The Right Destinations by the Right Paths

There are many ways to arrive at the destinations Christianity calls people to arrive at. Not all of these ways are equal.

To give an example of what I mean by that think of what it means to trust God in times of suffering. Imagine two people who are both going through suffering. Both people say they want to “trust God” in their suffering. The first person trusts God out of duty, because that is “what a Christian is supposed to do,” as if the evil here were pain/fear/doubt itself. As if the answer of Christianity to suffering was simply to push all of those things aside as if they did not exist, and the better able a person is to do that the more spiritual he or she is. With these motivations trusting God becomes a bitter pill which is swallowed because it must be. Contrast that with the person whose trust in God is not built on a foundation of duty, but built on the foundation of faith in the character of God. Belief that God is good…belief that the things which happen to us be they happy or sad are not random events out of the control of God but are things which are still under his rule… belief that although we may not have all the answers and explanations to why we are suffering, we are still able to trust God because who he has revealed himself to be is trustworthy and good. The second person is truly believing, truly trusting. When suffering comes the scaffolding which propped up the first person’s trust will crumble because that person made a groundless leap to the destination of trusting God – they took a less than true, full path to the place of trust. Whereas when suffering comes in the second person’s life, far from crumbling, the beliefs which are the foundation of the trust will stand, because they are closer to the reality of God’s truth and that person came to the place of trust by a more true, full path.

Trusting God in pain is not what I really want to talk about. I only wanted to take the time to explain what I am trying to say with a concrete example. The point is this: both people in the example came to the same place (trusting God) but came to it by vastly different paths. One path was rooted in less than it should be, thus, it contained dangers and pitfalls in the areas where it failed. The other path was rooted in a more full, complete, correct understanding, and did not share those pitfalls because it did not fail. In other words, arriving at the destination in itself is not enough, but we must arrive there by true paths.

Change itself is not enough (perhaps in some cases it is for the short term, but the short term is often not ultimately what is most important). The question of how people change must not be neglected. It is not no-holds-barred as if the main concern was with people’s outward actions and the goal is to produce those outward actions by any means necessary. The outward actions are important, I don’t mean to minimize that, but let those outward actions be produced in peoples lives because they have come to believe the truth more, because they have taken a path to arrive there which is consistent God’s character and his revelation.

These thoughts were driven home to me when I came across the same idea in two separate books. Both authors wrote about the fact that being a Christian is about more than simply believing the right doctrine, but a Christian is someone who really lives as Christ did, and is becoming more and more like him. In their books they talked about their proposed paths to the desired destination of a greater reality in Christians lives. I trusted one of the authors and the other I did not. I think that along one path there are pitfalls and blind spots and dangers, whereas the other is founded on a more solid, true, consistent, safe, foundation. Same goal. Two paths to arrive at that goal. With the first author I felt I could not allow myself to agree with although I desperately want to arrive at the place he was trying to move me into… all I could hear were alarm bells ringing from things I thought he had left behind or did not care about. And with the second author those alarm bells were silent and I felt that this would be a safe thing to take to heart, a safe path to step forward on.