Does God leave us destitute sometimes, on the days that we’ve run half the day into the ground and feel no hope at all for the other half? How do you begin to pray when you’re a mess, when it’s okay to pray for others, but “good grief, can’t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and DO SOMETHING about yourself?”
I think He does leave me destitute, leaves me lacking the religious things to say and the ability to just “change my attitude.” I feel like He sits back and He lets me see how little I truly have to bring Him. He lets me see the depths of my own fear and frustration. He reveals all the ugly and opens my eyes to exactly how weak and human and horrid I am.
And I really don’t like Him for that. I know the spiritual thing is to be grateful for it. But I get angry that He expects thanks in all things, that He asks for joy in all trials. HE doesn’t live with my hormonal issues. HE doesn’t lash out as I lash out at my kids with irritation over the smallest things.
I want to know why He doesn’t just make me NICE. Or SWEET. Or GOOD. Or even HEALTHY. I could live with HEALTHY. I don’t feel a lot like a Christian lately. In fact, most Christians annoy me. I have a problem with church people, and I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s because I feel that they are always RIGHT, and I gave up being RIGHT a long time ago. At least for the rest of the world. I suppose I still hold onto it for myself. Wouldn’t He like me better if I was good?
Almost everybody I know says the same thing, and it’s not Jesus. It’s not grace, and it’s not real Gospel. And maybe I grew up and church and I’m just tired of hearing the same thing over and over and over, but the things Jesus said don’t grow old. Not like the new law that we’ve created from Paul’s writings in the New Testament, not like the way we’ve constructed and reconstructed our idea of what a good Christian looks like.
I’m a horrible Christian. Or perhaps I should say, I’m a horrible religious person. I can’t stand hearing religious stuff anymore. I can’t even bring myself to say it, and I used to be GOOD at it.
Some days, I walk around and I wonder how it is that I even consider myself to be His – I don’t look at all like the person I thought I should be in Him. If I’d met me ten years ago, I’d have patted me on the back and said “I’ll pray for you” and walked away thinking how far I’d come and how much better I was than the girl who doubted hard and made a real mess out of her life.
I keep coming back to an encounter I had with God and legalism in Colossians, the “do not taste, do not touch, do not handle” passage. I was surrounded by legalists like myself who were constantly “encouraging one another” and “building each other up” through a subtle judgmentalism that said “I see this in your life, I love you, you’d better fix that and be like me.” They were rather literally whitewashing each other’s sepulchres. When I hit that passage, reading through Colossians one day, it was as if my eyes were opened to the fact that whether I was told or not, “I would choose the good anyway!”
Having God in my life changes my IDENTITY at its core. Action always flows from identity. But coming into Christ isn’t the same as getting a makeover to transform me into something good. The disciples walked 12 years with Jesus, and Peter still denied Him. Coming into Christ merely facilitates the relationship that I can have with God Himself, but John makes it clear, that I won’t be like Him until I see Him as He is. Even Paul speaks of the dark glass through which we see, until we see Him face to face.
I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of Spirit-work, but I know the ugliness in me, the way I feel so strung out and frustrated so much of the time. I KNOW why Israel went after other gods. I do. “How could they?” people accuse, taking into account all that Israel had seen.
It is because religion itself is the idol that all good people serve. If you want to be good, you say religious things and you have spiritual attitudes, and you put yourself into a position to “minister” to others so that they can be like you – er, God. But religion is a product of man trying to do the right thing. It is Garden-grown, cultivated by Satan with his tantalizing offer for us to “be like God, knowing good and evil.” If we know good and evil, we can avoid the evil ourselves. If we know what is right, we won’t do what is wrong.
And even Christians, unable to escape our Adam-born humanity, have no hope of escape. And we’re the ones who know MORE right than everyone else, because, come ON – God is on OUR side!
So this is where I live, in rebellion against “the right thing,” in utter frustration because of the waiting. We DON’T encourage one another to continue waiting on God to work in us to renew our minds and change our lives. We come into church with a “okay, let’s go, let’s get into ministry, let’s get to work on that to-do list of spiritual fruit and make sure we get sanctified good and fast!”
We don’t grow in grace, or in our knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We grow in our knowledge of “the whole doctrine of God” based on this creed or that fundamental principle, or that interpretation of Scripture. We accept that Jesus died for us as our fire insurance, and then we go on living our good lives and patting needier people on the head, hoping vaguely that we will be an example of a good life to them too.
I have serious doubts about some things in Scripture. I, who grew up knowing it all – I could STILL beat you in any trivia competition. I, who went to Bible college for a year and came out with a 4.0. I who wanted to grow to the point where I could be in ministry of one kind or another and walked away from it all because I couldn’t sit in church and be okay with what was being taught.
I’ve got nothing left on my religious resumé that would make me an authority on anything.
If you want to know what I know, it is that Jesus Christ died for me so that I could know God. Eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ who He sent. If I love Him, I will obey His commands, which are to love God and to love others. As far as I am concerned, I can spend a lifetime focusing on those things, and I’m STILL not going to arrive until I meet God.
Jesus did NOT come to complicate our lives. The wisdom that comes from above is pure and peaceable, and full of good fruit. The to-do list that ticks off in my head about being good or doing right or fixing this or that about myself brings only confusion and anger. It is a weighty burden that I direct at God, and He looks at me and says, “who told you to do this? I don’t require more than Christ.”
“But it’s not enough, God, it’s not enough. I still want to be good. I want to be sweet. I want to reflect You to the world.”
And then He reminds me that I am the earthen vessel that houses His treasure and will I let Him worry about His glory already.
This is not a conversation that makes me feel richer. Or better.
I know His grace and what it is for. I know it good, and I know it deep. But I don’t know how to LIVE in it. I don’t WANT to live in it. I want to be able to stand up and HOLLA! I’M THERE! when it comes to God. I don’t want my reward to be Him and His return. I want to be known by others. I want to be respected. I want to be at the top of my religious game and have all my bases covered.
I. Don’t. Want. To. Be. Broken.
But He says it is harder for the rich to come into His Kingdom than it is for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. We could MAKE a big needle and fit a camel through. The hardest thing in the world is letting go of myself and letting Him choose how I will reflect Him, instead of walking off by my big self and making me look good. No matter how well-intentioned I am in doing good, it just makes it harder to get to my heart, where God speaks and moves and lives and works.
So yes, I think God does leave me destitute. I can’t circumvent that. It keeps me talking to Him, even in anger. It gives Him a chance to respond to me. I have a bold relationship with Him, and it’s not just about receiving mercy. I can’t flout Him, and He knows I can’t, but He also knows how utterly confused I get when it comes to dealing with “right and wrong” – because these things conflict with my new identity in Jesus Christ. Either I am a new creation, or I’m not. Either Christ died once for all, or my whole Christian life must now be “Christ-plus” – just to make sure I’ve got my bases covered when it comes to pleasing God.
Jesus couldn’t give me rest if He didn’t do it all already, and that, I think is what Hebrews is talking about in the context of “be content with such things as you have.” The very next line is “For He has said ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.'”
On days like today, or the last week, or heck, the last six months, I may not LIKE God. I may not want to be faithful to Him, but I know that He IS, and that He is a Rewarder of those who seek Him, however grudgingly. I know that He Himself is faithful, even when I’m still trying to figure things out in the muck of life down here. And my greatest comfort is remembering that Jesus came and lived in the muck, lived here in the flesh like I do, and understands exactly how hard it is to die in obedience to God, even with the hope of resurrection on the other side of all this.