Good News: You’re Doing It Wrong

You are doing it wrong.

What is it you are doing wrong? – your spiritual life, your development into a disciple of Christ, your efforts to better yourself. How do I know this?  Because you are dust and aren’t infallible. There is no possibility that the knowledge you have gained thus far in life is sufficient to safeguard you from error. Knowing this can actually empower you.

It is necessary to put this awareness on the table and take stock of it because otherwise, you’ll suffer emotionally as you stumble learning to walk out the Christian life. You are likely to feel that God is treating you unfairly and throwing you curve balls. What parent refuses to let go of their toddler’s hands as they learn to walk? None does, because they love their child and know that the value of learning to walk surpasses the bumps, bruises, and tears they must endure while learning.  It is the same with our spiritual lives.  We are learning to walk in step with divine guidance. The learning process is uncomfortable.

When you experience discomfort on your Christian journey, God isn’t doing you a disservice or judging or punishing you.  He is simply engaging you from a distance far enough to enable your learning without His power encroaching upon your freedom. At that distance, He is lovingly giving you the space you need to pause, process, and even abandon the effort if you so choose. Occasionally having to reestablish your footing is what Him not imposing His will feels like. He’s leading you to the heights of holiness at a distance which requires your commitment. I promise!

I spent 25 years on that rocky road, saddened by each and every bruise God allowed me to sustain. I mistakenly interpreted this to mean that He loved me less than I thought. Now I see those pitfalls for what they were: opportunities for me to recommit to Him over and over until my reasons for pursuing Him changed from rewards to intimacy with Him. Learning the hard way made our relationship worth more to me. If we accept that the narrow road is inherently laden with challenges and that is why few find it, then our emotions need not take such a beating in the process.

I am convinced that God will require you to step out of your comfort zone out of sheer obedience to Him. If you are naturally Type-A, like me, then He will require you to quit asserting yourself so much. You must learn to wait and surrender to being led. If you are naturally hesitant or socially disinterested, then He will require you to step up, serve, and participate. Why would He do this? Because that is how He demonstrates His authority over different personalities and how we graduate from narrow personalities into temperaments more like His diverse personality. He wants us to reflect Him.

If you are naturally generous, then He will convict you that you must exercise more discretion with your giving because giving should be subordinate to being led where to give. And if you are tight-fisted with your money, then He will convict you that indiscriminate giving will sever the idol of money that has exercised a stronghold over you.

How can God be so contradictory? Because He is bigger than our predispositions and must convince us of this. Our human inclinations work against His authority, be they culturally labeled as permissible or condemnable. Until we learn to distrust our natures, we aren’t capable of properly reflecting a God who is infinitely diverse and beyond our comprehension. Aren’t believers to be continually filled with the Spirit? Without continual emptying of self, there’s no room for the Spirit to have His way.

There is a particular Christian leader whom I respect and whose books I read. I agree with every word he writes, but I wouldn’t put a period on any of it. I have discovered that putting a period on the wisdom we gather from God, limits it. It’s easy to assume that life experience makes us authorities on matters. Even though you have walked a stretch with God where you discovered certain realities, be aware that you may discover exceptions to those realities further down the road.

I cannot tell God when to stop talking, nor would I want to knowingly do so. Since the Holy Spirit indwells individuals, I cannot speak with authority that I definitively know what the Holy Spirit is telling them. I can only say what I, in my limited experience and my limited years of listening to God, feel like He might say. I can be wrong. I am often wrong. I have learned this lesson by being wrong too often on vital matters.

I am convinced that God even leads us to make what we later consider to have been mistakes, sometimes, so that we learn not to put stock in our own understanding.  When He leads us to a situation that we cannot make right on our own, we are compelled to trust Him to make good on His promise to work everything together for good in the end. If everything were already good, then He would not need to make the promise.

When we don’t leave ourselves open to being wrong, we quench the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can lead me to do one thing today for perfectly sound reasons and then forbid me from doing the exact same thing tomorrow for different reasons to prove the point that He is God and I am not. He possesses all authority. The wisdom He has previously taught me is not my authority; He–actively present right now–is my authority. There is liberty in following the Spirit: liberty to be lead, liberty to be ignorant, and liberty to not need to figure things out. I am free to go with the flow and I am free to be make u-turns. My burden is light.

I liken the Christian experience to placement within a color wheel ranging from all the shades of red on the left, all shades of yellow on the right, all shades of blue on the bottom, and all shades in between crossing and overlapping in Venn diagrams unifying all the colors. God, the person, encompasses them all.  He is gracious and wrathful, generous and jealous, abundant and refusing. He is all things. But the skin which stretches over all of His variable traits is perfection.

When he wields His pruning sword cutting down prosperity, one shade of His character comes into focus. When He rescues the undeserving from hedonism, again another unfamiliar shade is presented. He is, through all of life’s good, bad, and heartbreaking scenarios, revealing Himself. Until we journey with Him from the red side of His personality to the yellow side to the blue and so on, then He isn’t through with us, yet.

God is deep, complex, and intricate. One moment, He is uttering, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7), and the next He is intolerant, turning merchant tables over in the temple (Matt. 21:12-13). There is one consistency among these two reactions: He is right in both cases. He is always right. Rightness is defined by His opinion on matters, regardless of the setting or players involved because He is high enough, good enough, and powerful enough to always be right. Everything is subordinate to Him, even the wisdom we have already gathered.

It is His opinion which classifies rightness from wrongness. For example, God enforces that drinking alcohol is forbidden from the Nazarene (Luke 1:15) because it singles out Nazarenes as wholly set apart as God’s servants, and then, Jesus uses that same object–a glass of wine–to represent His own precious blood and instructs His beloved disciples to partake of it (Mark 14:23-24). There is no significance in the object itself; the value rests in how God uses it to convey His majesty. In one scenario the digestion of wine prospers His message, and in another scenario, the abstaining from it aids the same goal. It’s not the adoption of one stance or another that establishes rightness or wrongness – it is the expression of all things being subject to His authority. Everything is useful in making that proclamation.

If His goal is to make us “the most perfect worshippers of God we can possibly be, as we hope to be for all eternity” (Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God), which I believe that it is, then God must expose us to all the complexities of His personality. We must truly know Him. When we engage life according to our own understanding, we stop moving, we stop listening, and we put periods on sentences He isn’t finished speaking. Emboldened by our “God has spoken” philosophies, we assume control instead of remaining subservient and saying:

“Listen. God is speaking.”

 

Copyright © 2019 by D.M. Harrington

Photo acknowledgement: unsplash.com @sharonp