Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Sometimes we fear that the very thing we most need from God is something we do not want. Even worse we may feel that either we will never be able to want it or that God will not give it to us even if we were to truly want it.
I felt this myself recently when I came to wonder whether I truly want to be surrendered completely to Him. I also found myself wondering how I could get to the place of wanting such surrender. This coincided with the unpleasant feeling that if I even needed to ask such questions after 25 years as a Christian then I must be in bad shape. After all, if a quarter century of professing to follow Christ has not produced this desire (except perhaps during fleeting moments of devotion) then when can I ever expect to have it?
The byproduct of such thinking is a terrible kind of fear and I’ve known quite a lot of this type of fear during my life. It would be one thing if it felt like it was some kind of divine discipline, designed to bring me to a truer, deeper kind of faith. Unfortunately such moments all too often seem more like some kind of punishment for my lack of faith. It just feels more like rejection then it does conviction.
Why does it have to be this way for some of us? Is it because we have become so used to being rejected by imperfect, fallen human beings in our past? Do we prefer the misery of doubt and fear to taking the chance of giving ourselves fully to a God who we mistakenly think may be the next one to reject us? If so we have yet to realize that God does not turn away those who sincerely seek him though Christ. We are still thinking of God as just another abuser in our lives. This is the lie too many of us sometimes live our lives by.
The bottom line is that God’s persistent grace, mercy and love is the only hope those of us who fear Him in the worst sense of the word have for overcoming that fear. We desperately need to continue to be persistent in praying that God will help us come to realize that our wrong belief is what makes and keeps things so hard for us, not Him. It is our doubts about His character that drives us to work so hard for His acceptance that we cannot live from His acceptance. If we have sincerely asked Jesus Christ to be our Lord and Savior then at some point we have to stop doing what we think or feel necessary to make Him love us and start receiving that love in simple faith. The main thing which produces the desire to surrender the parts of us we hold back from God is the experiencing of a grace, mercy and love that we have never known from others, and have begun to know from Him.
I’d like to say that I have come to this place as I write these words but I know I haven’t. I hope that being honest about this might help some of you who are in the same place I am to at least know that you are not alone. Leave the “super-spirituality” to the “super-spiritual”. Those who consider themselves immune to the kind of struggle I’m describing probably cannot relate to any of what I have just expressed, but I know many of you know exactly what it is of which I speak. It is for you alone that I write these words and offer this one thought:
Let go of your wrong fear of God, but please, please don’t let go of Him and remember that it is His perfect love, not your tortured effort, that makes that possible.
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