God clearly promises blessings in Scripture, even material ones, but if these are our focus we’ve narrowed in on the smallest part of his love and grace to us. It also says something about our shallow understanding of suffering and its place in our spirituality.

Nobody likes suffering, but if Christ himself learned obedience through the things he suffered (Heb 5.8), how much more do we stand to learn? Christ only comes with a cross. His crown only comes with thorns. Accessing his life only comes with dying — dying to sin, dying to self, dying to delusion, dying to vain ambitions, dying to anything that distracts from a life of witness to Christ.

Suffering is not alien to the Christian experience. It is a key component of the Christian experience. To say otherwise is to ignore endless passages of Scripture (e.g., two thirds of the psalter) and deny the testimonies of our brothers and sisters throughout the entire history of the church, and even those living today outside the so-called developed world.

Visit rural Uganda and tell me with straight face that God wants us to experience a life of ease and wealth, that he’s concerned about what kind of car we drive. It’s offensive to contemplate. More offensive to contemplate: say it in the face of the martyrs’ families in Nigeria who don’t even pray that their persecutors would stop, only that they would be able stand when their time comes. We’re not even worthy to suffer for Christ like that.

Our life in Christ is not about ease. It’s not about comfort or security or the trappings of wealth. God may bless some with those things. Praise him for it. But God is far more concerned about whether we love him and our neighbor in whatever station we may be. He’s concerned about a life lived in witness to his love.

Any theology that leaves little room for suffering is a suspect theology. If Jesus himself experienced pain, loneliness, frustration, etc., then we should be ready for the same. If the apostles and the early Christians were willing to lay down their lives, certainly we should not expect uninterrupted peace and tranquility.

The disruption may in fact be central to our sanctification. What if, for instance, you struggle with a sin over which you can’t seem to get victory: greed, lust, anxiety, anger, doubt? That’s your cross to bear. And a good theology will illumine the struggle; it will sanctify the suffering so that we can see it as God’s tool to shape us into the image of his Son. Rather than fleeing suffering, (preaching to myself here) we should welcome the chance to grow because that’s why God permits and even sends it. Our best life includes our current struggles and setbacks, and God wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s pathology afoot in any other view. A theology with no room for suffering forces us to hide our failures and our faults, even from ourselves, maybe even from God. Of course such a maneuver is bound to fail as well, and then we stand alone with our sin, condemned by our very existence.

Instead we should remember that God uses our sufferings to sanctify and save. We stand in the arms of a loving, forgiving savior who helps us bear the weight and keep going.

One drop at a time (photo by onestickyrice, Flickr).

But the devil has little power that we do not cede to him. As Serenus says, the devil can only encourage us to do evil, not force us. “[N]o one can be deceived by the devil but one who has chosen to yield to him the consent of his own will.” Unfortunately, and all too often, we give the tempter all the consent he requires.

When temptations and evil thoughts arise, we do not “immediately meet them with refusal and contradiction,” as Serenus says; we sometimes hold onto them, turn them over in our minds, and nurture them in our hearts.

Usually no immediate harm comes, not at least that we can tell. It’s not like handling a hot coal or clutching a burning ember. Whether the thought is prideful, lustful, vengeful, slothful, or something else altogether, because there is no flash of pain, no jolting reflex of damaged nerves, we imagine that we escape the negative effects. We think that we can gratify ourselves with sins and not be harmed.

Another of the desert fathers, Abbot Theodore, talks about the slow erosion of little sins, the passions we indulge rather than oppose. He asks us to imagine a roof with tiles that have been neglected,

through which in the first instance only very slight drippings (so to speak) of the passions make their way to the soul: but if these are not heeded, as being but small and trifling, then the beams of virtues will decay and be carried away by a great tempest of sins, through which … in the time of temptation, the devil’s attack will assail us, and the soul will be driven forth from the abode of virtue….

Think of the people you know who have irreversibly damaged friendships, careers, marriages. That “sudden tempest” that brought the roof down on their heads was not the result of the devil forcing evil upon them so much as it was the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of little agreements made with the devil already.

Sin is not always, maybe not even usually, a burning, hot coal. It’s usually just a drip of water. And it can erode and then wash away everything we value in life.

To ponder: What are your leaky roof tiles?

