I am a news nerd, which is not a healthy habit in this decade! I consciously need to turn down the volume on despair at injustice and increase the volume on God’s promises of final victory.
However, it seems that balance is missing in most faith discussions. We fall into two divided camps: one wants to see change now and wants to work for that change and the other feels that we should be willing to wait for the time that God finally brings his justice.
But what if I don’t want to be complacent about evil in the world, nor do I want to panic at every new atrocity?
I heard an interesting analogy the other day on the Wild at Heart podcast. When we drive into ice on the road and start skidding, our instinct is to hit the brakes and turn out of the slide. Most of us over-correct. The right way to respond is actually to turn into the slide, so that the tyres can align and we can then control direction more easily and slow down.
And it’s the same with our response to global conflict, AI, wars and economic instability. All these things make our world seem out of control. Our instinct may be to slam on the faith brakes, to stop the slide into unpredictability which we also call unrighteousness. We want to turn completely away from all this ‘evil’ – if only we could go back to some idealised era when Christian values made our nations great.
If we dig a bit deeper though, the idealised era of the western church was actually built on factors like economic strength, peaceful governance, consumerism and reliance on good times. I grew up in Australia in the 60s and 70s – life was comfortable for most families and certainly my sisters and I had much greater security than our parents’ generation which had faced the Great Depression and World War 2. Australia was the lucky country.1 We see the fracturing of previous certainties and have a sense of unease, which we link to a slide away from traditional Christian values.
Most Christians however do not live in comfortable western settings and Jesus never promised his followers an easy life – they lived under a repressive Roman Empire, they believed in a strange new religion, and they could expect hardship.
John Stott wrote:
How did Jesus expect His disciples to react under persecution? [In Matt. 5:12 He said], “Rejoice and be glad!” We are not to retaliate like an unbeliever, nor sulk like a child, nor lick our wound in self-pity like a dog, nor just grin a bear it like a Stoic, still less pretend we enjoy it like a masochist. What then? We are to rejoice as a Christian should and even “leap for joy” (Lk. 6:23).4
Now not everything happening in our world right now that makes us feel pressured and uncertain is persecution for our faith.
But Stott makes the same point as skidding on ice. We can over-react to every pressure and be full of self-pity, or we can dismiss them because we have stoic endurance2. Or we can take unhealthy pride in the idea that we are suffering for our faith.
None of these extreme positions is helpful.
We can rejoice in God’s sovereignty and we also weep with those who weep.
We can pray, discern, and adjust our steering so we can avoid crashing. We can comfort others who are confused, because we have faith in the God of order and beauty.
And whilst we may long for sunlit uplands, we can learn patience and steady closeness to God in the darker places. I think that’s what Jesus meant by rejoicing in hardship – we can learn resilience and produce sweeter fruit, whilst never giving up.
Its not easy but it replaces a distorted view of faith with a realistic perseverance and outrageous hope.
In the midst of a new year of continuing uncertainty and crisis, we turn to God as our only solution and the best source of wisdom. “How precious to me are your thoughts, God. How vast is the sum of them.”
At rise 26 in November we are going to explore the grey zones of wilderness and how we can be leaders of gritty hope.
We are also having 3 webinars to prepare our minds and hearts to consider the big and issues and the personal ones that we face.
Go to riseinstrength.org to find out more.