I’ve learned over the years what not to do in the Church. As it turns out, bad examples can be as beneficial as good ones. This is a cautionary tale about a skull ring. The long and short of it is this: looking like something doesn’t transform you into that thing.
When I was fourteen-years-old, Keith Richards was my spirit animal. He was everything I wanted to be: witty, quiet, dark, mysterious, haggard, a fantastic guitar player, brilliantly smart, pirate-like, and invincible, yet hard-lived. I’m not sure when it started, but it was around my birthday of 2007 when Keith and I developed a seemingly cosmic connection. Halloween was only two weeks after my birthday, so I had to ask myself: how is a kid who’s too old to play pretend supposed to satiate his desire to be somebody else? The answer was obvious: dress like them for Halloween.
I may have had the bandanna, some fake earrings, and some other things here and there that brought a Richards air to my outward appearance, but I was missing a crucial piece of the outfit. The legendary, iconic skull ring. As luck would have it, my dad gave me a small white box for my birthday. In that box was a sterling silver skull ring, and just like that my destiny was sealed. I was Keith Richards now, wasn’t I? Sure, I didn’t have half the guitar skills he did or any of the other attributes listed above, but I had a ring like his. I had the aesthetic. What’s more important to a fourteen-year-old than that?
That’s the principle of the story and we’ll learn more about it later. Let’s examine the characters. You know how every story has an antagonist? The antagonist of this story is my old youth group. My youth group had a lot of problems with aesthetics. I’ve always worn a lot of black (almost exclusively), and that alone was enough to invoke a negative response from the leaders — skulls took things to another level. I might as well have drawn a pentagram on the floor of the youth room and sacrificed a goat in the midst of a sacred Wednesday night gathering. My taste in music was viewed as a deeper spiritual sign of the demonically possessed; only glimpsed by my appearance.
There were a lot of lectures about appearance and holiness. It turned out that the Christians I associated with had a lot of the same confusion I did when it came to appearances. They cared more about looking like something than actually having the essence of that thing — they didn’t realize that a skull ring didn’t make you Keith Richards. Only Keith Richards can be Keith Richards; there’s no external quality you can add to change your nature. The same goes for these “holiness” tactics. You can’t cause kids in your youth group to be regenerated because you forbid them to wear skull rings to church. You can’t force a young girl to be born again by measuring the length of her skirt and rebuking her accordingly. I, and everybody else in that group, needed a change of nature — something only God can do.
As the years rolled on, I felt more and more guilt for doing something my youth leaders didn’t want me to do. What wasn’t sin had become sin because I was going against my conscience. One reason Scripture is so against legalism is because making rules where there are none creates sin. If you cause someone to doubt something that isn’t sin and they go on doing it, they’re now sinning against their conscience because you put that arbitrary rule in place.
It got to the point where I was wearing my skull ring everywhere except church. I would leave it in the ash tray before I got out of my car. One time while my friend was in the car he saw me taking the ring out of my ash tray to put it back on. He started laughing because he knew what was happening, and he said, “it’s like you’re cheating on your wife.” It was only funny at the time, but now I see how accurate my friend’s observation was. I was cheating on my conscience by wearing the ring, and I was cheating on the finished work of Christ by taking it off in shame before I walked into church. I was leading a double life; neither genuine; neither of faith. All of this was the effect of a group of people deciding Christians shouldn’t wear skull rings.
Some of them may have argued that they didn’t believe the outward appearance saved them, and that’s probably true for the majority of them, but they didn’t live as if it were true. They tried to control people as if they had a say over their eternal destinies. We always need to examine our lives and ask if we’re living as if the promises of the Bible are true. Are we living like we’re forgiven of our sin? are we living as if sin’s power has been broken for us? are we living as if Jesus is victorious over everything and is reconciling all things to himself? are we living as if we’re saved by faith alone?
The villains of this story had a lot of problems with that last question. They knew that our conduct says a lot about what we actually believe, they just didn’t see how that principle applied to them.
John 19:30 says:
When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished…” (ESV)
In addition to that, Galatians 3:3 says:
Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (ESV)
Do we live as if Jesus finished it? or do we feel like there’s still something we need to accomplish? Do we live as if we’re being perfected by the Spirit? or are there some fleshly things we could add to make sure we’re super-saved?
I often wonder what could have been if that type of self-examination had been implemented all those years ago. I wonder how many of the kids in that youth group ultimately gave up any pursuit of Jesus because they were only given rules they couldn’t follow. That’s the state I was in when God saved me. After years of dealing with this, I was part of the church because I wanted to be, not because I was actually part of Christ’s body, and I believed in a works-based salvation that I knew I could never accomplish. I had damned myself, and I was living with it. It was complete nihilism — I just didn’t know it at the time. Jonathan Edwards once said:
You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.
I could only understand that once the Spirit regenerated me. My place in the Kingdom of God was not defined by what I did or didn’t do because I could never live worthy of it. My place in the Kingdom was defined by what Jesus had done on my behalf. I plead nothing but the blood.
I don’t remember when it was, but some point after my conversion I put that skull ring on knowing I was bought by the blood of Jesus and that a ring didn’t add or take anything away from that. I wish I could remember exactly when and how I felt it, because that must have been one of the most freeing moments of my life.
I’m sad to report that this type of confusion is still a problem in my old church today. I haven’t been part of it for nearly five years, but I pray that they repent of their legalism and actually start shepherding people toward Christ, and not a mere behavior. For your reading and edification, I’m recommending The Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson (link below).
Remember,
…without faith it is impossible to please God… (Hebrews 11:6, CSB)