Coming or Going?

The royal official said to Him, "Sir, come down before my child dies." Jesus said to him, "Go; your son lives." The man believed the word.... (John 4:49-50)

I am perceiving what I believe to be a key point in this story. Repeatedly this man urged Jesus to come to his place to resolve the problem he had and heal his son, but Jesus never did it that way for him. Instead of complying with this man's own plans and ideas of how it should happen Jesus gave him instructions for what to do if he wanted to act in real faith.

How many times do I believe that I know what my problems are and what is needed to fix them. I look at my immediate circumstances that may be causing me so much discomfort or grief and am sure that I know just what God needs to do to make me happy, to resolve my pain or fear, to remedy my situation so that I can then have more faith in Him. That reminds me of what I just read in My Utmost devotional today.

The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters. It is astounding how ignorant we are about ourselves!...

We have to get rid of the idea that we understand ourselves, it is the last conceit to go. The only One Who understands us is God. The greatest curse in spiritual life is conceit. If we have ever had a glimpse of what we are like in the sight of God, we shall never say —‘Oh I am so unworthy,’ because we shall know we are, beyond the possibility of stating it. As long as we are not quite sure that we are unworthy, God will keep narrowing us in until He gets us alone.

Chambers, Oswald: My Utmost for His Highest : Selections for the Year. Grand Rapids, MI : Discovery House Publishers, 1993, c1935, S. January 12

Yet I find that God often doesn't seem to be paying attention to my demands. Instead of responding quickly to my ideas of what needs to happen, what power He should exercise on my behalf, I sometimes hear rebukes and warnings and confusing messages about what is going on in my own heart. Instead of feeling comforted or listened to I feel even more stressed. “Why doesn't God just show up and take care of my problems the way I ask Him to? Why doesn't He care enough about me to see that I am hurting, I am stuck, I am helpless and come to take care of my needs, reveal His will to me explicitly, make the things that are hurting me stop?”

And yet the words keep resonating uncomfortably in my ears. “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” I squirm because deep inside I have to admit that His words ring true. Yes I do crave to see more miracles happen in my life to induce faith in my heart. Yet that often doesn't seem to be God's plan for me. He keeps insisting that something is awry here, that I need to have faith in His goodness and care for me ahead of the miracles instead of insisting on waiting until after them. There must be a critically important reason for this but it is so hard to agree with Him. I always tend to want to see the good things first and then base my trust in Him on the external evidences of His care instead of trusting His heart first and giving Him unlimited permission to do whatever He sees best whether it fixes my problems or not.

I find myself just like this man in the story begging and pleading with God to come to me, to resolve my problems and to do it now before it is too late. But like him, I tend to want God to do it my way, to already have worked out in my own mind what needs to happen and then solicit His power to make those plans take place. But what are the subtle implications behind those statements of how my heart feels toward Jesus? What are the hidden feelings hiding behind those words that reveal my gut-level beliefs about how God views me and cares for me?

I see implied in these thoughts that I doubt to some extent that Jesus really cares enough to want to do something about 'healing my son', at least as much as I want him to be healed. It exposes a secret belief that maybe I care about my children, my family, my friends, my needs, my prayer requests more than God cares about them. Now when that dirty little belief gets flushed out into the open how does that make me look? Embarrassed, ashamed, fearful that God might get upset with me for even thinking such audacious things about myself in comparison with Him. That in turn begins to drag out a whole string of further assumptions and beliefs about God that have tenaciously tried to stay out of sight as much as possible for most of my life; things like, God doesn't really love me as much as He says He does, that I have to take things into my own hands when God doesn't respond quickly enough, that God has a dark, hurtful side that might at any time lash out and punish me and consequently I cannot let my heart really trust Him fully.

The list could go on and on – and maybe it is important that it should. For it is not until Jesus exposes what is really lurking in the dark corners of my heart, the beliefs that necessarily must be exposed for the real lies that they are, that the light of the actual truth about Him can begin to replace those ugly lies inside about how He feels about me. And if He has to employ my own desperation in a time of crisis as the means of exposing those secret thoughts about Him He is willing to do so for my ultimate healing. For my beliefs about God are actually the most important thing that He wants to heal, even more important than the physical or emotional healing of my family or loved ones as strange as that may sound.

Just like what this man had to finally face in his own heart, I have to see that my distorted ideas and feelings about God that are hidden even from my own view are the very obstacles that are preventing me from having the kind of trusting faith in the heart of Jesus that can give Him permission to do all of the other things that He already is intensely eager to do for me anyway. But it is my own unbelief, my mixed emotions and beliefs about how God feels about me, my own double-mindedness that blocks the unleashing of the outpouring of heaven's blessings into my life and the lives of those around me.

