Superchristians

Something that has long troubled me about many biographies and Christian books (and I had read hundreds) was the airbrushing of negative experience from the lives of these successful teachers. Now, clearly this is not an exhaustive list of events in my own life and to list every discouragement would be wearisome, but there must be a balanced view. The Holy Spirit did this when recording the Biblical accounts and we are the poorer in our day because we don’t get to hear of the struggle and the back story of when it went wrong, when we acted in faith and it never quite worked out as we believed it would.

That is the story of my life in many ways; that is the story of Moses, of Joseph, of Paul and John. They lived hard, difficult confusing lives. Moses leaves everything to go rescue God’s people and on the way at the travel lodge the Lord tries to kill him, it takes his wife to figure out what’s going on.  He gets to Egypt and Pharaoh laughs him out of town, the people, after initially accepting him, then get angry and tell him to beat it, you’re making everything harder for us. Paul brings the gospel to cities and is beaten up and stoned, he writes to churches and they call him a pretend apostle with no authority as they read the Bible for the first time. He faces his final court appearances in Rome alone ,abandoned by all who had walked with him.

The great and the good in the church today are feted by all, they zoom around in private jets and motorcades lunching with celebrities and signing autographs themselves while the ‘ordinary’ Christians slog away in hardship trying to make ends meet and figure out where it all went wrong.

It didn’t go wrong!

The history of the church is one of slow slog, seldom is it a vast ingathering. It does happen, but the sweeping revivals quickly pass and we need to get down to the business of changing; changing habits, thought processes; changing from worldly minds to heavenly minds and that process is a hard day to day slog. Going to work, paying bills raising families and becoming the bride that He came to win. My wife reminded me recently that this mess of a church in the world is being formed into a glorious bride that will be presented spotless to Him on that last day.

We live in fallen bodies in a fallen world, we will get the same illnesses as everyone else, we need to pay the same bills, obey the same laws but we are children of a different world and therein dwells the hope.

My personal experiences and joint ones as a married couple have been filled with highs and lows, times of real assurance in the will of God and periods of great confusion, unsure if I am actually even close to where I should be.

Seldom in the middle of an experience have I fully understood what was going on, most of the time we just hold on to what we know to be true of God from His word even if the circumstances look to be a contradiction.

I wish someone had been this honest with me; life doesn’t always fit with the clichéd verses that people throw your way and it seems that God will use any circumstance and many means to teach us what we need to learn and become. His children over the centuries have lived lives that made little sense when measured against the teaching of the 21st century church, where personal purpose and fulfilment is the goal at the expense of personal holiness and communion with our Father. I put this interlude in at this point because during this time of our lives we were being bombarded with positive living messages and ‘all things are possible’ teaching at the expense of where ‘his Kingdom come’ met the ideals of just believe and you shall have.

I know from experience now that God will take us to extremes in every direction for a time in order to imprint into our psyche a way of thinking, and then when the lesson is over we settle back from the edge of that extreme.  I have lived this so many times with different doctrines and lessons. We are to walk a ‘narrow’ path, which means holding everything in balance.

So very difficult to live in practice.

Reprinted with permission:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/darkness in the Light by Daniel Brown