Genuine Church Community vs. Atomization and Individualism in American Culture

Image: www.goodreads.com

One of the most important priorities for the church right now is recovering genuine community. The health and effectiveness of church community for doing what the church is supposed to do has been severely weakened. Here are some examples and perspectives on this I have shared in the past from Rod Dreher and Carl Trueman and from Chris Martin (discussing Pew Research results on what Christians think is essential to spiritual life). It's why Mark Dever recently wrote a book devoted to community. Two major obstacles to forming Christian community are the trends of atomization and individualism. Here's an explanation of both:

Atomization refers to the trend of people disconnecting and living apart from one another and apart from the social and community groups they once regularly attended. It is a breakdown of connections and relationships on a community level, and some have noted it is particularly strong in America. Sociologist Robert Putnam drew attention to this phenomenon in 1995 in his essay "Bowling Alone" and captured the basic image: where people once used to seek regular community and do things together in groups, many people prefer now to do everything on their own terms. Putnam also identified some of the reasons this is harming America's social fabric, weakening both the productivity of the community and the ability of people to form relationships. He concluded it resulted in less civic engagement, and also in less trust between average people. Here's a longer explanation from a recent perspective.

Individualism describes the obsession of people in our day with living out their own unique, personal journey of self-discovery. It is characterized by an idea that the self-fulfillment and development of a person's individual identity is the supreme value. As a consequence, many people resist being influenced by groups and institutions that try to form common ideas in a community because they do not want to be shaped by something outside of themselves. If they join, they do so while standing apart and avoiding any adoption of group ideals unless it aligns with their personal identity. For instance, instead of letting church shape your thinking on God, you come to church convinced of your own personal take on spirituality and you only stay if the church seems to fit with that. Where American society used to be composed of many institutions of people coming together for common goals or values, which would form a united mindset and set of ideas among those people, today people often insist on figuring out who they are by looking within and by their own experiences rather than being taught or shaped by a community. Here is a useful discussion by Tim Keller and Russell Moore for more context.

Contrast this with the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer described the essential Christian community in his important work Life Together:

Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity. (Life Together, p. 26).

Taking Bonhoeffer's observations, Christian community is not about what kind of spirituality or identity you or I bring to the mix. It is about what Christ has done for us, and what we are because of Christ. Identity is not something personally determined and established by us as individuals; it is something that derives from and depends on the work of Christ. We could say that the more we know Christ, the more He reveals to us our true identity. But Bonhoeffer emphasized that meeting Christ in private and learning to know him by ourselves is only half of the process. He explained that community is not optional for the Christian; it is essential to the way we are formed and the way God feeds us. We need one another to speak the Word of God to each other, to hear each other's confessions and cries for prayer, to minister forgiveness to one another, and to display to each other in the flesh the love that Christ has put into our hearts through His Spirit.

Image: http://livingwatercommunitychurch.org/

Therefore knowing God requires humbling yourself to be shaped and taught by the community. You cannot come to Christian community and participate authentically while still insisting upon maintaining a personal identity not shaped or influenced by the community. One of Bonhoeffer's main points about Christian community is that it must be established by God. We do not have the option of taking or creating community on our own terms. All real Christian community is established by the Holy Spirit, not by our plans and expectations. "Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate." (Id. p. 30)

That is why Bonhoeffer states: "He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial." (Id. p. 27). We cannot make the community to fit our expectations. We must receive it. This necessarily requires humbling ourselves, because we are not in control and we must accept what God creates. I will note that this is not to be confused with simply accepting anything we are given by other men and women, for if they are also engaged in setting up their own idea of community, it may be equally detrimental. But it also means we have no excuse to just stiff-arm what we receive from others in community solely because we don't happen to like it or prefer it.

So how do we tell the difference? One of the reasons Bonhoeffer's book Life Together is so engaging and powerful is that it gives us a detailed breakdown and discussion of the aspects of community that come necessarily from our being united through Christ. These are the things natural to a genuine Christian community, the basic vital signs of the spiritual life. Bonhoeffer shows why these things are necessary to our life in Christ and how they nourish and maintain it. If the dynamics of your Christian community fulfill these purposes and serve to bring people closer to God and closer together in Christ, then they may be just what we need. That does not mean they will always be comfortable. Detecting the difference between the two - community created by God versus community dictated by other people - may take careful discernment. But either way, there is no question that the real community must be received. We cannot set the terms.

