Larry Crabb, Inside Out (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 2007 [1988]), 351 pages.
Review by Pastor Nathan, September 2011
Devastating and disappointing. Those would be the two words I would use to describe this book.
Inside Out is about how people change. Larry Crabb’s style is engaging and warm. He is honest and
relatable. And he understands with devastating perception the darkness of the human heart. The main
premise of the book is that if we’re really going to change we must be willing to take “an inside look” and
see the depths of our sin. I agree.
Crabb took me on a relentless journey through the miry motivations of the human heart. He identifies the
primary sin as being self-protectiveness – the opposite of love. He is honest and realistic about the
struggles and longings present in a fallen world, but he’s also firm on the fact that we sinfully relate to
each other in order to insulate ourselves from hurt. I loved the distinction he made, based upon Jeremiah
2, that being thirsty is not a sin, but rather the sin is forsaking “the spring of living water, and [digging
your] own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” And he illustrates with great insight what
forms this can take in our lives.
Crabb never lets up. He keeps pealing back more and more layers of self-protectiveness. It hurt, but it
was good, convicting. Chapter after chapter he stated that we can’t rush through this part of the process.
We’ve got to take a long, honest “inside look” and uncover this junk. As I kept reading, though, I started
to get a bit depressed and despondent in swirling self-absorption. I looked ahead at the Table of
Contents and saw that one of the final chapters was about the gospel. “Phew!” I thought, “I can keep
wading through this if he’s going to give me the Good News eventually.” I anticipated that he was going
to do a little Lutheran law-gospel, one-two punch on me: totally crush me with my sin and then point me
outside of myself to my righteousness that is in heaven (as John Bunyan put it)i. It was getting
depressing and making me hyper-introspective, but I pressed on.
However, when I got to the end I didn’t feel like my chin was gently lifted up to my gracious Lord and told
see him. “All he did was for you! You are seated with him in the heavenly realms. You are in him,
clothed in his righteousness because obviously all your righteousness is a menstrual rag.” Rather, here’s
what I got in the final chapter entitled, “The ‘Good Stuff’ Beneath the Bad”:
I do not want you to finish reading this book thinking you are nothing more than a
malignant mass of insecurity who must every day beg God not to throw you away in
disgust….
Before you close this book, I yearn for you to know that the Spirit of God has placed
something alive and clean and good and whole in the heart of every Christian. We are
now wonderful, unique, terrific people. The actual life of Christ is now in us, infused into
the center of who we are, waiting to be poured out toward God in profound worship and
toward others in healing grace. That’s what God has done for us under the terms of the
new covenant.
Yes, we are impossibly foolish, obsessively self-preoccupied, arrogantly self-sufficient,
and badly hurting. To deny it ruins the wonder of what Christ did for us when He died.
But we are more. By the grace of God, we are more. There is good stuff beneath the
bad. And yet we often fail to find it because we lack the courage to face the bad stuff that
hides it from view. (247)
A couple paragraphs later Crabb talks about “the release of the energy of Christ that is deposited deeply
within us through salvation.” Later he says, “I have tasted the goodness of God. That goodness is now
inside me, more defining of who I really am than all the badness and hurt that remains” (249). This
sounds awfully close to Rome to me. He even uses the word “infused”! The last words of the book were
not, “Look to Christ,” but, “Look deeper within to find the good that God has planted in you.” We are
directed not to an alien, imputed righteousness that is extra nos, but to an inherent, infused righteousness
that is wrought within.
This bent is also seen in the parting recommendation of the private disciplines of “solitude and silence, of
prayer, meditation, journaling, and fasting” (248). Crabb ignores the public, ordinary means of grace like
preaching and the sacraments (not to mention that some of the disciplines he lists are not even found in
the Bible!). And so what results is a devastating exposure of the sin in our hearts and then advice about
how to get alone and go deeper within yourself to find the buried treasure. Crabb is delightfully devasting
in his diagnosis, but dreadfully disappointing when it comes to the prescription at the end. We need to be
called out of ourselves through the public means of grace and shown Christ through the preaching of the
gospel and offered him through baptism and the Lord’s Table! This is God has designed for us to
change.
Crabb gives us ten or so chapters exposing our sin and then a short, flawed attempt to encourage us.
Robert Murray McCheyne’s approach is much better – “For every look at yourself take ten looks at
Christ.” If we really want to change we must continually repent and repent of the sins beneath the sins,
but we must also look up in faith to the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ and know that we are
seated with him in the heavenly realms (Eph. 2:6).
i
“One day as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest all was still not right,
suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Your righteousness is in heaven. And I thought as well that I saw, with the eyes of my
soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand. There, I say, is my righteousness, so that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God
could not say of me, [John Bunyan] lacks my righteousness, for that righteousness is right before Him. I also saw that it was not my
good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness
was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday and today and forever. Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I went home
rejoicing for the grace and love of God. Here I lived for some time, sweetly at peace with God through Christ. Oh, I thought, Christ!
Christ! There was nothing but Christ before my eyes.”