I was talking with a Christian brother some time ago about surrender and how God had responded to my persistent and consistent daily surrender to Him in my life. As I described what God was doing in me as I submitted to Him - often many times in a day - my Christian brother began to question me very skeptically, even denying that what I was saying was real. What I was sharing was nothing like his experience as a believer and he wasn't about to admit that his experience was in some way flawed or inferior to mine. Even though, by his own admission, his life was filled with doubt and moral compromise, frustration and confusion spiritually, he rebelled against the idea that his walk with God - so different from my own - was out-of-joint in any way. I was not trying to condemn or diminish my brother's walk with God by describing my walk with my Maker, but this was the view my brother in Christ adopted.
He tried a number of avenues of questioning to expose the falsity of my experience of God, to show that my experience of God was essentially just like his own, but the more I shared what God was doing and how, the more it was apparent our experiences of God were not only widely different but that mine were also genuine and real. Despite the glaring disparity, my brother in Christ refused to acknowledge that maybe the way he'd been trying to live with God was not actually the way prescribed to him in Scripture.
At the root of the difference in our spiritual experience was the matter of submitting to God. My Christian brother felt he'd submitted to God but had had no response from Him at all. I began to probe a bit into what he thought God would do in response to his act of submission, but my Christian brother's back was up and he cut off any further discussion along this line. Even though he could see his experience of God was not universal, his long experience of what he thought was the normal Christian life cemented him into a reflexive staunch resistance against the new (but actually ancient) information and ideas coming from me. The long familiarity of his spiritual experience had cursed him with a hardness toward truths that would lead him to a deeper, richer walk with his heavenly Father. He could not bring himself to think that the decades he'd spent in a floundering, frustrating experience of God was not the experience of God that he could have had.
I wasn't able to tell this brother in Christ of the way to a more joyful, more transformative, experience of God. He preferred what he knew and the comfort of its familiarity. I've thought of his response often since it occurred and realized that it is actually pretty common. C.S. Lewis wrote of children in an alley, playing in the mud, who are offered a day at the beach by a man passing by. The children have only ever known the mud of the alley, so they can't conceive of what it is they are being offered. The familiar darkness and mud surround them and rather than risk the unknown, they choose to remain in the dim dirtiness of the alley. Christians make this same choice, too, holding onto a stumbling, frustrating, laborious Christian life rather than the "day at the beach" God offers to them. They've lived this kind of tepid, faltering Christian experience too long and are too settled in it to give it up easily. They're invested in their "mud pies," in making the best of the dark and dirt of the alley, and will not readily abandon it – especially for the unknown.
I can understand this thinking. I, too, was an occupant of the alley, making religious “mud pies” right along with all my fellow believers, convinced there was nothing else to the Christian life except endless, faltering struggle against sin and finally heaven one day. I heard from time to time, however, of an experience of God that I did not understand and that no one around me seemed to enjoy. A guest revival speaker would preach to us of the crucified life, of life through death, of joy in fellowship with God, of a communion with God that was amazing. But this sort of walk with God seemed to be reserved for the special few, the radical, the called by God. It wasn’t my experience by any stretch of the imagination and didn’t appear to be the experience of any of the believers in my church community, either.
When the voice calling to me from the end of the alley, inviting me to a “day at the beach” with God was gone, the grimy familiar, the mucky but known, flooded in about me, quickly numbing me against the unsettling call to something more than I knew as a believer. A small, wondering part of me, though, always continued to look to the alley’s exit, imagining what could be out beyond the boundaries of my experience of God.
Thank God He’s always taking the initiative with us. The day eventually came when the “alley” and “mud pies” lost their interest for me entirely – my dissatisfaction helped along, I believe, by my heavenly Father. I prayed, declaring my resolve to walk away from God forever if He didn’t reveal Himself to me and move me into something real, something “abundant,” with Himself.
I thought God would respond by giving me a spiritual epiphany, a warm, fuzzy, moment of wonder with Him that would change me profoundly and permanently. But this didn’t happen. At all. Instead, God “took me to the woodshed” and for the next two years I endured an inner turmoil and blackness that had me, at times, desperately contemplating suicide. On the far side of this horrible time, though, I found myself free of the “alley” and seeing a whole new spiritual vista into which to walk with God. From that time until now, God has opened up more and more a kind of spiritual living that had always been available to me but that I had been made blind to by the spiritual darkness of the “alley” and the distractions of religious “mud pies.”
