Boxing the Inner Man
One of my favorite short books by C.S. Lewis is called The Great Divorce. My copy is a little worse for wear from multiple readings complete with margin writing and underlined passages. A quote from this book floats in and out of my mind regularly: “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.” I’m always struck by Lewis’ use of the word, “souvenir.” Souvenirs are so often considered innocuous little things, but the sentence sums up an insurmountable hurdle for human beings: nothing that we value or conceive intellectually, emotionally, or materially is free from the tarnish of sin, and therefore it is not fit to be in God’s presence until it is redeemed. The characters of Lewis’ novel respectively face the ache of surrendering their human relics before entering Heaven. One must lay down a hard earned professional title, for another it is a treasured family relationship; even the way a mother grieves the loss of her young son is subject to God’s purifying presence.
This is a painful truth to face, especially when we consider that our souvenirs of hell are often the means by which we, for better or for worse, determine our self worth and individuality. No relationship, job, creative accomplishment or trauma is meant to rest at the center of our identity; that space is meant for God alone. To make the matter more difficult, because redemption doesn’t happen according to terms of our choosing, it often resembles something we would not define as restorative at all; sometimes it looks like fire, or a flood, or the loss of credibility, or financial security, or the weakened state of illness.
For Christ, on our behalf, redemption looks like the cross. In his book The Normal Christian Life, Watchman Nee says, “The blood can wash away my sins, but it cannot wash away my ‘old man.’ It needs the cross to crucify me. The blood deals with the sins, but the cross must deal with the sinner.” Even after we receive new life in Christ’s death, the constant task of the human heart is the continual laying down of the souvenirs of the “old man.” “There is still unrest within,” Nee writes, “for within me there is something that draws me to sin. There is peace with God, but there is no peace with myself. There is, in fact, civil war in my own heart.”
Good, kind, loving Christian people can and do fall into sin. We often think overcoming sin is a matter of improving behavior, that we must simply make better moral choices, but this misunderstands the depth of our sin-problem. Indeed, before we were children of God, we were children of Adam. Born of his lineage, we carried the spiritual genetic markers of Adam’s disobedience and though in the cross we are new men and women, as the hymnwriter Robert Robinson says, we are still prone to wander and leave the God we love.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul lays out a model of Christian life for the well-to-do Corinthian church that upends their cultural values of freedom via self-reliance and pursuit of worldly pleasure and influence. He also offends their sensibilities regarding how spiritual teachers should behave. One of Paul’s more visceral illustrations in his exhortation to holiness and obedience is his use of athletes and boxers of Grecian sport competitions as symbols of the disciplined Christian life:
“Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” (1 Corinthians 9:25-27)
Paul’s tournament imagery evokes the urgency of what’s at stake when we fight for our imperishable crown. It doesn’t come without cost; like boxers or runners, Paul suggests we subject ourselves to the demands of training and prioritize Jesus above all other things lest we lose the fight against our sinful impulses. This not only requires adopting the spiritual practices and disciplines that beget holiness, it also demands taking an honest and radical inventory of the habits and seemingly harmless conventions of worldly living that keep us anchored to the temptations of our flesh. Christ-centered reality is exactly that-- centered on him and his preferences, pleasures, and perspectives of reality, not ours.
Paul’s choice of boxing as a metaphor is telling, especially when one considers that the ancient form of boxing was pankration, a submission contest with virtually no rules. How does one prepare for a voluntary contest of wills wherein almost any tactic may be used in the effort to dominate your adversary? We begin by understanding the opponent.
Whenever I read this passage I can’t help but think of a scene from the movie “Creed,” a continuation of the “Rocky” franchise, in which Rocky Balboa, now older and long retired from his boxing career begins training the son of Apollo Creed. In one particular scene Rocky stands Adonis Creed in front of a mirror and points at the boxer’s reflection saying, “That is your greatest opponent in the ring and in life.” Rocky instructs Adonis to throw a jab at his reflection’s jaw and a punch to the gut. He does, and Rocky asks him what he sees. Adonis replies that he sees his reflection throw the same punches back at him. Rocky responds affirmatively and then tells him, “Every time that guy throws a punch you block it, slip it or get out of the way.” This scene echoes Paul’s description of striking blows to his own body to subdue his flesh to his will so that he will not be disqualified from experiencing the freedom of the gospel he preaches to others. Paul is not sparring with someone outside of himself; he is contending with his inner enemy, the muscle memory of his previous self. In order to live successfully in our identity as a new creation in Christ, we must be aware of the moves and patterns of the opponent within each of us. Through self-examination and self-denial we can daily bear the cross that may cause temporary suffering but grows us in perseverance. That perseverance produces “character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:4-5).
Not all suffering in the Christian life is the incidental result of external misfortune. Through the testimony of Jesus himself we know that suffering is an intentional design feature of a life in Christ. Think how the disciples must have felt when their Lord said to them, “Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves” (Luke 10:3). We are often galled by the fact that this reality never abates, even in the face of additional hardship resulting from the fallen state of other humans and creation. Because life in Christ is predicated on submission to his lordship and will, to some degree, suffering is part of every Christian’s journey. Adoption of Christ’s will in place of our own often involves the destruction of our human inspired plans and agendas. We see this in the interaction between Peter and the Lord after Jesus predicts his own death. Peter’s vehement rejection of the idea that Christ must die in order to fulfill his mandate as the Son of God reveals that he clearly has his own ideas of how Jesus should ascend the heights of kingly authority. Christ easily names Peter’s plan as one of human design and motivation rather than divine when he rebukes Peter, calling him Satan and a stumbling block. Christ, as the one who can accurately distinguish between the desires of humans and God, recognizes Peter’s desire to protect him as sinful. In fact, Jesus sees it as the same trap set by Satan in the desert when he offers Christ an alternative and seemingly less painful way to fulfill his identity as the Son of God, if only he will worship Satan. Sometimes even impulses that appear good are perversions of God’s will and good order. When we surrender to the absence of human-centered comfort and control for Christ’s sake, we can begin to learn the deep formative purpose of our suffering: to be made in the image of Christ.
Many of us already know these things, but lack of knowledge often isn’t the problem. Take for instance the most recent spate of fallen Christian leaders. The snares into which the likes of Ravi Zaccharias, Carl Lentz, James MacDonald and others fall is not for lack of knowledge. It’s from a lack of accountability, self-discipline, and self-denial. James entreats us, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (James 1: 22-24). We must remember that “what we look like” are people who cannot do anything good apart from Christ. We must daily examine ourselves and seek the wise counsel of trusted faithful voices around us to help us remember this.
Poet Joyce Carol Oates once said about boxers, “The brilliant boxer is an artist, albeit in an art not readily comprehensible, or palatable, to most observers.” The same could easily be said about we strange few who follow the risen Lord. The practice of shadow boxing in a mirror is a real training technique for boxers, the result of which is a fighter who simultaneously throws and dodges punches, a fighter who constantly moves, constantly adjusts his defensive posture and who knows how to read and anticipate the next move of his opponent. A fighter who knows how to block, slip, and dodge the jabs of his “old man.”
Maggie Ulmer is Director of Resources & Education for Spirit & Truth, Managing Editor of Firebrand, and one of the hosts of Plain Truth: A Holy-Spirited Podcast.