Instead, we love people the way the Scriptures teach, and we accept them for Christ's sake, and then we take the community that God develops out of that. Bonhoeffer gives us a peaceful picture of what kind of growth in grace and joy is available to us if we will humble ourselves and just receive what God is giving. Consider how liberating and relieving it is to not be ruled by a pressure to fix and tinker with the community in every place where it isn't developing according to your expectations. Simply receiving is a gracious privilege:

Christian community is like the Christian's sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.

(Life Together, p. 30)

Does "The Inner Ring" Dominate Your Life? - Summarizing C.S. Lewis's Essay on Relationships and Ambition

I shared the link here to Alan Jacobs contrasting and comparing how C.S. Lewis gave a speech to students with how modern commencement speakers such as Steve Jobs imply moral lessons without acknowledging them. The C.S. Lewis speech Jacobs used was The Inner Ring. For several years I have been passionate about seeing every Christian read it, because it is one of the most important and universal explanations of human nature I have seen.

The longer I observe how people choose to prioritize their lives, which groups they prefer to join, and who they want to spend time with, the more I see Lewis’s insights confirmed. The best value for me has been what Lewis revealed about wrong motives for being a part of

things, which makes us able to recognize those motives in our own hearts and choose to resist them. What it comes down to is the difference between using people and relationships as a means of self-advancement, or valuing people and relationships for their own sake. As Lewis also brilliantly showed, doing the former makes you a prisoner and slave of ambition, rather than enabling you to control it. On the other hand, being authentic with people, doing good work for its own sake, and accepting the people God places in your life can be amazingly liberating.

The whole essay is here, but I’ve done my best to give you an abridged survey of Lewis’s main points identified by headings. All the material below is from Lewis, except for the headings I have added. The last two paragraphs are especially encouraging.

The Longing to Be Inside the Inner Ring

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.

People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

The Longing that Will Dominate Your Life – Unless You Choose to Resist It

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

The Fear of Being Left Outside

Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for... But it is not quite true. … It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.

Making the Inner Ring More Important than True Friendship

Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in?

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable.

I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. IN the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.

The Danger of Moral Compromise in Pursuit of the Inner Ring

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.

The Endless Thirst that the Inner Ring Can Never Satisfy

My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made part of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.

Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.

Becoming Free from the Desire for the Inner Ring

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

Why We Crave and Crave - Yet Only One Thing Will Solve It

Thomas Manton:
'The soul is like a sponge, always thirsting, and seeking of something from without to be filled; a chaos of desires. Man was made to live in dependence. Now, of all portions in the world, there is none worth the having, but God himself; nothing else can make you completely blessed, and satisfy all the necessities, and all the capacities, of soul and body..."The Lord is my shepherd:" what then? "I shall not want" (Ps. 23:1).'
-via Banner of Truth Trust

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:26

I cry to you, O Lord;

I say, “You are my refuge,

my portion in the land of the living.”

Psalm 142:5

"You move us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You." Augustine, Confessions (Book I, Chapter 1)

Don’t Hinder Joy by Waiting for Pain and Sorrow To Be Removed

Image from lululuvs.wordpress.com.

How often do we think of joy as something that requires the absence of sorrow or pain? We wait and wait for the pain to be taken away so that we can be happy again. As long as the pain remains, we resign ourselves to having to wait for joy to replace it. This gives suffering and sorrow domination over us, while we believe we cannot experience joy until they leave. But it shouldn’t be this way. It is possible to experience deep, sustaining joy even in the middle of sorrow or pain.

Christian joy is not a childlike innocence, unaware of the troubles of the world and therefore undisturbed. Christian joy is a triumphant and victorious declaration that Christ has conquered sin and death, bringing us together with God in a way that can never be separated again. Christian joy reigns over suffering and earthly sorrow. It does not need to wait for them to give way. It is stronger than they are, and can cover them and overwhelm them. Your joy can be stronger than your sorrow even while the sorrow remains. Paul could say he was “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” all at the same time. (2 Cor. 6:10). He could even say “we rejoice in our sufferings” (Romans 5:3), and that he rejoiced in his sufferings for the sake of the Colossians (Colossians 1:24). The Word of God demonstrates that joy in the middle of sorrow is possible and powerful.

