Despicable Me

Ahh, more cartoons. Yep, this one is about Despicable Me and not even the movie, just the title. My parents visited the other week and they, my husband and I went to see Despicable Me 2 in theaters. When I asked for four tickets, the man asked how many were for children and I had to laugh at the face he made when I said none. Yeah, be jealous. Anyway, the title of the movie got me thinking the other day. The first one was all about Gru, a notorious villain turning his life around to raise three daughters and the second one was of him saving the world from villains like his former self.

As I thought about the title, I wondered if any of us realize just how despicable we are. You see, until we own up to our "despicable-ness" we truly can't come to recognize our need for a Savior. In order to need a Savior, we need to get to the root of all evil. Better yet, we need to get to the root of our evil. C.S. Lewis (if you haven't figured it out yet, he is my favorite theologian), finds this to be one of the most difficult parts in spreading the Good News of God's salvation. Take a look at some excerpts from his essay God in the Dock:

"The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers... a sense of guilt.... Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy....  My own experience suggests that if we can awake the conscience of our hearers at all, we must do so in quite different directions [from drunkenness and premarital sex, as most don't find those sins any longer]. We must talk of conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice, meanness, etc."

Paul says to the Romans, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," (3:23) but do we really believe that? I don't think we do. Look at that list again. Conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice and meanness. We have all fallen prey to those feelings numerous times. Yet, I think our society has come to agree with the philosopher John Locke that we are born with a blank slate and learn to be either good or bad. But on issues concerning human nature, I side more with Thomas Hobbes' view who claims we are not born good, but are born particularly selfish. People are not naturally good. Have you ever babysat a one-year-old? Oh my, they can be monsters! But we have swept that under the rug. How often do we say, "She is a good person"? And we allow ourselves to say that because we our comparisons involve people. However, God calls us to compare ourselves to him. The only way to enter heaven is to be stainless as he is. So unless anyone has that recipe up their sleeve, we need to look to Christ and his sacrifice to create us as spotless.

No one is good. We must not forget that. The only way to be good is to be infused with the love of Christ. It is God and God alone who can chisel away at our evil, selfish natures to truly complete us. And once we have that, we must find a way to convince others who have not been saved by the love and dedication of Christ to realize they too are inherently bad and thus need him. It probably isn't the best idea to scream that in random passers-by faces, but as we grow in relationships with others, we can speak openly with them. In these talks we, as Christians, must never forget how bad we were before knowing Christ, and how much work we still need done. Then, we can offer humble life examples and help to those who become shocked by the diagnosis that they aren't truly good people, that, in fact, no one is. 

We have all played the villain in life. We have all been influenced by sin and temptation. We have all fallen short of perfection. But when we come to know Christ, he removes our sin and begins a changing work in us. He begins to turn us around. Only once we have called ourselves "Despicable Me" in his presence, can we take on the role of Gru in the sequel and begin to bring the other villains of this world, the ones we used to walk alongside, to the loving justice and mercy that is Christ.