Sadly, when I speak of this fuller experience of God, of real, daily fellowship with Him, to other believers, there is a distinct resistance to it from them, a strong reluctance to turn away from the familiarity of the drab and dirty alley to the sunlight and surf of a “day at the beach” with God, to the abundant life of joy and rest he offers to us all in Christ. I’ve written in other posts to this subforum on the general character of this life, so I won’t do so again here. I’m just remarking, really, on how powerfully the familiar can act upon us, sometimes to our great detriment, keeping us from wonderful communion with God.
Coming to this point in my comments, I realize it might be worthwhile to clarify that by communion with God, fellowship with Him, I mean what Scripture means:
- Conviction of sin. (John 16:8)
- Illumination of God’s truth. (John 14:26; 1 Corinthians 2:10-13)
- Strengthening in times of temptation and trial. (Ephesians 3:16; Romans 8:13; Philippians 2:13)
- Comfort in moments of pain. (Acts 9:31; 2 Corinthians 1:3-4; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17)
- Discipline in seasons of waywardness. (Hebrews 12:5-11)
- Transformation of my mind and heart. (Philippians 2:13; Galatians 5:22-23; Ephesians 5:9)
The fellowship with Himself that God offers to us through Christ, in the Person of the Holy Spirit who lives within us (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; Romans 8:9-14), is one of progressive, subtle, often unnoticed transformation of our being, just like a branch slowly growing out from a tree trunk (John 15:4-5); of peace (Matthew 11:28-30), rest (Hebrews 4:9-11), stability and calm (2 Samuel 22:47; Psalms 18:2; Isaiah 30:15) of holiness, joy, and delight in His truth. I do NOT mean the frenzied, hysterical and highly sensual “manifestations” of God that have gripped a growing portion of the Church. Rather, I speak of the life of faith (2 Corinthians 5:7), the life of death to Self (Matthew 16:24-25; Romans 6) that brings one to full, rich life in Christ, the life of the Spirit that is placid, and deep, and fulfilling in a way the “sound and fury” of a sensual, fleshly “experience” of God can never be. This is a life of genuine heart-change, worked by God Himself, not mere emotional enthusiasm, requiring constant winding-up in wild sessions of “worship”; this is the abundant life to which God calls all of His children – a life so many believers spurn in favor of the lesser but comfortably familiar and common counterfeit of the abundant life.
Are you wanting a "day at the beach" with God? Will you venture from the imprisoning alley of the familiar to experience such a "day"? I hope and pray so.
He tried a number of avenues of questioning to expose the falsity of my experience of God, to show that my experience of God was essentially just like his own, but the more I shared what God was doing and how, the more it was apparent our experiences of God were not only widely different but that mine were also genuine and real. Despite the glaring disparity, my brother in Christ refused to acknowledge that maybe the way he'd been trying to live with God was not actually the way prescribed to him in Scripture.
At the root of the difference in our spiritual experience was the matter of submitting to God. My Christian brother felt he'd submitted to God but had had no response from Him at all. I began to probe a bit into what he thought God would do in response to his act of submission, but my Christian brother's back was up and he cut off any further discussion along this line. Even though he could see his experience of God was not universal, his long experience of what he thought was the normal Christian life cemented him into a reflexive staunch resistance against the new (but actually ancient) information and ideas coming from me. The long familiarity of his spiritual experience had cursed him with a hardness toward truths that would lead him to a deeper, richer walk with his heavenly Father. He could not bring himself to think that the decades he'd spent in a floundering, frustrating experience of God was not the experience of God that he could have had.
I wasn't able to tell this brother in Christ of the way to a more joyful, more transformative, experience of God. He preferred what he knew and the comfort of its familiarity. I've thought of his response often since it occurred and realized that it is actually pretty common. C.S. Lewis wrote of children in an alley, playing in the mud, who are offered a day at the beach by a man passing by. The children have only ever known the mud of the alley, so they can't conceive of what it is they are being offered. The familiar darkness and mud surround them and rather than risk the unknown, they choose to remain in the dim dirtiness of the alley. Christians make this same choice, too, holding onto a stumbling, frustrating, laborious Christian life rather than the "day at the beach" God offers to them. They've lived this kind of tepid, faltering Christian experience too long and are too settled in it to give it up easily. They're invested in their "mud pies," in making the best of the dark and dirt of the alley, and will not readily abandon it – especially for the unknown.