As Christians grow and go through the years, we usually discover for ourselves this strange co-existence of suffering and joy. While we are on this earth, the sorrows of this life do not disappear. But we begin to discover that joy can flourish even in the sorrows. This is not to say it is easy. It is often overwhelming and numbing, and we need our friends to bear us up and pray for us and fight through the numbness. Our comfort is knowing for ourselves that even in suffering, joy can break forth and shine. I found Elisabeth Kincaid’s insights in An Elusive Joy at Easter, from her readings of John Henry Newman, to illustrate this beautifully:

 

Newman gives us permission not to confuse this joy with the sentiment he would most likely dismiss as enthusiasm. Christian joy at Easter does not need to be unalloyed and unrestrained. It is not the joy of children, but rather of convalescents, who are in the process of getting well, who see the promise of health, but are still regaining strength rather than fully healed.

When the crisis is past, the illness over, but strength not yet come, they will go forth to the light of day and the freshness of the air, and silently sit down with great delight under the shadow of that Tree, whose fruit is sweet to their taste.

Kincaid reflects that even the gracious work of healing is not always quick. She recalls Diggory’s mother in C.S. Lewis’s The Magicians Nephew, who is healed by an apple from Aslan in Narnia. But she does not heal quickly. In fact, it is so gradual that at first Diggory is doubtful it is working.

Perhaps we (often, although not always) should expect our healing and our rejoicing to look more like Diggory’s mother. Often, it is too easy for many of us, especially those raised in church cultures that place a high premium on subjective experience, to fear that the perceived lack in our joy is due to our own weakness and sinfulness. While this may at times be true, Newman challenges the belief that it is always true, rejecting the lie that “since it is the Christian’s duty to rejoice evermore, they would rejoice better if they never sorrowed and never travailed with righteousness.”

Sorrowing and struggle are necessary for this joy; they do not preclude it.

Worrying about my own perceived emotional lack — or feeling so overwhelmed by the brokenness of the world around me that I cannot raise my head to rejoice — may not be the solution, and in fact, may be part of the problem. Refusing to let go of my disappointment with my own brokenness and that of the world shows a failure to recognize not only the reality that in this world “the languor and oppression of our old selves” will continue, but also the reality of the new life given me. The solution is not to emote more or blot out the sorrows of this world, but rather to turn in prayer, not inward, but upward.

We must beg Him who is the Prince of Life, the Life itself, to carry us forth into His new world, for we cannot walk thither, and seat us down whence, like Moses, we may see the land, and meditate upon its beauty!

Easter joy does not require us, then, to leave ourselves or the world of this present hour behind. Rather, Easter joy may only come when, like Diggory, we return to the brokenness of this world — and our own and others’ brokenness — with the comfort of Christ’s presence and the instruments of grace that he has provided for us throughout the annual miracle of the paschal season. In this return, perhaps, joy silently comes, wearing a different guise, but deeper and better than anything we can ever expect.

These words prompted a comment from fellow contributor Charlie Clauss: “maybe our task is the active reception of joy.” Instead of trying to get past suffering so we can be joyful, we need to be willing to receive the gift of joy from God right in the midst of our brokenness. And, like Newman says, we pray earnestly for the gift to come.

What we often miss in trying to hide from suffering and isolate joy all by itself is that the deepest joy is formed from being healed and restored. You can be happier because you are renewed than you would be at just being new. Stop and try to think about why you love Christ, without including in your mind anything negative that He has saved you from. Take away what He suffered and what He saved us from, and what is left to show the depth of His love for us? I cannot sum this up more beautifully than Katy Hartman did in 2014:

 

"Everything that happens on the surface of this dappled planet, from the deepest joy to the most unspeakable tragedy, is a tangle of grief and celebration. We spend our days trying to separate the one from the other, yet we're baffled that we cannot.

...

"We live between overlapping realities—one broken and another being healed. Joy and sorrow, grief and celebration, cannot be locked away in separate compartments. Yet that's what we try to do. Looking at one without the other means we see only a portion of the whole story of this broken world being healed. When we look at grief on its own we fail to see that God is healing the world through the work of Jesus, that he is making things beautiful and turning darkness into light before us. When we live only in light of reasons to celebrate, as if joy is the only reality, we banish all thoughts of grief and turn a blind eye to the brokenness in ourselves and in the world. We forget how much we have been rescued from, and we ignore the fact that we still need healing. We ought not to be surprised when we find traces of pain in joy or beauty in sorrow, for this is the nature of living in a broken world being redeemed.

