Unbelief comes so easily to
us. The unbeliever, of course, lives in
denial and has absolutely no problem with unbelief - at least religious
unbelief. The unbelieving man or woman
can be liberal about some things, and conservative about others. They can be warm and compassionate on one
issue and heartless, cold, cruel and unthinking on another and never have a
reason to recognize that they are inconsistent.
Christians cannot have it both ways. We must have a center in our lives, and that
center is Christ. Sin in our flesh will
often push us toward inconsistencies, but we strive deliberately toward being
God’s holy people all of the time. We
have the commission of Christ to be His disciples, to
walk in a manner worthy of the Gospel, to love one another, and show forth
His glory by living lives which are, by the mercies of God, living and holy
sacrifices to Him, which is (or so the Apostle Paul wrote) our spiritual service of worship.
This is where unbelief become a problem for the
Christian. We don’t usually have
problems with the big things: Jesus is the Son of God, the Trinity,
Creationism, big doctrines like those we just accept on the authority of the
Word of God. We generally accept them
easily because they don’t challenge us in our daily lives. The divinity of Jesus Christ doesn’t directly
impact the way we do our taxes, or how we approach evangelism, or even which
denomination we belong to - within reason, of course.
The trouble comes when living out our lives
requires living out the faith that we confess.
We confess that God answers prayers, but when trouble comes, we are
often slow to pray, and impatient with God to answer in a way we recognize as
an answer. We talk about God guiding our
lives and blessing us, but when we are not delighted with how life is going, we
often imagine that something is wrong, rather than trust God and confess that
He is God and we are not. We live a
theology of glory even while we confess a theology of the cross.
God does not work according to our sense of how
things ought to be. He tells us in
Isaiah, “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are
My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” The course of the world around us is not
going to accommodate us, and the work and the plans of God are not going to
accommodate our desires either. We may
find financial distress more frequently than we would like to. Illness may dog our steps now and then. People may not like us or recognize our true
worth. In short, life may not seem ‘fair’
to us.
The reality is that life is almost never fair
to anyone. It is not fair that someone
should win a lottery and wind up wealthy.
It is not fair that you should work for years to establish your nest egg
only to have a market “adjustment” steal it away. It is not fair that you work hard and the
opportunities fall toward someone else.
It is not fair, it is reality.
It is also not fair that you should be healthy
and another suffer heart disease or emphysema.
It is not fair that your car starts on a cold morning and someone else’s
does not. It is not fair that fame,
popularity, unbridled success, or whatever, should fall upon one person while
another, who works just as diligently, and seems no less worthy, misses
out. It isn’t fair, it is simply what is.
These facts make me see the wisdom of
God revealing the truth that “Godliness with contentment is
great gain.”
Would we really want what we deserve? We deserve no good thing, according to our
faith - at least the one we confess publicly.
We don’t measure our ‘deserving-ness’ on the scale of sin and absolute
justice. We measure it on the scale of the
goodness God has shown us in the past, and take it for granted that He must be
just so good to us – and in the same way - today and tomorrow. If we can arise in the morning, breathe in
and out, and begin our day with our morning food and customary baths, showers,
or washing and brushings, we should be shouting for joy and raising prayers of
thanksgiving for God’s undeserved and immeasurable goodness and kindness to us.
That we don’t is due to the patient teaching of
false doctrine to us by the world around us.
It tells us that today is the minimum life ought to be, and we should
only expect things to get better from here.
Our lack of praise and thanksgiving is a manifestation of unbelief in
us. We don’t actually believe that we
deserve anything less. But few of the
world’s inhabitants get out of such nice beds, arise to such fine food, or have
the assortment of clothing to put on that we consider a minimum. Even fewer know who the provider of these
blessings is.
Then we set out into the world. Usually, we think it is too hot or too
cold. We have to work harder than we
want to. The people around us do not
treat us as well as we think they should.
Our situation in life is often somewhat less than what we dreamed it
might be, and we find ourselves chafing under the reality in which we live.
