A good bargain
I mentioned in an earlier post about the love of a bargain that my daughter and I share. On a call yesterday, Elizabeth took delight in telling me about a really good bargain that she secured recently. This reminded me of the best one that I have ever had (other than Free, obviously). This was at the Boxing Day sales some twenty years ago, when I came across a strangely named store that I hadn’t noticed before – Eisenegger. I probably wouldn’t have paid attention then, except that there was a rack with reduced-price garments right in the entrance. I looked through the items and picked out a thick padded coat that was my size. To my astonishment and, to be honest, disbelief, I saw the price was – supposedly – reduced from £99 to just £9. I was sceptical about the quality of something that was being sold so cheaply, but decided that it must surely be worth the risk at the sale price, and so went ahead and made the purchase. My son, James, had come shopping with me on this occasion; we had gone our separate ways and arranged when we would meet up. When we did, I told him about my apparent bargain, but perhaps unsurprisingly, there was nothing left on the rack for him when he looked. I gradually came to recognise, as I became convinced of the quality of the coat, that it really was worth the original price, and what a great bargain I had secured. Actually, it is far too warm to wear except in the more extreme winter days, but it is still in great shape and used whenever we have a particularly cold snap.
How engaged is God?
I wonder if we view our salvation in a similar way to how I thought of my new coat; something that we half suspect, because it seems too good to be true. Maybe, like me with the coat, you decided that it had to be worth the price on the ticket, but perhaps you have reservations about whether it is truly as good as you have been led to believe. Our life experience as Christians can cause us to wonder how engaged in our lives God is, or wants to be. Some see him more like an occasional visitor than a permanent resident; they hope to catch his presence when he turns up, but feel obliged to soldier on without him for the rest of the time. We may feel, when reading the New Testament letters, that they reference lives that are so different to our own experience that we regard them as tantamount to fiction, rather than reflecting the reality that we ourselves experience.
The passage of time
The difficulty I had in recognising the value of the coat had nothing to do with its design or manufacture. It was my own prejudice, and my scepticism that the bargain could be everything that, at face value, it appeared to be. This didn’t change the value of the product, and as I examined it at my leisure and began to wear it in the cold, I became convinced of its worth. Our Christian experience might seem to work in the opposite direction, though. Often, our early steps of faith seem to be straightforward and relatively easy, as God demonstrates his love and presence to us. However, with the passage of time, our Christian walk may appear to become harder and more challenging; it might feel that God is more distant than we experienced him before. There are several reasons why this might be our experience.
The good parent
Most significant of these is the basic fact that God wants us to grow in our walk with him, and so he gives us learning opportunities, which we may or may not rise to. Parents do everything for their newborn baby. The time comes when they encourage it to respond, maybe to smile or make speech-like sounds. At a later stage, they might say that, yes, I could do that for you, but you are capable of doing it for yourself now. Good parents encourage their offspring to grow, develop and go on to maturity – God does this with us as well. There are a few places where the New Testament writers use the analogy of being infants, notably in 1 Corinthians 3:1, where Paul writes: “But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.” (ESV). Those whom Paul is addressing appear not to have grown and developed in their faith. God only treats us as infants when we actually are; he expects us to learn and grow in keeping with our experience of life with him. If we reject his encouragement, then he doesn’t revert to treating us as recently born (again) infants; rather, he waits for us to have a change of heart.
Expectations
God is always ready to walk with us, if we are prepared to go hand in hand with him – he is a loving heavenly father. Someone posted on an online Christian forum, bemoaning the fact that he had asked God for a mountaintop experience, but after that, things had become emotionally tough for him. He felt that he had asked for a blessing and was receiving the opposite. I am sure that this wasn’t the case – I believe that God had set about answering this man’s prayer, but not in the way he had expected, or hoped. It would appear that he wanted to stay the way he was, but still have some form of spiritual blessing. Whilst our God is patient with us, he wants us to become disciples; those who lay down self to follow him. We come to the beginning of God when we reach the end of ourselves. For there to be more of God in our lives, there needs to be less of self. I am convinced that God was bringing this man to the end of himself, so that he could experience God in a new and deeper way.
Nothing new
There is great truth written in Isaiah 55:8: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.” Just like me with my doubts about the coat, we may have made assumptions about how our Christian lives are ‘supposed’ to pan out, and then tell ourselves that our faith doesn’t ‘work’ as well as we hoped for. We might be sceptical about what we read in the New Testament, settling for something far less valuable and beneficial. But that isn’t how our lives are meant to be. If this is your experience, then maybe, somewhere along the way, you have settled for second best. Perhaps that was all you thought was available to you – but it isn’t. Those biblical writers were experiencing God in the same way that is available to us today. God hasn’t changed, and his promises haven’t either. Just as the early Church experienced life in the Spirit, so we can today. We need to let go of our preconceptions, realign our expectations with what we read in the New Testament, and allow God to do his work in us in his way. If we are willing to lay aside self, then we will be open for God to change us to become the person he desires, someone filled with His Spirit, trustworthy and empowered for his use in his kingdom.