 

"The cross itself is the ultimate example of this intricate web of sorrow and joy. Jesus experienced sorrow incomprehensible, dying a gruesome and lonely death to absorb the entirety of God’s wrath toward evil in our place. This immense suffering is what leads to his ultimate exaltation in Revelation 5:12: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Somehow, this gruesome, tragic event of his crucifixion is the very thing God uses to redeem the arc of history, reconcile sinners to himself, and heal every aspect of the world he created. We were not made to know death or pain or loss, and the cross guarantees that one day, all of creation will be restored to its rightful design."

 
Amen.

Is Happiness a Vain and Worldly Thing or a Christian Thing?

Randy Alcorn has written the essay I have been waiting for someone to write. This is an important thing to get clear. We see so many people wrecking their lives and their souls by pursuing "happiness" in all the wrong places that we can become skeptical and critical of the idea of happiness itself.

Some Christians have dismissed happiness as a worldly and self-centered idea that is different from Christian joy and satisfaction. They try to explain Christian joy as something different and spiritual, and they treat happiness as a self-indulgent desire. This is very confusing to our hearts, especially to those who struggle for joy, because it makes us feel criticized for some of our legitimate efforts to be happy. And yet we cannot get away from them. As Christian philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously said: "All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end." (Pensées, #425).

This has been one of my first priorities in writing a blog, and I've tackled the search for joy a number of times from the very early posts to If You Struggle With Joy You're Not Alone and a string of posts here from 2013 on C.S. Lewis (including Don't Let Being Unhappy Make You Feel Guilty).

But for the present, I just encourage you to read Randy Alcorn's post. Here's a preview:

An ungrounded, dangerous separation of joy from happiness has infiltrated the Christian community. The following is typical of the artificial distinctions made by modern Christians:

Joy is something entirely different from happiness. Joy, in the Biblical context, is not an emotion. . . . There is a big difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is an emotion and temporary; joy is an attitude of the heart.

Judging from such articles (and there are hundreds more out there), you’d think the distinction between joy and happiness is biblical. It’s not.

John Piper writes, “If you have nice little categories for ‘joy is what Christians have’ and ‘happiness is what the world has,’ you can scrap those when you go to the Bible, because the Bible is indiscriminate in its uses of the language of happiness and joy and contentment and satisfaction.”

Here’s a sampling of the more than one hundred Bible verses in various translations that use joy and happiness together:

• For the Jews it was a time of happiness and joy, gladness and honor. (Esther 8:16, NIV)
• I will turn their mourning into joy. . . and bring happiness out of grief. (Jeremiah 31:13, HCSB)
• Give your father and mother joy! May she who gave you birth be happy. (Proverbs 23:25, NLT)

The relationship between joy and happiness in these passages refutes two common claims: (1) that the Bible doesn’t talk about happiness, and (2) that joy and happiness have contrasting meanings. In fact, the Bible overflows with accounts of God’s people being happy in him.

More...

The Ultimate Fulfillment Is Greater Than We've Ever Dreamed

C.S. Lewis perceived that our inconsolable longing in this life will only be completely fulfilled when we are united to God in the next. He also identified another awesome dimension to our ultimate desire for fulfillment. What we really want is not merely to be satisfied, but to become part of the beauty and glory that draws us in even now:

"When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as 'the journey homeward to habitual self.' You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. ... A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

"Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being 'noticed' by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3). ... Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.

...

"At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in." (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

We All Have an Inconsolable Longing - For Now

In the last post, I said that C.S. Lewis spent a great deal of time thinking about our universal human longing for happiness. One of the greatest and most important things he ever wrote on this subject is a sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. Every Christian should read it. It is one of the most revealing commentaries written in modern times on desire, fulfillment, satisfaction, and what it really means to be created for eternal life in heaven. Here is how Lewis explains our inconsolable longing:

"Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object. ... In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. ... Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited." (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

We are always trying in this life to arrive – to get to a place where we feel really fulfilled and do not long for anything else. And that is just what we can’t do. Lewis recognized that because we were not made for this world, we have a natural and inborn longing for something better and deeper that will only be fulfilled in the next world. That doesn't mean we don't get foretastes of joy and happiness and fulfillment in this life. Lewis also recognized that we are given the good pleasures in this world (the music, the beauty, the happy relationships) to whet our appetites for the glories of the next. But this world is temporary, and limited, and we can't experience the fullness of everlasting joy that God has planned for His people in this perishable world. We have to be ready to put it away when the time comes to receive our true inheritance.

