It’s tempting to stay removed from the problems for which we have no ready answers. It’s much easier to preach that we need less counseling and more obedience than to involve ourself in the messy details of life where obedience comes hard. One result of extricating ourself from the tangled complexity of life is simplistic preaching that fails to deal with life as it is. Rather than penetrating life with liberating truth, such preaching maintains a conspiracy of pretense that things are better than they are or ever can be until Christ returns. We end up unprepared to live but strengthened in our denial…
Our hope has switched to a responsive Christ who satisfies His hurting people by quickly granting them the relief they demand. That hope, however, is a lie, an appealing but grotesque perversion of the good news of Christ. It’s a lie responsible for leading hundreds of thousands of seeking people into either a powerless lifestyle of denial and fabricated joy or a turning away from Christianity in disillusionment and disgust…
But to demand that our groaning end before Heaven keeps us from all that’s available now…
God wants to change us into people who are truly noble, people who reflect an unswerving confidence in who He is that equips us to face all of life and still remain faithful. Spirituality built on pretense is not spirituality at all. God wants us to be courageous people who are deeply bothered by the horrors of living as part of a fallen race, people who look honestly at every struggle, who feel overwhelmed by what we see, yet emerge prepared to live. Scarred, still troubled, but deeply loving. When the fact is faced that life is profoundly disappointing, the only way to make it is to learn to love. And only those who are no longer consumed with finding satisfaction now are able to love. Only when we commit our yearnings for perfect joy to a Father we have learned to deeply trust are we free to live for others despite the reality of a perpetual ache…
The ache remains, and even intensifies as more of the fallen reality of our own soul is exposed. But the notion that our present suffering is nothing in comparison with the glory ahead begins to make sense…
The kind of internal change that permits a richer taste of God is possible, but it requires surgery…And there is no anesthetic as the knife penetrates our soul. But this kind of change- change from the inside out- is worth the pain. It makes the Christian life possible. It frees us to groan without complaint, to love others in spite of our emptiness, and to wait for the complete satisfaction we so desperately desire.
