A Personal Confession….and a Hope

What is the greatest desire that can be harbored in the heart of a Christian? Is it not this: that the deepest part of us be defined by God….and owned by Him?

Twenty years ago I knew nothing of this desire, only a monstrous depression and the sense of living death. I felt alienated from all things and indeed was, insofar as I yet knew nothing of the Ground of all being, including my own. The consolations that, unknown to me, common grace had afforded in earlier years were utterly gone. Both my childhood share of natural happiness and my adolescent inklings of transcendence had been banished by an existential alienation that thoroughly lodged itself in my soul as I entered young adulthood. I was desperate for life, yet lost in a horror of despair.

In the admittedly hard struggles that have defined much of my Christian walk since my conversion in 1990 it has sometimes been all too easy to forget just how terrible my existence as an Atheist had become; or how nothing was the same the moment belief began.

Then, as the title of the biography of another converted Atheist, Joy Davidman Lewis put it, “God Came In”. God and Christ and light and life that I had never before known “came in”. It was, for me, fleeting as experienced in real time (in fact, to what seems to me too large an extent, it continues to be that way in my experiences of God even today), but it was real. The Lord of all did become a part of my being, I hope the core of my being, and nothing has ever been the same. The cross became my bottom-line, the One who once hung there my new and all-powerful reason to carry on.

Perhaps the very drama of that change two decades ago is what haunts my Christian life now and brings me back to the question I began this essay with; the question of what the deepest desire should be for a person who professes to be a follower of Christ.

You see the greatest sin I feel in myself these days is the same one I have felt consistently for my entire time as a believer. It is the deep resistance to God that haunts my days and nights, the unbelief, the fear of real surrender and absolute commitment. It seems to me that I almost always keep Him at wretched arm’s length rarely, oh so rarely, letting down my self-centered guard. What am I guarding against exactly, you ask? It is God’s claim as Lord above all else in my life, as Lord not only of that “all”, but of me.

Maybe this is what accounts for the continued fleetingness of my times of sensed communion with God.

Of course I suppose all of us who are believers, but who remain in this world, have felt this resistance to some degree. We are told in the Scriptures that, even now, we must struggle against our, hopefully dying, flesh. The new nature is ours, but the old nature in some form remains and competes for our attention. At times we even hug this unquiet spiritual corpse, this cadaverous “old man” who still masquerades as our deepest identity and has no intention of allowing himself to be quietly crucified. We do this even as we remain aware that the old man was the core of our once hopeless condition, and even though we know that Christ has given us new life.

But deep down hopefully we also know that to be defined and owned by the perfect God of love is the thing we truly want the most. At the least let us, let me, in Jesus name “desire the desire” and wait for He who died for us all to supply the thing itself. Then we can all make that leap of surrender and commitment, though perhaps having to make it over and over again, until our union with our Lord and Savior is well and truly on the road to being experientially absolute.