Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
One of the amazing things about the Christian experience is how easy it can be to misapprehend the character of the God we profess to worship. Despite the silent testimony of the cross of Christ, the human heart sometimes continues to doubt the goodness of the Father and the desirability of fellowship with the divine versus fellowship with the world. It sometimes seems as if no amount of intimate experience with the Holy Spirit is ever enough to completely erase either resistance to the things of God or a lingering desire to gratify the flesh.
This is not a topic that the Church is generally comfortable discussing, or sometimes even a reality to which it is willing to admit. For one thing there is a “Triumphalist” wing of Evangelical Christianity that is never willing to publicly deal with the remaining treason in our being because to do so would be to give in to “negative confession”. In these circles a sort of sanctified positive thinking is the only thing permitted to be preached and woe betide the person who brings up any stubborn darkness of the soul. To do so is to betray a practical theology that says that admitting to such darkness is tantamount to promoting it.
But even churches that try to be more transparent about the trials and tribulations of the Christian life are generally only willing to wrestle with questions of doubt and temptation to a certain point. A person who consistently admits to “discipleship failure”, as a counselor acquaintance of mine once defined it, tends to eventually be labeled as someone who at best doesn’t quite get it and at worst is “backslidden.”
Of course a Christian who spends far more time questioning the things of God than seeking those things may indeed be backslidden. If the temptation to shy away from holiness and give in to sin becomes a fixed tendency then something truly is wrong deep in such a person’s heart. The disturbing thing about this truth is that it probably describes more of us than we would care to admit. The Scripture speaks of the love of many growing cold in the last days and such a chill seems to have descended on many professing believers already, at least in the Western world.
Yet in all this a divine provision continues to exist which can give perhaps even the most prodigal among us reason for continued hope. The antidote to wavering hearts has always been, and continues to be, the relentless grace extended by a long-suffering God towards even the most wayward of His children. Perhaps part of the reason this grace remains is because our Lord is not without a personal understanding of the myriad temptations the world holds for human beings. After all He knows exactly what it is to be human, albeit without the experience of actually giving in to temptations all humans face.
In the end the ability of unconditional love to finally and completely grant us an abiding desire for God and His kingdom above all else is the only hope we have in the midst of our resistance. We would all do well learn to fight that resistance more than we fight such love. Otherwise we may risk finding that the darkness to which we cling has become the darkness we embody. Whether that embodiment ends up being for the rest of our lives or for all eternity; it is not something worth risking.