone what I mean is that I unlearn how to speak gospel until the only gospel I speak is the one which is truly flowing out of a changed heart. It means being dissatisfied with yesterday’s manna. Every day.

Of course that only happens when you stare at the glory of God until you see it. That phrase is one taken from Ray Ortlund Jr. but it’s great advice. Just keep looking and looking and looking and looking until you see.

Both of these things are actually saying one thing—I need Jesus, daily. And because of the gospel I’m already and always in union with Christ. That truth is where to fix my eyes. And that truth makes a parroted gospel seem as empty and foolish as it really is.

Let me see Jesus.