I sat in silence as the end credits scrolled down the movie screen and asked myself, “What does the gospel have to say to these people?” My wife and I had just spent the evening with a cast of characters whose lives were so riddled with sin that it made the movie hard to watch. Some movies help me to escape, but this one slapped me in the face with a heavy dose of reality. The human condition, in all of its depravity, was thrust upon me, melting the Christian insulation with which I have surrounded myself. I saw afresh, in concentrated form, the kind of pains and problems that real people deal with every day of their lives. I was reminded that every Sunday, people with lives just as messy as the ones I had just seen on the screen walk into churches hoping to hear some good news.
On the way home from the theatre, my imagination began to assemble a cast of characters for my own movie. I selected a handful of broken people I had come into contact with over the last few years and gave each of them a juicy role. The teenage heroin addict caught in an endless cycle of recovery and relapse, the twenty-five year old single mother with three kids from three different fathers, the paroled sex offender who at one time was so addicted to kiddie porn that during his first week in jail he suffered physical withdrawal symptoms, the lonely and desperate middle-aged father whose uncontrollable rage has driven away his wife and children; I put each of them into a newly developed relationship with God and wondered how the movie would play out.
I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be the nice, neat, no-loose-ends kind of story you usually find on the fiction shelf of Christian bookstores. Just because broken people develop a relationship with God doesn’t mean they will suddenly be fixed, or that the scars of the past will be instantly healed, or that all of their neurotic behavior will be miraculously cured. If my movie is to be true to life, then their lives will be just as messy after their encounter with the redemptive love of God as it was before.
That’s not a poor reflection on the gospel though. It’s a poor reflection on our expectations of what the gospel should do in our lives. Sometimes we expect too much from the gospel. Sometimes we expect too much from God. We’ve confused the gospel with a fairy tale where bad guys are instantly turned into good guys and ride off into the sunset on white horses, never to struggle with the demons of their past again. When our lives don’t take the same shape as a fairy tale, we start to question our conversion or doubt the truth of what we’ve believed.
Where did we dig up this toxic, faith destroying fairy tale anyway? We certainly didn’t get it from scripture. There you will find no romanticized depictions of heroes whose lives are suddenly and magically changed by God. One of the most frustrating, yet realistic, traits of the characters we read about in scripture is that they almost never act the way we think they should after an encounter with the Almighty.
* We want Noah to be inducted into the Maritime Hall of Fame, but instead he gets drunk and ruins one of his boys.
* We want Abraham to be worthy of the blessing God has laid on him, but instead he lies about his relationship with Sarah and loses credibility with his neighbors.
* We want Jacob to be transformed by the promise God makes to him during a dream, but instead he continues to be a deceptive heel grabber.
* We want the Israelites to glorify the God who parted the Red Sea before their very eyes, but instead they throw a party in honor of a golden calf.
* We want Jonah to shake the seaweed out of his hair and celebrate the repentance of the Ninevites, but instead he curses the grace of God.
* We want the disciples to follow Jesus to the cross, but after three years of sitting at his feet, they run away in the moment of truth.
* We want the Post-Resurrection Peter to be more stable than the Pre-Resurrection Peter, but instead he gives into peer pressure and refuses to eat at a Gentile table.
* We want Paul to be a saint after his Damascus road experience, but instead he is unable to get along with the man whose name means “Son of Encouragement.”
Like those we read about in scripture, our own walk with God produces plenty of frustration:
* We want to keep sex sacred, but instead our good intentions are lost in a moment of passion.
* We want to depend on God alone, but instead we run to the refrigerator, or the liquor store, or to an adult web site in search of comfort.
* We want to say only the best to and about other people, but instead we spew venomous words that gnarl the hearts and character of people who wish us no harm.
* We want to be free from the sins and addictions of the past, but no matter how hard we try or pray or study, we eventually stumble back into the pit for another wallow in the mud.
Life is not a ninety-minute movie. If it were, our problems could be solved in over a bag of popcorn and our past actions would have no long-term consequences. But that’s not the way it works. Following Jesus doesn’t erase the memories of the sexual abuse you suffered when you were a child. It doesn’t reverse the damage you did to your body or psyche when you committed the sins of your youth. It doesn’t automatically make right what is wrong with your life.
No, we don’t expect too much from God. We just expect the wrong thing from God. We expect a quick fix. We expect an easy solution that immediately cleans up the messy parts of our lives. That’s not what scripture promises. Instead of quick fixes and easy solutions, Scripture promises the inescapable presence of a God who faithfully remains with us no matter what happens. This promise is embedded in one of the most popular passages in the Bible. When David says in Psalm 23:4, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me;” he reminds us that the good news is not that we no longer have to walk through the dark valley. The good news is that our shepherd is with us in the darkness every step of the way.
We sometimes use language that suggests we walk away from God’s presence. The words we use fail to describe reality. We never leave God’s presence. We just learn to ignore it. As David says in Psalm 139, we can never get away from God:
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
God is always there. He is there in the light and in the dark. He’s there on the mountain and in the valley. He was there with Abraham when he lied about Sarah. He was there with Peter when he denied knowing Jesus. He was there when you lost your innocence in the back of a Buick. He was there when you began to doubt him as a child when he failed to flip the light switch in your bedroom on and off like you asked him to.
Before you ever took your first step as a disciple of Christ, He was there. After you took a few steps behind Christ and stumbled, He was there. When you stumble and struggle and hurt in the future-He will be there. Of course, He is here with you now, even as you read this.
Maybe that’s what the gospel has to say to the broken characters in my movie. Maybe that’s what it has to say to us. Believing in Jesus Christ won’t make your life perfect, at least not on this side of heaven. It won’t end your struggles. But it will give you something to hold on to when the fairy tale collapses around you.
So let go of the fairy tale, and instead cling to the final words of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” In the absence of a perfect life, the presence these words promise will have to do. We may expect more, but we will never receive any less.
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons