He Fixes Us

Most people do not know this, but I was once certified to be a high school English teacher. It’s appalling to think of me, the Typo King, as the example of fine writing to our impressionable youth, but I once was credentialed.

I admittedly struggle with attention to detail. It’s a failure, mostly because I like to run 200 miles per hour when it comes to my work, and the process of slowing down the snail’s pace required to go through writing with a fine-tooth comb is torture. Yet, even if it weren’t, I don’t know how well I would do. Take some songbooks I put together recently, for example. I went through those books multiple times. My entire family sang through those books, song by song, from beginning to end, and then I went through the songbooks again. Despite that much “editing,” they still ended up with some major mistakes, like having two sets of songs numbered 73-76.

When it comes to my writing, I do the same. I let around fifteen people read the manuscript of the first book I wrote. They sent me back page after page, listing every spelling and grammatical mistake they found in the text. I went through and examined every single one, made appropriate changes, and then finally did several more edits on my own, each time finding more mistakes but each time seeing less.

I recently invested in a year-long subscription to Grammarly, where I can upload my text to their website, and the computer will edit my text. Grammarly will make between 95 and 140 suggestions in each chapter of my book, finding missing words, bad grammar, misspellings, and other messes in the text. In. Each. Chapter. The book is 39 chapters. That’s over 3,900 mistakes. How in the world did I miss 3,900 mistakes? I can think of three reasons that I miss the mistakes.

First, there are many mistakes about which I’m just ignorant. Paul teaches in Romans 7 that he “would not have known sin if it were not for the law” (Rom 7.7). There was a time when Paul was doing the wrong thing even though he did not know it was evil, and when he came to know the law and identified that what he was doing was wrong, he later said, “when the commandment came, sin sprang to life again, and I died” (9-10). Sometimes, the mistakes we make spring from ignorance.

Another reason we sin is from being torn between two opinions. Paul explains this struggle in 7.14-24). What he wants to do, he doesn’t. What he wants to avoid, he fails and ends up doing it. One of the many writing mistakes Grammarly identifies is the use of commas, which I honestly don’t always know where to place. The rules allude to me, so I’m often torn between what sounds best and what I know the rules to say. Grammarly is forcing me to follow the rules. What a wretched writer I am!

Often, spiritual speaking, I fight the same battle between what seems best and what the law says. I know one is right and one is wrong, but the flesh yanks me in one direction while the spirit wags its conscientious finger at me, directing me the other way. What a wretched man I am!

A third reason I struggle with continuous mistakes is that I am quick to blame everyone but myself. I had a broken high school English learning experience, moving between my sophomore and junior years. I had many proofread my writing, but they didn’t catch the mistakes either. People always say it is impossible to proofread your own material because you read what you intended to say instead of what you actually said. My wife is too busy to proofread. I can come up with dozens of more excuses when the reality is that I just am limited in capability or personality. Luckily, I’ve found a sort of savior in the Grammarly online subscription who is willing to fix my mistakes and encourage me along the way.

Paul has the same realization in Romans. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!... there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus,... For what the law could not do since it was weakened by the flesh, God did.” (7.25; 8.1, 3). Ultimately, we make mistakes, and we need someone better than us to come and save us. We need someone who can find all of our mistakes, love us despite them, and fix them. Jesus is that Savior. God is that loving and patient friend. If we want to be better, we get there by being attached to Christ. And He doesn’t require an annual subscription cost. His gift is “free” (Rom 6.23).