But our faith teaches us that God is with us,
guarding us and guiding us. He has
planned good works for us to do throughout the day, and sets them in our path
to do. So, while we do not understand why
the world around us does not see our true worth, we can be sure that whatever
we find before us to do is what God would have us do. If sin presents itself, we are to resist and
flee from it, and that is our good work.
If temptation arises, we are to resist it, and turn our backs on
it. If menial tasks are required of us,
we are to do them as though this is the work we are to do to worship God - because it is.
Our circumstances and our daily activities don’t
have to strike us as special or important or earth-shaking. Our faith teaches us that we are where God
has placed us, to do the things God would have us to do for the blessing and
benefit of our neighbor - just as they do what they do for our blessing and benefit,
whether they realize it or not. When we
chafe at life and its demands, we are forgetting God’s hand in our lives. When we despair of our situation or lose
hope, we are forgetting God’s love and promises, and act as though it all
depends on us, and not on God at all!
When you forget the promises of God and act as though He were not aware
of your life or involved in your circumstances, that is a species of unbelief.
Of course, the difficulties we confront can be
an opportunity to change things, make things different and better. We can find a better job, one for which we
are better suited. We can take the
opportunity of a broken relationship to repair it by humbling ourselves to
confession, repentance, and forgiveness.
If we can find the courage to say, “I was wrong. I sinned.
Can you, will you forgive me?”, we may also discover the joy of being
forgiven, and find ways to put back together relationships that we imagined
were broken beyond repair. More than
that, however, we may model the very things we confess; faith, forgiveness,
humility. We may have the chance to show
someone how powerful the gospel is by acting out our part in it.
We Christians talk a
lot about grace, forgiveness, humility, and repentance. Now and again, God gives us opportunities to
put those things into practice. Just
being confident that God has forgiven us can give us the strength to admit
errors, or open the door to forgive someone who has sinned against us. Sometimes, people need to see Christ in us
before they are going to be willing to hear about Him from us.
We can never tell what God is working through
us in the various circumstances of our lives.
A hospital stay can be the platform for showing the reality and power of
the hope of everlasting life to a nurse or doctor, another patient, or someone
just visiting a friend. Economic
difficulties can position us to confess Christ without the one who hears our
words thinking, “Yeah?, I bet you wouldn’t say that if you were in my shoes!” Just being a decent and kind person, and
doing all to the glory of God without hardly ever speaking a word can earn you
the respect of those around you, who learn respect first, and then wonder, when
they find that you are one of those “church people” who go to that church down
the road. Your witness - and your stock
in their eyes - may never be noticed by you, but you cannot tell what God is
doing by means of your faithful, holy, daily walk in the Lord.
Jesus never had much money. He never drove a car, used a cell-phone, flew
in an airplane, or appeared on television.
He was never what we would call popular, and He occasionally said things
that drove many of those who followed Him for a time right up a wall, and out
of His life. He didn’t measure what He
was doing by the reaction of those around Him.
He measured them by their reactions to God’s Word and God’s works. What Jesus did do was keep the whole will and
Law of God flawlessly, so that He could then die when He did not deserve to -
and in doing so take our place, and die our death, and pay what was owed to the
justice of God for our sins for us. He
redeemed us.
Because He died where and when and how He died,
and because He rose from the grave, we are forgiven. And we know the love of God for us. And we know that God is with us and watching
us and guiding us and blessing us. We
also know these things because Jesus said so, for
the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that
I came forth from the Father. (John 16:27) We have seen the love which the heavenly
Father has for us - and we know the promises about resurrection and life
eternal which lie ahead of us. So we can
live every day as though every bit of your faith is true - and we really should
- because we believe what Jesus has done, promised, and given to us. The only way anyone else can see that it is
true is by your faith leaking out into your daily living. Let us pray that
God guards us and keeps us so that the devil, the world, and our flesh may not
deceive us nor seduce us in to misbelief, despair, and other great shame or
vice.
