Good Things Need Redemption

In his devotional book In Christ E. Stanley Jones points out that good things need redemption, too:

"We are noting that everything needs redemption--through and in Him. Until it is redeemed through Him it is suffering from an incurable malady--unsurrendered egocentricity. Wisdom that has an unsurrendered egocentricity at its heart is foolishness--the foolishness, for instance, on the part of psychiatry, that knowledge or insight will cure you of mental and emotional sicknesses. It doesn't. Very often--too often--the psychiatrist himself suffers from the very maladies he attempts to cure. One of the basic sicknesses of the mentally and emotionally ill is that they have not loved or been loved. Insight into that will not cure them. They must actually love and receive love. The knowledge is moonlight, the giving and receiving is sunlight.

"Paul puts it in unforgettable terms: '"Knowledge" puffs up, but love builds up' (1 Cor. 8:1). Knowledge puffs up because at its heart is an unsurrendered ego: love builds up because at its heart is a surrendered ego, surrendered by the very fact of loving others.

"Righteousness that is obedience to law and regulation is self-attainment--and self-attainment means pride of attainment. Righteousness that is an attainment needs redemption--redemption from the self that attains. Until that self is redeemed it lays a contaminating hand on all its attainments. Self-righteousness is not righteousness.

"Sanctification which is attained by keeping aloof from outward contaminations, by touch-not, taste-not, handle-not method, soon turns into an outwardism which declares, 'O God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men.' Jesus said such outwardism does not go away justified, let alone sanctified.

"All three of these need redemption--redemption from the central sin, the sin of making the self central, naming the self God."