Day 2772 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge. Luke 14:33. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples. NIV
The problem with this version of religion that so many are selling is that it carries with it the assumption that God will immediately drop us right at the destination. We’re led to believe that if we say a single prayer a single time that as soon as we open our eyes our lives are changed in every way we wanted them to change. It’s this kind of fast-food drive-thru faith that is the reason that we’re starting to see so many fall away from a true Christian faith and instead give into doubt and apostasy.
When we’ve built up this idea that faith makes us immune to struggle or strife or fear or challenge or worry or confusion then when any of those things inevitably come into our lives, we’re left to assume that our faith has failed. We’re looking for any reason, any excuse to run back to our cozy little hideouts in the pit of sinful shame that we’re used to calling home. So if we’ve built our faith on this idea that it makes everything easy and perfect, then as soon as something is hard or chaotic, we’ve got all we need to choose doubt and turn back to the wider, easier, more comfy road we’ve always known.
You see, we’re so used to getting our way, never having to change a thing, assuming only the best and never considering the worst that we’re in serious danger of building our faith on the least stable foundation possible. Because like it or not, life still happens and it’s just not always easy or understandable. So if our faith consists of nothing but this selfish expectation that we get our way and we get it when we want it, then we know nothing of faith nor those who’ve gone before us and left their stories for us in Scripture to help us learn what faith is meant to be.
We’ve been talking about the Israelites leaving Egypt behind only to find themselves wandering through the desert for the next 40 years. They left behind the lives they knew, the lives they had a handle on, the lives that they didn’t have to work to figure out or understand in exchange for a radically different way of life filled with more questions than answers, more challenge than comfort, and more reason to doubt than to trust. After all, as humans, we only trust what we can see and if it doesn’t make sense then we’re prone to doubt. And that’s what we see as they wound their way through the wasteland. The doubted God every chance they could. And sadly, we tend to do the same!
We doubt Him when we don’t get what we wanted. We doubt Him when His answer is ‘No’. We doubt Him when life is harder than we’d like. We doubt Him whenever anything is hard, scary, challenging, inconvenient, uncomfortable, or in any way contrary to the perfect dreams that we’ve spent years putting together so that they fit just right.
So what do we do when God leads us away from what we know? What do we do when He asks us to leave behind everything we thought we’d always have, everything that we spent so many years obtaining and accepting and building our lives around? What do we do when He points us toward the desert and tells us to walk away from the relative comforts that we’re used to having? What do we do when His path leads us to leaving everything behind and walking into a place where we’ve got nothing but hope that there’s something out there somewhere?
As I said, we doubt. We quit. We give up and let go of that hope of something better and simply stay put and learn to accept where we are because we either don’t want to let go of what we have and where are. We turn around and march back toward enslavement in a foreign land because we’re afraid that we’ll not make the journey or that the result won’t be everything we thought it would be. We doubt God’s ability to lead us to something better simply because we can’t see it and don’t have the patience to wait for it. We’d rather keep what we have than to risk losing it only to find nothing with which to replace it.
So often in our lives God’s direction is into the desert. It’s through the fire. It’s leaving something behind or cutting a toxic person out of our lives. It’s asking us to let go so that our hands can be free to take hold of the promise that He has in store. It’s emptying our hearts of every ounce of this world in order to receive what He has planned up ahead. But as we talked about yesterday, our lack of foresight and inability to trust leads us to complain and doubt and cling to what we have rather than believing that He can actually give us something better.
The truth is that we can’t actually live by faith if we’re not willing to wander the desert. That’s where our faith is. It’s not in saying prayers where we are with no intent on moving or changing. It’s not taking a step or two outside our comfort zone and running back to it. It’s not found in arriving at the destination and getting everything we want or hope for. Our faith is in the fog. It’s the unknowns, the uncertainties, the wrestling with unlearning everything we thought we knew and setting our hearts to considering things that seem foreign.
Faith is hard, and it should be! It should make us uncomfortable as it burns away the lives we’ve always lived. It should shake our world apart so that every bit of evil and wickedness is brought to the surface where it’s stripped away. Faith is about losing all we are and all we know and all we have in exchange for hope. It’s looking at everything we have and admitting that it’s not what we need and finding a courage to let it all go in hopes that Jesus really did go to prepare a place for us that’s better than this one. It’s taking off into a life of struggle and pain that makes no sense and offers very little respite or reward in this trust that our reward comes later.
But we always stop well short of learning that as we have such a desire for our lives to remain easy that we’ll forfeit anything it takes to make them simple. I think what we need to come to terms with is that faith isn’t meant to fit our lives. Faith is meant to change our lives. We don’t grow if we’re not rained on. We don’t lose the chaff if we’re not thrown to the wind. We can’t shake off the dross that’s accumulated on our hearts without being led through the refining fire.
Friends, the Bible is filled with stories of people who lost. They lost friends. They lost neighbors. They lost homes. They lost jobs. They lost possessions. They lost battles. They lost nations. They lost family. They lost freedom. They lost safety. They lost their lives. Faith opens for us a door to an eternity filled with so much to gain that it blows our minds. But we can’t forget that that door is at the end of this road and that it is truly narrow, so narrow that we simply can’t bring anything with us when we pass through it.
We have to be willing to lose. This time we’ve been given in this world is our time to lose. We have to learn to lose every worldly desire, every creature comfort, every selfish goal, every ideal dream, every plan, every hope, every single thing of this world that has held a grip on us. We can’t keep trying to gain something here and cling to the assumption that we can take it with us. There is no room for baggage on this ride, because anything that we think is so important that we just can’t let it go is something that will remain between us and fully surrendering our lives to following Christ.
I said in a post a while back that we can’t fully understand what we have to gain until we let go of everything we have. Gotta get it out of the way. We have to be willing to completely empty our lives of everything else in order for Christ to have enough room to do what He needs to do to lead us where we truly hope to be. Don’t let anything remain between you and Him. Anything from this place that we continue to hold onto is keeping us here. If this is where you want to stay, then have at it. But if we want to see what He can do, where He can lead, and what this whole faith thing can mean, we have to let go of this place and everything in it.
Faith isn’t found in wanting something better but still being attached to what we have. Faith is in the desert where we have nothing to cling to but hope in a distant promise that will take us a lifetime to finally reach.
