Preaching to the Choir

I know probably much of what follows is nothing new to most of you. But I'm going to go ahead and vent, anyway. Because I'm Trosenwilkin, and darn it, I feel like it! Anyway, this is what I want to say. I don't get many compulsions from God. Nor really much of anything in the way of a helpful nudge. But lately, God's really indicated that maybe I ought to share a few things. And one thing I've learned is that if you do happen to get a helpful nudge from God, it's usually best to follow it.


Before I found Christ, I spent a lot of time wondering what God was up to. I’d never really doubted his existence, because it seemed ridiculous to doubt that someone was in control of things. I always felt that entropy, for want of a better expression, was crap. Yet I never chose to follow God. Like many others who had experienced tragedy in their life, I wasted years asking, Why, God? Why does this happen? And more importantly, why does it happen to me? I don’t recall ever getting an answer from God, yet now, knowing Him even a little, it seems obvious why.

Because that’s what it took.

That’s what needed to happen in my life to get me to cry out to Him. I’m not saying that God deliberately caused tragedy to happen in other people’s lives in order for me to choose Him, only that had those things not happened, I might never have made my decision. I think now that the bad, the terrible things that happened all had their place in those people’s lives, as well. I know that my mother might never have cried out to God at all if she hadn’t been facing death, hadn’t been hurting beyond my capacity for understanding. And if I hadn’t heard her praying for salvation, then I might have taken a different path myself. And every other event that happened in my life (my friend’s suicide, my father’s death, and even the death of Tim Wakefield), had its place in breaking down what remained of my inhibitions. In breaking down the obstacles that had been keeping me from Him (and yes, they were obstacles of my own design—they always are), breaking down what remained of my expectations regarding my life, and what would follow after it was over. After all, I’d heard so many dramatic testimonies over the years, it seemed I didn’t really have much to worry about. I was a nice guy, and I never did harm to anyone. I was raised to do the "right thing." Surely, that was enough. Doesn’t the Golden Rule simply say, do unto others as you would have them do unto you (of course, the fact that Jesus was responsible for the Golden Rule was something I chose to ignore)?

And in a way, I had always felt that it was God that was keeping me from choosing Him. That if he had not arranged my life in such a way, I might have began a relationship with Jesus that much sooner. And once I began seeking, it seemed that if I did choose to "lead a christian life," there was much I would have to give up. Much about my life I would have to give up in the interest of following (never mind the fact that anything I did give up would be because it was a hindrance in my fellowship with God). There were things I felt I was good at, affinities I thought I had that I wouldn’t be able to explore if I "took up my cross." Or even if I did, that they wouldn’t be worth anything to Him. What could I do that would mean a thing to Jesus?

Oswald Chambers says:
One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is that of temperament. We make our temperament and our natural affinities barriers to coming to Jesus. The first thing that we notice in coming to Jesus is that he pays not attention whatever to our natural affinities. We have the notion that we can consecrate our gifts to God. You cannot consecrate what is not yours; there is only one thing you can consecrate to God, and that is your right to yourself. If you will give God your right to yourself, he will make a Holy experiment out of you, and God’s experiments always succeed.

What it took for me to realize that was the total breakdown of self, and self-expectation. I had to lose what felt like everything in order to gain what actually was. Once I realized that nothing I had or nothing I did would make me worthy of Him, that everything I had or was good at was because of him, and that unless I turned to Him, my worst day would one day get a whole lot worse, my obstacles began to tumble.

And then you have Psalm 44: 25-26: "we are brought down to the dust, our bodies cling to the ground, rise up and help us; redeem us because of your unfailing love."

That’s what we do. We cling to the ground because we understand it. When you look at it a certain way, the world makes sense. If we can empirically explain something, it makes sense. The monkey fell out of the tree because it was dead. I can understand that, even though it stinks for the monkey.

There’s nothing about God that really makes sense. Why would someone, even a God, do the things that God has done? Why would he create something (like the universe and mankind itself), and then allow that creation to ultimately decide its own fate? Doesn’t the fact that you made something make you responsible for it? Why would He allow us to choose him instead of compelling us to?

Simple. Because then, it wouldn’t be choice. You might be able to compel someone to do your bidding, but that just makes you a despot. We’re allowed to choose because God loves us. God pursues us and wants us to come to Him. When He says "come unto me," it’s not a command. It’s an entreaty. He’s pleading for us to run into his embrace, and to live when the only other option is to die.

And there will come a moment in your life when it’s just you and God. You’re standing there, and you can either turn to God, or turn away. If you turn away from Him, probably nothing will happen right away. Maybe you’ll go on and have a great career and a family, and at the end of the day, you’ll park your Humvee in the driveway. Maybe you’ll never even realize you’re missing out on anything, because you can be comfortable and happy without God, at least while you’re on Earth. But one day you won’t be. One day you’ll have to consider what’s going to happen at the end, and whether or not you’re prepared to face the consequences of the decisions you’ve made (or not made). And then you’ll realize you don’t know what’s next. And that’s scary as hell.

If you choose Him, maybe things won’t be so easy. Maybe, probably, you’ll struggle. Things won’t be easy much of the time, but you’ll know what’s next, and there’s power in that knowledge. There’s power because the only real thing that the world can do to us is take away our lives. Once you’ve accepted Christ, you’ve defeated death.

There’s a scene toward the end of the movie Frankie and Johnny where Frankie is giving Johnny a litany of reasons why they can’t be together, and then she lays the main reason on him—she can’t have kids (due to the abuse of a former lover), and she knows he wants that more than almost anything. But Johnny just tells her;
"I can’t stop the bad from coming. But when the bad comes again, I’ll be next to you."
And that’s what Jesus will do for you. He’ll be next to you. He will provide solace where it seems there's none to be found, like Tolkien says, "a light when all other lights go dark." He'll be with you in all circumstances, and once you come to Him, nothing can separate you from His love.

It’s something to think about.