Notes of Faith November 12, 2022
Unconverted Places
Resilient
Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. “You also were with Jesus of Galilee,” she said. But he denied it before them all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Then he went out to the gateway, where another servant girl saw him and said to the people there, “This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.” He denied it again, with an oath: “I don’t know the man!” After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, “Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away.” Then he began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know the man!” Immediately a rooster crowed.
— Matthew 26:69–74
Survival situations bring out the best and the worst in people.
Who we are, what we love, and how far we are willing to trust God are revealed when we are truly hard pressed.
There is poor Peter, of course, and the call of the rooster. But another revealing story — especially in terms of the fear of not having enough — comes to us from the life of the young church. Things are still turbulent. Revival is happening, but so is persecution. The infamous Ananias and Sapphira sell some real estate, and the problem isn’t that they kept part of the cash for themselves; the issue is they pretend they are sharing it all with the poor. They want to look sacrificial while living selfishly. The duplicity is the issue. I think the fear of not having enough causes them to hoard, but they lie to the apostles and say they aren’t. Things don’t go so well after that.
Pressure brings it all to the surface.
Military training is designed to do exactly this — strip away all pretense and expose what’s really in you, see what you’re made of. All those popular outdoor leadership programs have a similar goal but take a less severe approach. They simply drop people into the backcountry — far beyond the Comfort Culture — push them past their normal limits, and see what comes out.
Most of the time what comes out is not something we wanted the world to see.*
I enjoy watching those wilderness survival reality shows not only because I adore the wilderness but because as a therapist I love the raw look into the inner world of hard-pressed human beings. Everybody knows how to put on a brave face; what I want to see is what’s beneath. If you’ve ever watched any of those shows you’ve seen it — how their biggest battle ends up not being cold or hunger but their inner demons.
I’m bringing this up because we are trying to thoroughly strengthen our souls’ “immune systems” for trying times.
There are pockets of resistance in us that will prove our downfall if we don’t bring them to Christ.
"The goal of God’s work in us is Jesus taking up residence in every part of us. Nothing left out."
— John Eldredge
The Sweet Safety of Holiness
Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again. — 1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT
I absolutely love this verse; I love the hope of my entire being made pure by the Spirit of God.
I realize that holiness is a word with a lot of baggage for many people, but we can get past all that if we look at the gorgeous life and character of Jesus — He was simply good through and through. His character is so alluring, so winsome, and whenever you see Him relating to people you are watching true holiness in action. Women who everyone had used and abused came to Jesus, threw themselves at His feet, and He was only loving toward them. Sometimes the crowds loved Him, other times they shouted for His head, but He didn’t let it faze Him. Jesus’ goodness in the Gospels is captivating.
When His own time of severe testing came, that goodness was His shield. Just before the secret police came for Him, before the grisly scenes that follow, Jesus told His disciples,
I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me. — John 14:30 NKJV
The enemy tried every angle he could find on Jesus — seduction, rejection, threat, the fear of not having enough, even torture. Nothing worked, because Satan had nothing “in” Jesus to use as his hook. Imagine the sheer relief of it.
It probably feels like obtaining even a fraction of that goodness is beyond you, but the promise of the Christian faith is that God will reproduce Jesus’ goodness in you:
I feel as if I’m going through labor pains for you again, and they will continue until Christ is fully developed in your lives. — Galatians 4:19 NLT
The goal of God’s work in us is Jesus taking up residence in every part of us. Nothing left out. No little pockets of resistance. (And did you notice? Paul, with the Holy Spirit through him, is “mothering” these dear followers of Christ toward the beautiful goal. He is “in labor” with them, for them!)
In our own times of severe testing, we want to be made “holy in every way,” our entire “spirit and soul and body... kept blameless” (1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT). Let me be quick to add, I think much of the testing and the Falling Away takes place very subtly in the heart. It’s the small turns from God toward our other comforters, the quiet feelings of being disappointed with Him, the early stages of Desolation — this is how most of the testing plays out. But it has momentum like an avalanche.
C. S. Lewis’s personal secretary was a man named Walter Hooper. He described the Oxford professor and creator of Narnia as “the most thoroughly converted man I ever met.”1 What a wonderful thing to be said about you. Lewis was a man whose entire being — heart, soul, mind, and strength — had become almost thoroughly inhabited by Jesus Christ. His fragmented self was nearly fully reintegrated in Christ. (Nearly, because none of us are utterly whole until Christ returns. But my goodness — nearly is fabulous.) Many people fell in love with the presence of Dallas Willard for the same reason.
Let me pause on that thought for a moment, because while this is known to the saints, the Comfort Culture framed within us other goals. Does your heart tell you that it agrees with this — that the goal of your life is to become the most converted person your friends and family know?
Or does your heart prefer the goal to be something else? Perhaps, “I just want things to be good again, and let somebody else live through the end of the age”? Ouch. That hits close to home.
The battle taking place over the human heart can be described as Satan using every form of seduction and threat to take our hearts captive and our loving Jesus doing everything He can to form single-heartedness in us. This often plays out in thousands of small, daily choices. Which is kind, really; we want to develop single-heartedness before the severe testing comes.
Theodore Roosevelt had a lifetime of stories to prepare him for his last great adventure and ordeal — descending an unnavigated tributary of the Amazon in primitive canoes. And he needed preparation, because he nearly died on that trip. But this is the fellow who rode eighteen hours on horseback across the Dakota Badlands without water because the spring from which they’d planned to get water had dried up.
I love another story about a hunting trip during which Roosevelt and his guide repeatedly got their wagon stuck in mud as they tried to travel into the mountains.
The second plunge of the horses brought them up to their bellies in the morass, where they stuck. It was freezing cold, with the bitter wind blowing, and the bog holes were skimmed with ice; so that we passed a thoroughly wretched two hours while freeing the horses and unloading the wagon... My companion preserving an absolutely unruffled temper throughout... whistling the “Arkansas Traveller.” At one period, when we were up to our waists in the icy mud, it began to sleet and hail, and I muttered that I would “rather it didn’t storm”; whereat he stopped whistling for a moment to make the laconic rejoinder, “We’re not having our rathers this trip.”2
A whole lot of that gets you ready for just about anything.
Maybe this helps you reinterpret the story of your own life. Maybe all those former hardships were developing resilience in you!
*Marriage and parenting do this too, famously so, but it takes place over years not weeks, and less publicly, so the exposure isn’t as immediate. But you are revealed for who you are nevertheless. How you respond to these challenges is one of your most important tests.
Walter Hooper, “Preface,” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1970; repr., Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2014), xiv.
Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and the Wilderness Hunter (1885; repr., New York: The Modern Library, 1996), 436–37.
Excerpted from Resilient by John Eldredge, copyright John Eldredge.
I would love it said of me as of C. S. Lewis above that I, “am the most thoroughly converted man you ever met.” Oh, to be like Jesus . . . to be like Paul in his conversion! To give this earthly life to Christ and to pursue holiness and serve Him is all that I want others to see of my life! I pray that you would see the challenges of this life as a preparation and a transforming of your heart and mind to be like Jesus. Love God. Love others!
Pastor Dale
