If we do not know the gospel and continue in the gospel, we will be dragged away by the love of other things: “I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you…Â from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:29-30). These things, Paul says, are twisted.
Twisting Things
What happens when something is twisted? Its natural shape becomes misshapen, plied into an unnatural form. Men twist the natural order of things quite often. We take naturally good things and adjust them to suit our preference. We take things like a high quality of life, a great career and success, a family, or community and we bend them. We try to make them serve the wrong end–our ultimate happiness. When we bend quality of life, career, family, and community, pushing them to make us happy, we disfigure them. The quality of life has to get higher. The career has to be better. The family more present, never-failing. Our relationships are taken to the point of breaking, where they cannot offer us the love, acceptance, worth, and meaning we long for. Then, snap, they break and we decry their failure. Out with wealth, career, family, and community. But this is twisting! It is plying a ordinary thing into an extraordinary thing. It is placing the weight of the world on the wrong shoulders.
When we twist, we try to make good news out of ordinary news. When the news of movies, bands, food, family, promotions, homes, and personal freedom become our truly good news, what we get excited about, we twist those good things into ultimate things that they were never meant to be. We make them out into a kind of salvation, demanding they save us from our woes (even the greatest spouse cannot meet these demands), and eventually we twist them out of shape, where they are unable to bear the weight of our otherworldly, extraordinary longings.
Untwisting Things
The antidote to twisted things is the gospel of grace. When we replace things with Jesus, when we work his majesty, forgiveness, and grace back into them, they straighten out, and drop a step or two below God, assuming their proper place. When God takes the ultimate place, and his word of grace, the gospel, becomes our good news, we discover true happiness. Suddenly, we are able to lower our expectations for family and friends. Our career, while enjoyable, no longer becomes our source of worth. Quality of life, while desirable, settles in at a far second to the comfort that only Christ can provide, especially through suffering. The wonderful news of the gospel is that it untwists things, placing them back in their proper order. It announces to us that the weight of our longings can be forever held up by an un-pliable Jesus Christ. Jesus bears the weight of our twisted things at the cross, and emerges from the grave in order to bear the weight of our forever longings to be loved, accepted, forgiven, and known. The gospel untwists things.