Just now my son whined about how long it was taking for his frozen peach to thaw, so he could eat it.
And it just about made me want to throw up.
Seriously. Sometimes the impatience and immaturity in these kids …
Wait.
That’s me.
Sometimes the impatience and immaturity in me is just too much to handle. Sometimes I take a long hard look at my own spirituality, and I realize that the source of my agitation and unrest is simply that I have embraced a perspective on life that isn’t Christianity.
Yesterday I read the quote below. You know what? This is me on paper. Sometimes something just levels you, and this leveled me. I desperately need the Father to strengthen me, His daughter. I am His beloved, I am chosen and cherished and profoundly loved … but I can also become a spoiled, entitled, flabby, whiny child who desperately needs a dose of discipline. Anyone else?
I say this in LOVE:
We will never be happy living less than His best for our lives. True joy, true satisfaction, true life is found in embracing the cross, embracing the gospel, and following Jesus into the resurrected life that comes through death to self. So here, I share these words with you, in case they touch something in you as well. The author is expounding on Noah’s tremendous faith, to labor in building the Ark in the face of incredible opposition. He compares Noah’s faith to ours:
“Ours is a generation of quick fixes, no waits, and instant communication … And many Christians have subconsciously embraced this mind-set. We expect immediate deliverance from our problems and grow spiritually weak when they linger on. We expect quick fixes to marital struggles, even if it took years for us to get into the perilous predicament we’re in. We seek short-cuts to Bible knowledge, maturity, and expertise that took others decades to learn. Pastors want growth and maturity in their churches but fail to make the huge investment of time to actually make disciples. In our personal growth too we expect spiritual muscles without spiritual exercise. We feel it’s our right to succeed or to be given success, promoting ourselves from little league to the bit leagues.
If we could get maturity and discipleship from a drive-through window, Christians would line up for miles. Then even that would take too long, and we’d demand a phone app. We get out of breath when asked to run the long distances of faith. We’re often content to settle for the appearance of spiritual knowledge, maturity, and strength. We desire all the benefits but none of the struggles. We want the perks without the pain. Progress without perseverance. Success without suffering. We want to look good spiritually and have great faith, but we don’t want to saw and sweat, hammer and hurt. Not for long, anyway. We just want a big boat and a story to tell about how it was a “God thing.” We’re weak and out of shape. And that’s why it doesn’t take much suffering to bury the average Christian under a pile of defeat and depression. We’re spiritually lazy, proven by the fact that most believers go for years or even decades without sharing their faith. I wonder how much real persecution it would take to crush the Western church? What would it take to cause us to fold under pressure?
Honestly, we just want a pre-fab, awesome-looking Ark to impress our friends and post on Facebook, and to do it all without blisters and inconvenience. But that’s not Christianity. And that kind of faith is found nowhere in the Bible. When we visit God’s Hall of Faith (Heb. 11) we encounter heroes with real, raw faith. There we find suffering, sacrifice, obedience, and men and women living like strangers in a strange land. We meet some whose promise from God wasn’t fulfilled in their lifetime. Men who passed over pleasure to endure pain with God’s people. … God says they were people of whom this world was not worthy.
Friends, with all that is in me I want to be a woman of great faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God, and I want to please my Father.
I desperately need God to pry my fingers off my picture-perfect life and loosen my grip on my own understanding; to help me cling fast to HIM and fall freely into His good and perfect will, by faith.
He who loses His life will find it. That’s a promise.
{May we grow in faith this week. Thank you for reading.}