False Comfort and Unnecessary Misery

False Comfort and Unnecessary Misery
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Save us, oh Lord, from false comfort, but also from unnecessary misery for neither is of You.

These are two experiences in the Christian life that are opposite states of feeling and yet have perhaps equally deleterious effects on us if they persist for very long in our lives.

False comfort might be defined as anything that gives us a sense of peace and wellbeing while simultaneously glossing over a serious deficiency in our relationship with God. The source of this comfort might be sinful in and of itself or it may be morally neutral, but become sinful to us because it keeps us from dealing with that deficiency. Writing about innately sinful false comfort C.S. Lewis once stated it this way:

“Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things — ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear.”

Lewis understood that human beings have a natural tendency to want to remove pain using any means necessary. Rather than go through a potentially painful period of growth, possibly involving some repentance on our part, we often look for worldly panaceas of one kind or another. If they make us feel better we may wrongly assume that the Spirit of God is granting us comfort when it is more accurately a rationalized avoidance of reality taking the form of something that simply makes us feel good.

The other side of the coin is accepting misery in our lives that God in no way ordains.

Many sincere Christians assume that whatever pain they face in life is automatically from the hand of God, most likely because of the perception they have of some personal sin, real or imagined. Certainly unrepented sin can cause us misery, but it is dangerous to automatically assume this is the cause. Sometimes an unbiblical kind of spiritual Masochism also masquerades as being of the Spirit when actually it is not of our Lord at all.

Some believers who have not matured in their understanding of the Bible may think that the more pain they endure the more spiritual they are. This was the mistake of some of the extreme ascetics of the early Christian centuries who believed all misery was cleansing and who courted discomfort wherever they could possibly find it. In fact God does not only use pain to mature us, but blessing as well. The blessing may involve some pain (such as in childbirth for instance) but it is not permanent or pervasive and it is not an end in itself.

Both of these errors, seeking false comfort and seeking unnecessary misery, are good subjects for prayer for those who fall into either mistake. They are both diversions from the path of true balance in the Christian life and God stands ready to lovingly correct his children in either case once they recognize the problem and submit it, and themselves, to Him for maturing.