But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. (James 1:6-8)

My reactions even to this last text will reveal much about my beliefs of how God views me. If I feel resentment when I read this, that God is refusing to give me what I need because I don't have enough faith worked up yet and still cannot expel that last little bit of doubt, then the whole system of beliefs and assumptions that supports that logic reveals lies that permeate my heart picture of God. This is how I viewed these verses for much of my life until it was shown to me what this text was really saying and what the true meaning of many of these words are that had never made much sense to me before.

Faith is very different than the elimination of all doubt, as I grew up supposing. And doubt is not just the existence of a passing thought that maybe God won't do this for me, as I often supposed it was. And most importantly, double-mindedness is not a description of the presence of both faith and doubt in the sense of those early definitions but is actually a condition of having two opposite opinions about how God feels about me at the same time. It produces a similar effect like applying both the brakes and the accelerator full force at the same time and then wondering why I am having so much problem driving.

My mind has been carefully educated in the schools of religion and by the church all of my life to believe all sorts of “truths” about God and about life and reality. My mind has learned theses lessons well and has filed them all away just as I was taught to do. These beliefs may not have all been completely accurate as I have discovered since, but they were still learned and generally embraced nonetheless. I have been highly equipped with abundant religious information, facts, logic, assertions, arguments and many of the trappings of a good religious training.

But parallel to that and much more subtly deep in my heart, I was accumulating a thorough education in its own internal views of God. But this other system of theology was so different than the outwardly acceptable system of religion that it had to stay pretty much out of sight to keep out of trouble. Those in my life who through default were God's representatives to my heart often portrayed in their actions and treatment of me a dark picture of God. This mentoring process instilled in my heart a great deal of fears, suspicions, questions and doubt about the rumors of God's love for me. Because of suffering abuses from those in authority and misrepresentations of God's love by those claiming to love me in His name, my heart amassed many lies about God that to this day still feel very true inside even though my head has been learning many wonderful things to the contrary.

This discontinuity between what my head believes about God and His attitudes towards me, and what my heart believes about how God feels about me creates a condition that James labels as double-mindedness. It is simply that my head and my heart are believing incongruent, incompatible things at the same time. The clear and unavoidable result of this condition is emotional instability. I believe that this was exactly the condition that this man found himself in when Jesus exposed his condition with His words about signs and wonders. This man's head thought he was believing but deep inside his heart simply could not believe because of all the false beliefs about how God felt about Him.

When Jesus speaks these words about our resistance to believing in Him, He is not trying to shame us into having more faith. Shame does nothing to inspire more belief but only affirms our false beliefs about God even further. Jesus is seeking to open our own minds and hearts to see the incongruity that is blocking Him from doing what He wants to do for us. He wants us to know that He desires our good even more than we want Him to bless us. He is seeking to expose the myriads of false assumptions that prevent us from trusting His heart so that He can have permission to bless us beyond our wildest expectations. It is not His heart that is holding back but is our conflicting internal beliefs about His heart that block Him from being able to bring into our lives the healing and blessings that we so desire to experience.

When this true condition of our internal situation finally becomes obvious to us, we are then challenged by Jesus to do something very different than what we have been insisting should happen. Why is this? Why is it wrong for me to insist that Jesus come to me to fix my problems? Why, when I say come He instead says that I should go? I say come – He says go. Who is right here? Why won't He do it my way?

I don't have all the answers for this, but one thing is becoming clear to me as I listen to His Spirit all through this. If Jesus were to accommodate my demands to work miracles for me the way I think they should happen, then He would be reinforcing the very system of confused beliefs about Him that exists presently in my mind and heart. And that is certainly the last thing that He wants to perpetuate.

According to James, the presence of believing opposing ideas about God and how He feels about me creates a condition inside of me that incapacitates me from being able to receive anything from God. This was a startling revelation to me the first time I saw it. But far from God arbitrarily withholding things from me that I ask for as His punishment on me for not having enough faith, as my heart has too often supposed, I now see that James is simply here describing a reality of the broken condition of my soul that is incapable of receiving what God is eagerly desirous of giving to me. That man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord. He can't receive because inwardly he is like a broken cistern that cannot retain water. The problem is on the receiving end, not on the giving end. He will not receive simply because he cannot receive.

Father, please repair my broken cistern. Expose and expel all of the lies about You that have blocked Your desires for me for so long. Heal my heart from these damned lies, because that is exactly what they are doing to me. Shine the light of truth deep into my soul and transform me into a harmonious reflection of the truth about how You really feel about me. Open my eyes, my heart, my mind to embrace what You are really trying to do in me when it seems that You are holding back the things I am begging You to do for me. Thank-you for not settling for a half-done, immature, confused relationship with You but are wanting to grow me up into the full image of Jesus Himself.