11/29/2023
When your Christian walk seems futile, or the “I just can’t go on” syndrome.
Whoever taught that becoming a Christian was an “escape” from trouble and if done right, will result in one blessing after another, was either spiritually immature or worse, selling a different gospel.
I have struggled with worth all my life and I have handled it badly, even as a believer…especially as a believer. I waffled between spiritual heat and coldness until the Spirit of God moved someone to counsel me with this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
Here’s where it gets interesting. After fifty years of waffling resulting in the loss of all my possessions, friends, work, and a family baffled over my downward spiral, the Holy Spirit whispered this in my ear on a day when my hope was gone: “You’ve done it your way for the last 50 years. How about trying it my way now?”
Without going into how profound a statement of grace and forgiveness that offer was to me, it absolutely set me on a new course with renewed hope. The invitation to do it His way did, however, make me ask just what His way was.
I grew up on the Bible. From the time I gave my heart to the Lord at 4 years old, my mother had devotions with me and my brothers every night at bedtime. We went to an evangelical church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. I went to church camp each summer and participated in Christian youth programs outside of the church. The Bible was taught in every experience and my knowledge came from what I was taught until I started reading it for myself in my late teens. I had a ton of scriptural knowledge and was well-versed in the do’s and don’t’s of being a Christian. The emphasis of what I was taught majored in living right and minored in evangelism; telling others about Jesus. We were to be holy, do good works, and spread the Word.
The trouble I had when I did it my way was with trying to please God by behaving rightly. I judged God’s temperament with me by how good or bad I acted. And when I acted bad, I saw God as keeping His distance, disappointed with my failure. I rarely saw Him in any other light as I constantly turned to the same sins over and over as I faced my inability to live a consistently holy life. It was self-perpetuating behavior…personal failure, whether perceived or actual, led to sin to anesthetize the emotional pain…then repentance, elation, and a period of righteous behavior until the next failure and turning to some familiar feel-good sin to ease the pain…and repeat. I didn’t know any other way and now God was offering His way…a way I had previously perverted into impotent legalism.
His offer resulted in me becoming a blank slate…so blank that I didn’t even know myself. Everything I had used in the past to validate my life and give me relevancy was stripped away. What was ahead was yet to be known…and change or not, the world didn’t stop trying to beat me down. All the triggers were there, even more apparent now that my eyes were opened to how they had ruled my life.
I went to the Father in prayer and shared my frustration with the lack of a human mentor. My earthly father was a stepfather and distant at best. I was never encouraged…only rebuked and I needed an older, wiser, holier man to walk with me in filling the blank slate of my renewed life with God’s way. My stepfather had passed away years before and up until God’s offer, I had no close, godly male friends.
God being God, He answered my prayer with this: “I will be the father you need.” What I didn’t understand at the time was this: the secret to the Christian life is defined by that declaration.
The struggle to be found right in God’s eyes is experienced by all who come to Jesus for salvation. There are plenty of if/then clauses in scripture: if you do this then that will happen. If you think this way then that will result. God is not mocked, what a man sows he will reap. It’s easy to see a set of rules, a ledger of regulations we must follow to please God.
I can’t do it. I’m going to mess up. No one can do it, except One…Jesus lived the perfect life, without sin, never failing to do His Father’s will. And He will be the only One to do it.
How do I live so that God is pleased with me? Yes, it’s by faith…but it’s more than that. Faith is a result of getting to know the Father. Our desire to live holy lives, to produce good works must come as response to truly knowing the Father like a child knows their earthly father. We don’t work to please God…we desire to please Him because we have received and experienced His loving behavior towards us. We might start out with fearful respect but we should be moving towards intimate connection. God doesn’t want us checking off a list of things to please Him with. He just wants our love and then He will inspire and empower our way of life…His way.
The promises of God for our salvation, protection, and provision are absolutely reliable. They are not for others but not me. I lived that deception for 50 years. They are for all His called and saved children…and some of it even falls on those who don’t know Him. Consider the story of the prodigal son, which Jesus used to illustrate the Father’s relationship with His children.
In the story, the youngest son decides he’s had enough of home life under his fathers rule, so he asks for and gets his inheritance to be consequently used on pleasure and vice until he’s flat broke. He’s now mistreated and hungry and decides to return to dad, not as a son, but as a bond servant, working for room and board. Just an aside…how many Christians find this situation too familiar….Working hard to do the right things in hopes that God will find merit in it and provide for us?
What the boy discovers as he nears his father’s property was not an indignant dad, disappointed and remote, but a father who had been aching for his son’s return, watching out the window every day for any sign of his coming. And when he finally sees him from a distance, dejectedly coming up the road, head down, shoulders slumped, the father leaps to his feet, pulls up his robe to free his gait and sprints down the road to meet his son. Everyone in this man’s household were shocked, including the prodigal son, at his reaction to his son’s return. You see, his father never stopped being his father, never stopped loving him, and his home was forever his home regardless of how he behaved.
Jesus was showing us the Father’s heart for His children…and for all of humanity. We are created in His image and our place is in His household. If we are coming for the first time in repentance for salvation or making the return trip for the hundredth time, our Father’s reaction is the same….and it is in that knowledge and experience that we pull from to live holy lives and do good works. We want others to come home to live in the love of our Father and God!
Finally, if God can save a man who squandered his gifts away for most of his life, who tasted of the freedom in Christ and the gifts of the Holy Spirit only to turn back to his own vomit over and over, He can save you.
He’s watching out His window for you… and I can vouch for what type of greeting you will get! Just let Him love you for awhile. You’ll get it. It’s not about the struggle…it’s all about the trust!
