BP183
As you prepare, Christian brother or sister, to launch into 2024—ready or not—you will struggle in this world. Why? Simply because you are in the world but not of the world.
This post will delineate some reasons we might agonize as a Christian in the year ahead, not to depress us but so that we can say I saw it coming—this wrestling is not abnormal. It does not mean I am not a believer or that God does not exist. (Some of these reasons will apply to non-believers as well but they are particularly poignant for those who have chosen to walk by faith and not by sight).
Following is the list of “sandpaper points,” where our faith in a loving God runs rough against the realities of a fallen world and the flesh that still opposes our born-again self. As you can see, this list is far from exhaustive—only a few examples are cited.
+ Christian, we are not home yet. As new creations in Christ, we sense that we were made for heaven and so we find ourselves somehow out of place in this world. Some believers sense this truth more than others. I believe that the closer you walk with Jesus, the more you will understand this dilemma. In the gospel of John, Jesus said, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” ~ 15:18-19.
+ We were created to live forever so when death (both spiritual and physical) entered the human experience, a deep disruption penetrated the human soul like a spear thrust into a beating heart. A dark anxiety and a heavy depression driven by fear fell over humanity. Death is wrong. It does not fit the original plan. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God “has put eternity into man’s heart . . .” Death is not a part of life. It is a foreign invader that entered the human experience in that beautiful dreadful garden. In many ways, it is an unknown. It separates us from others. It is a journey done alone. No human can go with us to the end—only Jesus. Living in the shadow of death can cast a dimness over a life lived in the Light.
+ We are born into this world under condemnation. John 3:16ff says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light. . .” Even when we give our hearts to Christ, the old self within us is still under condemnation. Paul speaks of the battle between the law of sin and the law of the mind (faith) in Romans 7 but then follows it up in 8:1 with the beautiful truth that “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” We are then, in a sense, a house divided in our souls. As Paul says, “I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” ~ Romans 7:25.
+ The Fall impacted us physically so that we struggle with imbalanced neurotransmitters that impact us psychologically toward mental illness. As DTFL has mentioned before, we all fall somewhere on the mental illness spectrum. None of us are free from it for it is a consequence of the Terrible Garden Separation. But do keep in mind, that it is not as simple as neurotransmitters impacting your mental health. Sin and coping skills like blaming others and self-imposed isolation will impact our neurotransmitter levels. It is a bi-directional influence. So, we need to make sure that we don’t just ingest some medications and think we’re good to go. We need to do the hard work of spelunking in the cave systems of our souls to discover if our choices and practices are influencing our mental health (even if some of these practices look godly and good on the outside).
+ Besides the physical impact of imbalanced neurotransmitters, the fallenness of our bodies impacts us in other ways: Spinal Muscular Atrophy, diabetes, birth abnormalities, familial tremors, neuropathy, cancers, eye issues, childhood illnesses such as leukemia that can even lead to death, brain damage or deficits. This world can often be a place of bodily suffering, groaning, and tears.
+ Going back to our second point, the death of a child may turn our current world upside down. It could be a physical death or a spiritual death as in the story of the lost son in Luke 15. Fewer things are more painful in this world. You might even be the lost son or daughter giving the stiff-arm to family and/or God.
+ Or the death of a beloved parent.
+ Or the death of a dear friend.
+ Sinning over and over until we believe that Jesus can no longer forgive such a repeat offender can be a challenging “sandpaper point” for believers.
+ True guilt after we have sinned that can make us feel that God no longer loves us.
+ False guilt when Satan, another human, or our own flesh condemns us and we feel that we are bad and that the good God is so far away.
+ Satan’s lies, accusations, and desire to kill our spirit or our body that can rack us day and night.
+ Seasons when God’s presence feels far away (even when you have not sinned), and we might even wonder if the sovereign God loves us or even sees us.
+ Depression that feels so dark that we will never climb out of it.
+ Anxiety that owns us. Yes, we can struggle with anxiety about money, our health, our future, our past, our children, our relationships. But some of us will struggle even more devastatingly with what I call “break-through” anxiety. BTA triggers mental breakdowns that fuel agoraphobia, daytime and nocturnal panic attacks, and even a very real feeling of breaking into pieces and not being able to function at all.
+ Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that opens the door to intrusive thoughts that seem impossible to control. Thoughts about not being a Christian, about running over a child on the street as we are driving when all we did was hit a pothole, about sexually abusing a child we have never touched and never will, about being “bad” for some unidentifiable reason that feels like the guillotine of doom hanging over us.
+ We turn to food and cutting and addictions to comfort ourselves when our emotions feel frozen and our family and friends seem so clueless to our plight. Afterwards, we feel like pond scum and filth and project onto God that He feels the same way about us even while He looks on us with the eyes of love and grace.
+ Said a bit crudely, mentally we do not bob for apples but instead we bob for “turds.” We allow our thoughts to graze on weeds and poisonous plants. See what we need to be bobbing for mentally in Philippians 4:4-8.
+ Literal moves. Geographical location changes when we were young or when we were an adult that led to loss of close friendships. Related to this topic of change is graduating from college and suddenly losing our support system and our life structure and feeling very alone and vulnerable to Satan’s lies and even faith deconstruction. We might even contemplate thoughts of death at these lonely and lost times.
+ Loss of an animal friend that felt like an angel to us, God’s gift to our lonely soul.
+ Feeling like we don’t fit into this world because we love Jesus. In a darkening culture—which certainly describes America at the time—we might feel outnumbered, strange, alone, even foreign. And foreign we are to this world, just as non-believers are aliens to God.
+ Feeling like we are never really seen because we are a natural caretaker and are quick to see and hear the needs of others, but they do not return the favor to us. So, we feel unloved and unknown and unpursued and withdraw from our family and friends, alone in the “coffin” as C.S. Lewis says.
+ Grace is still such a foreign concept to us while the Law is first nature. We feel like we need to earn God’s favor, do the right thing, be perfect, not sin, in order to be loved by our Savior. To sin or fall short of expectations is crushing and condemning for us.
+ We feel alone for one of many different reasons. Being alone and lonely is the worst.
+ We cannot trust our own perceptions because they are not always accurate. We might hear things people are not saying or come to conclusions that are not consistent with reality—but they seem so real to us.
+ We believe that we need to be independent, strong, not needy. Our family of origin unspoken rules whisper to us to not be needy, to not cry, to help others even when we are weeping inside to be helped by them, to crucify all of our desires because we don’t want to be narcissistic like our father or selfish like our mother.
+ We experience the undulations of the spiritual life. We have amazing devotions and feel close to Jesus for a few days, weeks, or months, but then we lose momentum and feel like we have drifted far from God or He has drifted far from us. The whole Christian journey that was joyful days ago is now dry, empty, lonely, pointless.
+ We might become disillusioned with our church. We might feel like we don’t fit in or that the pastor has disappointed us or that our friends have left, so we decide to leave a family that is not perfect but possibly was where God wanted us to be.
So many things can come our way in this world. Above are only a few examples.
So, be ready for 2024. We may experience many of the items on the above list or only a few of them. Either way, remember that we are not home yet . . . and we are in a war. To remind ourselves of this ongoing sandpaper grinding we experience this side of Eden, we need to look once again at Romans 7 where Paul writes about the daily struggle of being a new creation who is still divided between the old self and the new self:
“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”
Yes, Jesus is our Deliverer. He never forgets us, never condemns us, never turns His back on us. He entered our world through the Incarnation “in the fullness of time,” at the perfect moment the Father had planned before creation. He came for us, and, He knows what it is like to be human. Check out the gospels and Hebrews 2 and 4.
In 2024, we need to remember the words in Hebrews 13:5-6, “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say,
‘The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear;
what can man do to me?’”
We must recall what Jesus said in John 16:33: “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
How do we access this confidence and peace? Rehearse what Jesus told us. Be in the presence of other believers where we can remind one another of God’s truth and love each other in the easy and most difficult times. Confess our sins to one another. Bear one another’s burdens. Practice His presence while we pray, sing, groan, cry, and walk through this fallen world but view it through the eyes of faith, through His eyes.
“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us)” ~ Matthew 1:22-23
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you” ~ John 14:16,17