Coming up short (Flickr, wilhei55).

The majority of complaints about supposed hypocrisy are really complaints about moral weakness and failure, something that plagues everyone. Can it be any other way? Jesus tells us in Matthew 5 to be perfect. Ever succeed at that? Me neither.

One response to this is to define morality down, to lower the bar. If losing your temper, or taking God’s name in vain, or having lustful thoughts, or gossiping, or gorging yourself at the dinner table are suddenly acceptable behaviors, then one need not let them bedevil the conscience.

Our therapeutic, narcissistic, self-actualized culture has become quite adept at loosening the tolerances on our moral filters so that just about anything can get by. As the church lamentably drifts with the culture, the more significant concern is not a church full of strident but hypocritical moralists; it’s a church full of supposed Christians who don’t care that much about biblical morality.

Instead of defining morality down, we should try living up to the impossible standard. After all, “if a thing is worth doing,” as G.K. Chesterton said, “it is worth doing badly.” That includes living the Christian life. Nobody does it perfectly, and coming up short shouldn’t stop us from giving it our all—despite opening us up to charges of hypocrisy. Like St. Paul we press toward the mark even though we stumble. That’s what repentance is all about.

The point of the Christian life is to progress into greater union with God, to become more like Christ and enjoy ever more communion with the Father. It’s a transformation that comes in degrees—and since God is infinite, growing into his image is a job and a joy that never ends.

We don’t settle for badly, but we have to start someplace. Look back on the last ten years of your life. Has your walk deepened, your faith grown, your understanding increased? Take heart and keep pressing toward the mark. None of us are done yet, none has arrived, and none of that matters. We keep going anyway.

Living the Christian faith badly is the only way to do it. And it’s the only thing worth doing.

We were going to Sunday meeting, Kate decided. It would be good for us.
‘Oh God,’ I protested, ‘I don’t have to contemplate my sin, do I, Kate?’
‘You do,’ she replied in a very practical tone.

Philip Davison
A Burnable Town (Jonathan Cape, 2006), 121.

Detail from Praying Old Man by Julian Falat (National Museum, Warsaw; Wikimedia Commons)

The statement of the monk (who, by the way, was St. Silouan the Athonite—it’s a true story) provides a helpful guide for quickly judging our actions. Making the sign of the cross is a physical way to express thanks to God for something, to bless something, to offer it to God. It’s a prayer, as I’ve discussed before, and St. Silouan’s point should be read to include verbal prayers as well. Put it on a 3×5 card and keep it in your wallet:

If you can’t say grace over it, then you shouldn’t do it.

This is one of the things that underlies St. Paul’s discussion about the scruples and liberties of weaker and stronger believers. “If I partake with thankfulness,” he says, “why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks?” The main takeaway from these passages in Romans and 1 Corinthians is that a believer with greater freedom should abstain in love if exercising his freedom causes another brother to fall. (Side note: I think it is an odd occurrence of our time that we appeal to these passages to support our freedoms—“all things are lawful”—but not our commensurate responsibility to love our neighbor, but that’s another blog post). The thing to note is that for Paul the act of thanking God is central either way. This is particularly obvious in the Romans passage. Whether we’re the weaker or stronger brother, we should only do that for which we can offer thanks.

If you feel like you cannot thank God for an activity you’re about to undertake, if you feel like you cannot ask God to bless a particular task, then you probably shouldn’t do it at all.

Here’s a challenge: Any time you consciously do something today, try to thank God for it or ask him to bless it. If you are about to do something you know is wrong or doubt is right, does this change anything for you?

Wikimedia Commons

While I get the sentiment, I reject the thought. Admitting sin and identifying with it are two very different things. The first is something we all must do. If there is one scripture I recall my dad reciting in his prayers over and again it was the line from Romans 3: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” It’s an ontological fact, courtesy of that disaster in the Garden and our own propensity for perpetuating the mess. But it’s also conditional, relative to Christ’s saving work in our lives.

Because of that work, says Paul in Romans 7, “it is no longer I who [sin], but sin that dwells within me.” He makes a clean break between his identity and his actions. As the rest of the chapter shows, Paul is quick to confess his faults—he wrestles and grapples and admits his frustrations with them—but he refuses to identify with them. Sin lives within Paul, but Paul is not his sin. In making his admissions, he is not “finally being true to himself.” He is explaining what he calls the strength of his “old nature.”

