I’m going to share a quote with you by AW Tozer. It’s about human potential. But first, it’s important that you understand Tozer holds two contrasting ideas at the same time. Before I get to potential, I want you to hear how Tozer speaks about problems in the church. Which probably needs to be done more often than it is. So this is the quote before the quote, all by Tozer, circa 1950.

“If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.”

For Tozer, it’s important that it be understood: Christians are not alright. The church was, across the board, not alright 75 years ago, in Tozer’s estimation. And there is no reason to think his assessment would be sunnier today. Tozer refuses to let this principle float around in ambiguity. For the person who says, “Lord knows I’m not perfect!” Tozer would respond: “Not perfect? Not perfect?! You wouldn’t know if the Holy Spirit disappeared entirely.” This is bonkers offensive. But the question is, is it offensive because Tozer is wrong? Or because he’s threatening our comfortable and generic imperfection — the kind we barely have to ask forgiveness for — with something that requires genuine accountability? Tozer refused to let Christians deal with an absence of the Holy Spirit theoretically. He refused to concede the idea of safe, inconsequential church sin.

But… there’s another Tozer quote…

“God shines best of all in humanity. And it’s only sin that has cracked the lens and distorted the image. So that, when WE look at each other, we don’t see the potential that lies there. When our Lord looked at us, He saw not what we were, but what we could become. And He took away the curse of our limitations. …Jesus Christ said, No!, you are not what you seem today, you are what you can become. And so He gives us the power to move out to the edges of the perfection of human personality, that is the glory of the Christian life.”

— In the same way that Tozer refuses to let our problems remain ambiguous, generic and distant, he also refuses to let our potential remain ambiguous, generic and distant. This is Tozer engaging not only with the fact of the resurrection, but also with the effect, which was to change everything.

Jesus Christ gave us living, breathing proof that we are no longer destined to die in our limitations. But… if we are not walking according to the Spirit, if we are not letting the most important event in human history redefine our thinking, then we are living as if the resurrection never happened. And every time we put into action the old idea that human limitations are fixed, we wave a finger at the sky, and we tell Jesus: I’ll be the judge of the limits of your blood. We define people by their failures first, when we could have defined them by their Christ-purchased potential.

In Jeremiah 31, the Lord said, “The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel! Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers. Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. For there shall be a day when sentinels will call in the hill country of Ephraim: ‘Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God’.”

Jeremiah comes along about 500 years after the Judges. You may recall that during the time of the Judges Israel did many things that wouldn’t incline a person to refer to the nation as “virgin Israel.” Jeremiah is 400 years post David and Solomon, who were kind of like the ancient version of today’s TMZ scandals. Jeremiah is roughly 200 years after Micah, who denounced the misuse of power and called Israel’s prophets corrupt. And yet, after all that …the Lord says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel!”

God knew all about Israel’s failures. But he made a promise to Abraham. And He always knew what it was going to take to fulfill that promise. He saw the potential for the whole world, from the very beginning. 600 years after Jeremiah’s prophecy… came the chosen, willful sacrifice for our good. The cross. The fulfilment of the promise to bless all nations through Abraham. Throughout the Old Testament Yahweh never stopped giving us reasons to doubt the limitations of sinful humanity. Through David, through Jeremiah, through Isaiah… And finally His Son came in the flesh. Died by free choice. And rose again.

And for the first couple of hundred years after Jesus’s ascension, Christian worship was first and foremost celebratory. The Early Church knew Christ had risen, and they knew what HE had changed. When 500 people see a famous dead man walking around, or eating and drinking, it makes many old ways of thinking seem… over. They’re just over. Thank God. It was understood that a new age had dawned because of the resurrection. The church recognized the fulfillment of Psalm 118: “There is a sound of exultation and victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of the Lord has triumphed! the right hand of the Lord is exalted! I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord has punished me sorely, but he did not hand me over to death. The same stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

Jeremiah and David both provide insights into the cross. In Jeremiah we see the God who refuses to allow limitations to define Israel. In the Psalms we see the God who accepts rejection in order to save. So it becomes increasingly difficult to define the resurrection mindset as anything the world would ever see as “common sense”… The renewed mind sees that old things have passed away and all things have become new.

When you add up the number of believers you think of in terms of POTENTIAL FIRST… what’s that number? Most of us can see potential in ourselves. That’s not a bad thing. And if you have kids, or grandkids, I bet you can see potential in them. And after that point? The amount of potential you see in others drops off pretty fast. It’s not easy to see the blood-bought potential in everybody. But we do see it in some people, and that’s a start. A good start. We just don’t want to let it also be the finish.

In Acts 10, Peter tells Cornelius that NOW he realizes how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. This is monumental. This is Peter’s mind being renewed — thus the realization — and then the transformation that followed. Commentator Carl Holladay says, “Considering the long-established tradition of purity laws and how deeply embedded they were in Jewish thought and practice, the church’s decision to challenge them could not have been made lightly. Nor could the implementation of this change in the everyday life of the church have been easy, especially in communities in which Jews and gentiles sought to be disciples of Jesus.”

Jaroslav Pelikan remarks that Peter’s reference to doing “what is right” is not an invitation to moral examination, but rather a challenge: “by what right may we be more restrictive than the Almighty One?” By no right, obviously. By no right. Because the resurrection matters more than our knowledge of good and evil. We are free of the curse of the garden, but we have to accept the reality of the cross in order to experience the Holy Spirit.

In the end, we are left with a very great burden if we intend to step into the pulpit and defend a “limitations-first” understanding of the resurrection. Christ’s resurrection ransomed all of our stolen potential back from Satan. Don’t hand it back over. All our limitations are forgiven in Christ, and we are finally free to live the rules of love and eat at his table, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again.

There’s one more element in this theology of grace and potential. And that is the life of ongoing sacrifice. Carrying our own cross. When I see your potential through the cross of Christ, I am moved to extend grace… that grace will always have me moving in the direction of laying down my own life. The result of a cross-shaped life can be genuine relationship. And where there is genuine relationship, there is the Holy Spirit.