In fact, the more we try to be completely satisfied here in this life on earth, the further we put ourselves from complete satisfaction. Our only means of being fully satisfied is to seek with all our hearts to find our satisfaction completely in God, something we will not fully receive until our bodies are renewed and we join Him in eternity. While we are on earth, this experience will become an increasing fulfillment and satisfaction in God if we continue to pursue it. The eternal fountain of absolute joy does overflow into Creation, filling those who embrace Jesus as their Lord and Savior with streams of living water. But we aren't satisfied taking drinks from the overflow of the fountain forever. What we really want is to be plunged into joy endlessly, to never get thirsty again. In the next post, I'll share how Lewis depicted that glorious union.

Happiness Is Limited in This Life So You'll Enjoy It Forever

I want to make sure that I am clear in what I mean when I say God wants us to be happy. I do not at all mean that God promises we will be happy all of the time in this life, or that we will mostly have joy and very little pain. Joy is not a constant thing. If you have many seasons where you must struggle to find joy, you're normal. God does provide joy, and God is the only one you can rely on to provide everlasting joy. But He deliberately limits our experience of it in this life, and I think C.S. Lewis understood why.

I have been helped and encouraged immensely by C.S. Lewis when I have been struggling to find joy and happiness (as you can see from the link). Lewis has made more sense out of why we long so much for satisfaction that seems elusive, and why we suffer so much, than just about anyone else outside the Scriptures. The only other Christian author that has helped me this much is John Piper, and I suspect that is in no small part because Piper himself has been richly helped by Lewis. Piper titled his biographical sketch of Lewis "Lessons from an Inconsolable Soul" (a title that will be explained by the next post). It summarizes well how much Lewis thought about joy and satisfaction and the longing to find them.

Lewis's conclusion about why happiness is limited in this life was simply this: God gives us as much happiness in life as is good for us, but not so much that we miss out on everlasting joy.

"The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacles to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home." C.S Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Or, as the Scriptures put it: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” 1 John 2:15-17.

And not only that, but their joy abides forever too.

Why Does God Delay Giving Us Joy?

I firmly believe God does want us to be happy. The way Jesus prays for His people in John 17, especially John 17:13, is a powerful example of that. John 15:11 is another. He is really focused on our joy being full. It appears to be one of the main priorities Jesus has as He is preparing to leave the world. So why is joy so hard for many people to find? If God wants us to have it, why do we have to seek for it in spite of so many obstacles, and why do some of us have to wait so long to find it? This is a painful question for so many people. It has been a painful question for me. The thoughts below have truly helped.

I argued here that the Bible has many examples of God telling us we ought to ask Him for good things that He has already said He wants to give to us. The riches of God's love and kindness to us are displayed much more powerfully when we ask Him for something in complete dependence and He faithfully gives us just what we need. It's one way of demonstrating to the world who He is: a loving heavenly Father who knows how to give good gifts to His children. (Matthew 7:7-11.) That's probably only one glimpse of what God uses prayer to do. What about the prayers for joy, for relief from pain, that God doesn't seem to answer? Why do we sometimes have to ask repeatedly? Why not grant it the first time we ask for it? Wouldn't that look more generous than making us wait?

God clearly has a much more complex purpose in prayer. C.S Lewis made the point that prayer is not about changing how God acts; prayer changes us. There is something happening inside of us as we pray, and especially as we wait for God to act. In fact, to put it fairly, God is acting all the time as we pray to Him. Even when we don't see signs that He is answering the prayers we lifted up, He has already been at work changing us through the relationship of prayer. The process of praying earnestly for God's help over a long period of time is doing something in our souls while we experience it.

When we feel we need something from God and He doesn't seem to give it, it often doesn't feel like a comfort that He is invisibly doing something else in our souls we can't feel yet. We are almost always focused on our immediate needs and wants. We don't have the benefit of God's far-sighted perspective on what will bring us the most happiness. God is not just seeking our immediate happiness. He is seeking a permanent and lasting happiness. In fact, the process of waiting may be a necessary tool that shapes us and trains us so that we actually can receive the joy God wants to give us. We aren't always ready to receive what we ask for - it might not even help us much if we got it when we first asked for it. A loving God would do more than just give us whatever we ask; He would make sure to change us so that we could actually enjoy it.

