The poet Robert Browning, famously wrote, “God’s in his heaven/all’s right with the world.”
With apologies to the poet, that’s not altogether true.
God has come down from heaven precisely because all’s not right with the world. And our joining Him in his enterprise of bearing a truthful witness to the people of this Earth is bound to stir the ire of many. No one experienced it more brutally than He did.
So why deliberately enter into a lifelong conflict between truth and falsehood? Why make trouble for yourself?
Christian writing, teaching, preaching, witnessing, and prayer seem to constantly have a component of struggle to it. Even after the rapture (or the completion of multiple ones), and the glorification of the saints, the fighting has not yet ended. Revelation 19 shows us the coming of Christ with his saints to join the battle at Armageddon. Until that time, a fight of some sort will always be going on. If you’re a faithful Christian, you’ll feel it.
Standing firm on this Earth is not simply my being true to what I believe, although that is a great part of it. It also has a lot to do with an exercise of seeing myself as responsible for the house of God–my brethren in the faith. This is not some delusional assessment, a self-promotion that makes me a hero in my own eyes. It is rather an acceptance of the responsibility that every child of God eventually has for their brothers and sisters.
My parents expected me to “take up” for my siblings. Even if they hadn’t stressed it, I felt the need to do it. It was an odd sort of contradiction that, though I was often annoyed at my brother, and picked on him for fun, I wanted to beat up anyone else who gave him trouble. Such impulses weren’t coming from a place of affection, just duty.
That landed me in trouble from time to time. Like when I got mouthy with a kid who was a karate black belt, who I thought was being a poor influence on my brother. We got close to a fistfight that would not have gone well for me. Thankfully, the whole thing stopped before I ended up in the hospital. Still not being satisfied with the outcome, though, I made some moves later to take the encounter to another level, where I would have ended up in prison rather than the hospital.
Thankfully, the whole ordeal blew over.
Our core impulse to stand for the family of the faith is right. Yes, at times, we start ill-advised fights and make matters worse by forgetting to handle things out of the resources God has given us. Paul wrote, “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7).
The greater part of difficulty lies in learning and applying those three qualities of power, love, and self-control. They’re so easy to say, and so hard to effectively have.
Purchase John’s new book here!
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Tyrus from Pixabay
Comments are closed.