I can understand this thinking. I, too, was an occupant of the alley, making religious “mud pies” right along with all my fellow believers, convinced there was nothing else to the Christian life except endless, faltering struggle against sin and finally heaven one day. I heard from time to time, however, of an experience of God that I did not understand and that no one around me seemed to enjoy. A guest revival speaker would preach to us of the crucified life, of life through death, of joy in fellowship with God, of a communion with God that was amazing. But this sort of walk with God seemed to be reserved for the special few, the radical, the called by God. It wasn’t my experience by any stretch of the imagination and didn’t appear to be the experience of any of the believers in my church community, either.
When the voice calling to me from the end of the alley, inviting me to a “day at the beach” with God was gone, the grimy familiar, the mucky but known, flooded in about me, quickly numbing me against the unsettling call to something more than I knew as a believer. A small, wondering part of me, though, always continued to look to the alley’s exit, imagining what could be out beyond the boundaries of my experience of God.
Thank God He’s always taking the initiative with us. The day eventually came when the “alley” and “mud pies” lost their interest for me entirely – my dissatisfaction helped along, I believe, by my heavenly Father. I prayed, declaring my resolve to walk away from God forever if He didn’t reveal Himself to me and move me into something real, something “abundant,” with Himself.
I thought God would respond by giving me a spiritual epiphany, a warm, fuzzy, moment of wonder with Him that would change me profoundly and permanently. But this didn’t happen. At all. Instead, God “took me to the woodshed” and for the next two years I endured an inner turmoil and blackness that had me, at times, desperately contemplating suicide. On the far side of this horrible time, though, I found myself free of the “alley” and seeing a whole new spiritual vista into which to walk with God. From that time until now, God has opened up more and more a kind of spiritual living that had always been available to me but that I had been made blind to by the spiritual darkness of the “alley” and the distractions of religious “mud pies.”
Sadly, when I speak of this fuller experience of God, of real, daily fellowship with Him, to other believers, there is a distinct resistance to it from them, a strong reluctance to turn away from the familiarity of the drab and dirty alley to the sunlight and surf of a “day at the beach” with God, to the abundant life of joy and rest he offers to us all in Christ. I’ve written in other posts to this subforum on the general character of this life, so I won’t do so again here. I’m just remarking, really, on how powerfully the familiar can act upon us, sometimes to our great detriment, keeping us from wonderful communion with God.
Coming to this point in my comments, I realize it might be worthwhile to clarify that by communion with God, fellowship with Him, I mean what Scripture means:
- Conviction of sin. (John 16:8)
- Illumination of God’s truth. (John 14:26; 1 Corinthians 2:10-13)
- Strengthening in times of temptation and trial. (Ephesians 3:16; Romans 8:13; Philippians 2:13)
- Comfort in moments of pain. (Acts 9:31; 2 Corinthians 1:3-4; 2 Thessalonians 2:16-17)
- Discipline in seasons of waywardness. (Hebrews 12:5-11)
- Transformation of my mind and heart. (Philippians 2:13; Galatians 5:22-23; Ephesians 5:9)
The fellowship with Himself that God offers to us through Christ, in the Person of the Holy Spirit who lives within us (1 Corinthians 6:19-20; Romans 8:9-14), is one of progressive, subtle, often unnoticed transformation of our being, just like a branch slowly growing out from a tree trunk (John 15:4-5); of peace (Matthew 11:28-30), rest (Hebrews 4:9-11), stability and calm (2 Samuel 22:47; Psalms 18:2; Isaiah 30:15) of holiness, joy, and delight in His truth. I do NOT mean the frenzied, hysterical and highly sensual “manifestations” of God that have gripped a growing portion of the Church. Rather, I speak of the life of faith (2 Corinthians 5:7), the life of death to Self (Matthew 16:24-25; Romans 6) that brings one to full, rich life in Christ, the life of the Spirit that is placid, and deep, and fulfilling in a way the “sound and fury” of a sensual, fleshly “experience” of God can never be. This is a life of genuine heart-change, worked by God Himself, not mere emotional enthusiasm, requiring constant winding-up in wild sessions of “worship”; this is the abundant life to which God calls all of His children – a life so many believers spurn in favor of the lesser but comfortably familiar and common counterfeit of the abundant life.
Are you wanting a "day at the beach" with God? Will you venture from the imprisoning alley of the familiar to experience such a "day"? I hope and pray so.