We easily forget that we are not whole yet. We are not at present the mature children of God that we one day will be. There is still a lot of work to be done to untangle the cords of sin and defiance and pride that are wound around our hearts and souls. There are glorious things God has promised to us, but we have to undergo the process of being healed and fixed and restored in order to appreciate them, and to avoid ruining them. J.D. Greear, in his book Gospel (p. 188), pointed out that waiting for God, and even being denied what we ask for, reveals things about what we really place our hope in and what we really treasure. Sometimes when we ask for joy or happiness, what we really mean by that is that we want certain things in our lives to work out a certain way because that's what we think we need to be happy. The process of waiting can lead to our discovering that we treasure other things more than God, or we trust them to satisfy us more than we trust God to do it. This discovery may be exactly what God uses to bring us to the greater joy of being satisfied in Him alone. J.D. Greear quotes Larry Crabb as saying: "You might never really know Jesus is all that you need until He is all that you have."

The pleasure of knowing God Himself is the only joy in the universe that will never let us down and never wear out. One of the clearest demonstrations of God's love is that when we are wrong about what we think we need to be happy, He doesn't give it to us, but instead helps fix us so we will learn what will really complete our happiness. If we are depending on other things to happen for us to be happy, even "good" things like being married, having unity in our church, or being free from pain, then those things control our joy. As J.D. Greear put it, "Whatever controls your joy is what you abide in." (Gospel, p. 188.) Abiding in anything other than God for joy is setting ourselves up for disappointment. Learning to abide in God alone for joy is a very difficult process for us, but if it guarantees that we will get that joy, and keep it forever, then the sooner we learn to do that the better. That is truly a loving answer to prayer.

Don't Let Being Unhappy Make You Feel Guilty

I am very conscious that what I said in the last post about the importance of seeking happiness can easily come across as making it sound like it's our fault if we're not happy. Telling someone who is very unhappy that he or she needs to be happy sounds insensitive and condemning, not to mention unhelpful. That isn't what I want to convey. The conviction that God encourages happiness and wants us to seek it should give us hope. The fact that we can't make it happen takes us back again to one of the keys to spiritual life: the things we need and the things we are supposed to do are impossible for us to accomplish by our own strength.

Being told you should be happy can't give you the ability to be happy when you're not. It often simply tends to make you feel worse. The only thing that can make you happy when you aren't is for God to act in your heart to give you joy. God uses many methods and means to do that, but the main way it happens is through prayer. Believing that God wants us to be happy and satisfied should give us hope that God wants to give that to us when we ask Him for it. It should make us bold in praying to God for happiness, joy, and freedom from anxiety or depression. We have every reason to eagerly trust that He will answer us because we know we are asking for something He already wants to give us.

The mystery of why God desires that we ask Him earnestly and prayerfully for things He already wants to do isn't something we will fully understand on this side of heaven. But it should be enough that the Scriptures tell us this is how He relates to us. We don't know how or why it works that way, but the important thing for us is that it does work. Jesus tells us God knows our needs before we seek them (Matthew 6:31-33), but He also tells us to ask God for our bread daily (Matthew 6:9-13). God desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:3-4), but Jesus also tells us to pray to God that He would send laborers out to the harvest to save souls (Luke 10:2). God has blessings to give us that He is waiting for us to ask Him for.

Perhaps the most helpful explanation of this I have heard is that God's goodness and faithfulness and generosity are displayed more clearly when we desperately ask Him for something and He gladly responds by giving it to us than they would be if He simply gave us everything we needed without our ever thinking about it.

The bottom line is that God has given us a message that He wants us to be happy. We can't make it happen by ourselves. But we can choose to seek it diligently in every possible way, chiefly by praying to Him that He would make it happen. And the fact that He has told us He wants us to have it is the guarantee that if we keep asking Him for it, He will do it.

Wanting to Be Happy Is a Virtue - and a Necessity

This perspective by C.S. Lewis has really ministered to me through a painful summer. Walter Hooper describes the virtue of Lewis's positive willingness to pursue his own happiness: "Lewis had his share – some would say more than his share – of worries. But, having done all in his power to solve them, he left the matter to God and got on with his work and pleasures. … Lewis really wanted and liked the happiness which the Divine Son died to give all men. …in a letter to his brother … he says, 'I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.'" (Introduction to The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

The world will give us plenty of reasons to be tempted by despair. We have to teach ourselves to unapologetically choose to be happy. Many people are sad, lonely, or depressed when they very much do not want to be. But it seems that not many of us feel the freedom to actively choose to cast away our anxieties and cares upon God and simply enjoy the life He has given us. (Phil. 4:6-7; 1 Peter 5:6-7.) It seems it is all too easy to succumb to sorrows and to become accustomed to being burdened by them, so much so that it almost feels unnatural and "guilty" to us to simply enjoy some free and unfettered happiness - as if we're somehow being selfish for having a carefree mind and unhindered joy. The Scriptures show that God Himself is supremely happy in being who He is and in the work He does. Then it follows that it is a quality of godliness to diligently seek to be as happy as we can in the ways God designed us to find our joy, however much we must work to get there. Happiness itself is a genuinely good thing of which God heartily approves.