That is because Paul and all of us, including the person who started this reflection, is a new creation. Our ontology has been overhauled, changed, re-created, reborn. We have a new nature. Because of our participation in Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, we are now in him. Constituted in the church, believers are the body of Christ. We are to mature into Christ. We are to grow in the image of Christ. Our identity is in Christ.

People once had a better understanding of this connection between faith and identity. Traditionally, Christians followed the Jewish practice and named their children at their initiation into the covenant—Jews at circumcision, Christians at baptism. This usually happened when the child was only a few days old. Christians “christened” their children, giving them their “Christian name,” every participant from the parents to the pastor to the people in the pews all confessing that these children are now part of Christ’s body and find their identity in him.

This vision of life swerves dramatically from any pronouncement that links sin and self-recognition and self-acceptance. The moment we sin and say, “That’s just who I am,” we have said a horrible lie about ourselves and Christ. When we see sin in our lives, we do not recognize ourselves; we see our enemy. When we find sin in ourselves, we do not reconcile with it; we reject it. Our sin is not something with which to get comfortable. Our sin is the measure to which we must still grow and mature into the image and likeness of Jesus, which is our primary occupation in this life.

That growth and maturation happens through many different means and down several different paths, not least our trials, temptations, and struggles. The battles with our old nature are what bring perfection to our new nature. So whatever else it might be, giving into sin is forfeiting an opportunity for holiness.

Every sin we face is a chance for us to grow in grace. This is why James tells us to “Count it all joy . . . when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete. . . .” Don’t waste your sins by giving into them.

Perhaps we face a very powerful sin, over which we struggle to gain the least bit of victory. Rather than capitulate, we should consider that sin—whatever it might be—as a defining battle of our sanctification, our cross to bear, one that may mark our lives until the grave but a fight that we must engage nevertheless. It may not seem like it in the moment, but the victory is ours in Christ because our identity is the same place.

'Saint James the Less' by James Joseph Jacques Tissot (Brooklyn Museum, Wikimedia Commons).

Given his intense practice, it comes as no surprise that James discusses prayer in the letter that bears his name. These verses in the fourth chapter hit me this morning: “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”

I’ve heard people quote that first sentence a million times to say that all you have to do is ask, and if you ask in faith then God will answer. (I notice that people usually quote it from the King James: “ye have not because ye ask not.”) The idea seems to be that God is just waiting around to bless us if we’ll only make a peep.

But what about the second sentence? “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Passions basically equates to sinful desires. So to that point, what if we live our lives out of sync with our prayers? What if we pray for things to gratify or satisfy our lusts or our anger or our fears or (insert your particular issue)? James seems to say that God won’t give us what we ask.

Other writers have followed James’ train of thought, and I find their observations as helpful as they are convicting.

“Our life should correspond to our progress in the faith, and we ought to offer our prayers to God in accordance with the way we live our life,” writes Mark the Monk, a fifth century ascetic who lived in Egypt. Mark’s comments are particularly interesting because he was a perceptive observer of the human heart. He saw through the subtleties of the passions and how we can be double-minded and undone by things of which we’re barely conscious.

Says Mark, “A passion that someone willingly allows to dominate his activity will later violently stir up the person who is under its influence, even against his will.” The comment reminds me of Paul’s statement of personal frustration with sin in Romans.

“The person who hates the passions removes their causes,” says Mark, “while the person who is addicted to those things which cause the passions is attacked by the passions, even though he may not wish it.” But the trouble he says is that secretly “We love the causes of involuntary thoughts, and that is why they come.”

How many secret thoughts and subtle passions are hindering our prayers? In his essay on prayer, Montaigne says that when we pray while harboring sinful thoughts, “we ourselves present to [God] the rods with which to chastise us.” He paints a worrisome picture of people whose conduct is so double-minded that their prayers are really “only an act.” Taken to that extreme, prayers like this are more superstition than true petition. And sin is what takes it to that extreme.

Reading these passages I am increasingly mindful about seeking anything of God before seeking repentance. I am also gratefully reminded that there are people like James constantly praying for my repentance and forgiveness. I can use all the help available.