Sunday Salt: Charles Simeon's Comfort in Suffering

Charles Simeon was the pastor of Trinity Church in Cambridge, England for 54 years (from 1782 until his death in 1836). John Piper has a very good biographical message about him that you can read, listen to, or download the audio for here. This quote is taken from Piper's message. It made a large impact on me when I read it, and the impact grew the more I learned about the kind of suffering and opposition Simeon faced during his 54 years of preaching and ministry. These words would not have nearly the same weight if they came from someone who had not experienced great struggle and suffering and difficulty. The encouragement in these words is that they come from a man who faced challenges and discouragements at least as difficult as anything most of us ever will, and he could still be content in the knowledge that His soul was secure in Christ. Piper's message has many more examples of how Simeon's faith and practices of devotion to God's Word and prayer kept him encouraged, and I commend it as very worthwhile reading.

A friend had asked Simeon how he had endured the opposition and strife in all his years of ministry. Simeon's reply:

"My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering for Christ's sake. When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through, I can bear the pricking of my legs. Let us rejoice in the remembrance that our holy Head has surmounted all His suffering and triumphed over death. Let us follow Him patiently; we shall soon be partakers of His victory" (H.C.G. Moule, Charles Simeon, London: InterVarsity, 1948, 155f.).

Scriptures that come to mind: 2 Corinthians 4:16-18; Romans 8:16-18.

Your Worst Times May Be Your Best Testimony to the Gospel

The best chance you have to show the Gospel to people may be when you least feel like you have anything to give. When you are in the midst of distress and suffering, there will usually be people who are aware of your situation who don't believe in Christ. It is one thing for them to hear you talk about the hope of the Gospel and the freedom of trusting in Christ when things seem to be going well for you. Any person might be content with his or her beliefs and way of life when all is well. But when your world seems to be falling apart and you are clearly under stress, the way you react shows much more truth about what you believe. If you praise God and affirm that he is faithful and wonderful even in the midst of your own suffering, you show that the Gospel really is a consolation to you and that knowing God really does bring comfort.

People will often expect you to be miserable when circumstances are difficult or painful. Most people won't even criticize or judge you for it - they know they would react the same way. It's usually accepted that we will be unhappy and discouraged when life is hard. But at the same time, if you do react that way, then people see you're no different from them and your comforts are no different. But when you react to suffering with hope and encouragement instead, and when you maintain your trust in God and your enjoyment of Him, people take notice. This is something they have a hard time explaining away. You can testify to a person for years that you believe in Christ and that He is the Way to life, but when that person sees that you really do take your own comfort from trusting in this - and that the hope you have in the Gospel is so strong that it brings you encouragement and peace even in painful suffering - you have just proven your sincerity in a way that can't easily be questioned or doubted.

On one occasion where Paul and Silas were thrown into prison, Acts 16:25 says: "About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them... ." No doubt! You would be paying attention too if you saw men in a first-century prison singing while sitting in the stocks. Paul and Silas were soon released from prison, but the point is that they were singing before they received relief. Praising God and seeking Him in the midst of suffering shows that you trust Him to deliver you from it. And that captures people's attention. As David said in Psalm 40 about God having delivered him from trouble: "Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord." (Psalm 40:3).

Our Fear of Letting Go of Our Pleasures

To sum up the last post, you were designed and created to find your satisfaction in God, because that is the only place a living being can experience real satisfaction. As long as you find something more desirable than knowing Him and experiencing Him - as long as you hold something back as more dear to you than God - you will never be content.

This is the part that most people get discouraged at. We are used to relying on lots of things in the world (romance, sex, money, vacations, friends, family, food, books, television, etc.) for comfort and pleasure. The idea that we must set all these aside and desire God more than any of them, and further that we are supposed to be satisfied entirely by God Himself, feels threatening. We aren't yet used to enjoying God and being satisfied with Him alone, and so we are anxious that this idea of desiring God above all things will mean that the desires we are used to will go unfulfilled and will be a disappointment to us. This is where we have to act in faith. "Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart." says Psalm 37:4. And God has promised us that "whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever." John 4:14. If we want that deep longing in our hearts that none of these other things have ever fully satisfied to be finally fulfilled, we must trust God that He means what He says. We must seek Him first and most deeply.

One of the great delights we will find is that when we are most satisfied with God, we can enjoy the other good things He has given us too. Some past things we must give up entirely, because they actually come between us and loving God - those are sin. But many things we can safely keep as long as we never let them become more dear to us than our experience of God. Not one of the things I listed at the beginning of the second paragraph is bad in itself. It is only bad when taken in a way that puts it before God or disobeys His teaching. The safest thing you can do if you want to keep enjoying a thing is to always make sure it is never more important to you than God. For if you have begun to desire it more than you desire God, then what can God do in His love for you but remove the thing that is distracting you from fulfillment?

On the other hand, when we make God the center of all our desire and affection, the other worthwhile things we enjoy are not robbed of their pleasure. They are actually made more enjoyable. The most mature Christians you see are not people that never have any fun. They find enjoyment and delight in many things - but they enjoy the Lord more. The things they love, they love for the Lord, with the Lord, and because of the Lord. They don't enjoy anything without enjoying it together with God. That is the way to be content in life.

How I Discovered Satisfaction in God

This post is basically the overview of what made me come alive and taste real satisfaction. The posts to come will expand on the outline here and show how it all played out. I was raised without any belief in God for nearly 19 years. Sometime I will share how God opened my eyes to see the truth about the spiritual life and convinced me that Christ is my Lord and my Savior. But in my first post here I emphasized that there was still something missing from the faith I was living. This post starts to lay out how I went from being a Christian who believed and prayed, but was disappointed and still caught up in desires for sin, to becoming a Christian who enjoys God and finds satisfaction in simply experiencing Him.

I can't give you a secret recipe that will automatically introduce you to satisfaction in God if you just take the steps in the right order, because finding satisfaction in God happens through developing a personal relationship with Him. It's not mechanical – it's a dynamic, living, spiritual experience of coming close to the Divine and learning to know and trust Him. You let Him quiet your mind and release your tension in prayer, you listen to Him, you tell Him what troubles you, you wait for Him to do things in your life and in your heart, and you learn by experience that He is faithful and gives you what you need. Truly knowing God and finding satisfaction in Him is not like following a map or trying to learn how to operate something. It is much more like falling in love and starting a new relationship.

Thankfully, a lot of people before us have developed this relationship and have left great advice on how they went about it. The relationship still depends uniquely on the interaction between the two people involved and how they relate to each other, but the experiences of others give us a good idea how to get started. Most importantly, a relationship with God is unique because He gives and invests far more than you do and He actually works spiritually inside you to change you. So it will differ somewhat for each person, but the things below were fundamental for me, and from reading widely through what other Christians over the centuries have experienced, I believe these things will be fundamental for most people in finding a steady satisfaction in God.

• I began reading my Bible every day.
• I was genuinely unhappy and dissatisfied with where I was spiritually and with
  the results of my own efforts to manage my life. I confessed that I had done a
  lousy job and that I was not keeping God's Word faithfully on my own. I wasn't
  succeeding in fighting the desire for sin, and I was sick of being trapped in a
  cycle of doing things I was ashamed of and then having remorse and guilt.
• I learned to consciously focus on admitting I could not do what I needed to do
  myself and putting my trust entirely in God to do it instead. I was learning
  that prayer doesn't just include asking God for what we think we need, but also
  includes asking God to change us and do in us what He desires to do. I learned
  that you don't keep God's commands by trying harder; you keep them by asking Him
  earnestly to make you obedient and trusting Him that He will do it.
• I truly desired to know God more and find satisfaction in Him – I was becoming
  convinced that we were meant to enjoy God Himself for who He is, not just for
  what we get from Him, and I wanted to learn how to do this.
• As I read the Bible daily, I was learning to trust God's Word and His promises
  instead of having my attitude shaped by how I felt or what I saw in my own life.
  I was learning to put aside my own expectations of what was possible or what was
  going to happen and believe that all things are possible with God instead.
• I began to trust God that I could really let go of the things I had been holding
  onto for comfort and pleasure, and that He would replace them with something
  better and more satisfying. I learned to practice turning to Him when I was
  tempted by sin, trusting that He would ultimately give me more satisfaction and
  pleasure than sin could – without any shame!
• I made my relationship with God and my time with Him my highest priority.