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These past two weeks have been very interesting. In between car, bus, and subway rides to and from work, I am left with an overabundance of time for thinking, reading, praying, and reflection. There’s something dangerous about thinking too much about the future. I tested those waters in hopes of finding an answer and decided I’d bite the bullet on what it may do to my faith. I firmly believe in practicality and educated planning before engaging or committing to anything. However, I’ve also learned that attempting to anticipate and calculate everything that will occur on year 2010 in a year 2009 NJ Transit bus seat will prove useless and confusing.

A close missionary friend of mine asked me of my life plans and, rather than actually having a plan to share after all of my thinking, I had a confession. I was thinking about my future seminary, location, church, and spiritual walk with Christ all too much. And similar to over-thinking anything except the massive capacity of mercy and grace our God poured out on us through his son, you get mentally burned out. I’m not too concerned with sharing the contents of my thoughts as much as the place that they led me.

It’s almost unavoidable to start thinking about potential failures in our attempts to calculate the future. Nomatter how self-righteous we are or confident in our skills, it never becomes less wise to have a “Plan B” because of our flawed nature. Last week I came down heavily on myself for my inadequacies and inability to measure up the way that I would like to as a man in my decision-making and passions. It stole my appetite at lunch and set me up for failure as I let my infatuation with pleasing God supercede his grace. It would be easy to sum it up in saying I was a prisoner to “works-based religion” or that I wanted to “make God owe me,” but this is oversimplifying what I felt and still to a degree feel about my performance before God.

I’ll tell you everything that I didn’t do: I did not really look to God’s grace and I did not daily appropriate the gospel.

What I did do amidst the downcast emotion I felt was read the bible. And it was painful.

It physically bothered me to read the bible daily, even when I knew in my heart that I desired to flip through the pages and see God reveal something to me, even if it were completely unrelated to my issues at the moment. I did get through it every day. However, once my eyes locked on the page, it became exceedingly difficult to make my way down the line. I’m not suggesting that there was a demonic force. But I found myself breaking a sweat on the air-conditioned bus and feeling a pain in my stomach every time I pushed myself to read. It was only until this morning as I was reading Piper’s book “Stand” that I understood a little better why this happened.

No, there was no demonic force making it impossible for me to read the bible. Even if there were, the holy Spirit is greater than any power like that. I was struggling with the presence of sin in my life. The more I grow, the more sin in my life I’m aware of. I was overwhelmed and I wanted to persevere strong like a leader should. But I wanted to do it on my own. Piper says the following:

A Deadly Path of Perseverance:
“Perseverance Puts or Keeps God on Our Side”

The other misguided way of overcoming the fear of not persevering is just as dangerous. It is the way that says: “Yes, perseverance in faith and love is necessary, and that means I must wait till the last day for God to be 100% for me, and I must depend on my own efforts to secure God’s full favor. God may get me started in the Christian life by faith in him alone, but perseverance happens another way. God makes his ongoing favor depend on my efforts” That, I say, is deadly and leads either to despair or pride. And certainly not perseverance.

The moment I read that, I penned a box around it and said to myself, “This is me. And I know it and can’t stop it.”

I want to fight the good fight for godliness by my own efforts. I want to show God that I can do all of the thinking, planning, wise anticipating, and tough decisions on my own. I do this not because I feel as if I can lord it over him and make him owe me; it’s more to prove to daddy that his son has been taught well by him and is growing up. I want to be a good son. Not only with my earthly father, but with my heavenly one.

For a good reason, it doesn’t seem to work this way within the context of mercy and God’s providence. In this context, I have to depend on him and look to him the whole way. And as I stand in the light, it exposes the sin as my strive for whole-hearted sonship unveils itself as pride. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel the sin. But i know it’s there through scripture (Which gives a -1 point to having a relationship with God based on “feelings”). “How would you know that changing would make any difference then?,” you might ask. Because I’m in anguish and slavery as I try to plan everything out selfishly on my own. I’m treating God’s grace like training wheels, when it is really the entire bicycle, taking me home to him. Call it another case of the “ABC Syndrome” where I reduce the gospel to the beginner’s basics of Christianity and not the foundation of our lives.

The reason why I couldn’t read the bible that I desired to was because I wanted to check it off on my list of godly commitments more than actually delve into it. Jerry Bridges (I thank God that he keeps that old man alive) said that we’re not transformed through the act of reading the bible daily. Rather, we are transformed through the reading session itself. I want to believe that I can feel the love, blessings, and presence of God through the knowledge that I have been reading his word daily. In this desperate pursuit, I only pay about half as much attention to what I’m reading when I do. I want what has already been given to me and despair over my blindness to it.

Piper excellently continues:

When does God become totally and irrevocably for us – not 99%, but 100% for us? Is it at the end of the age, at the Last Day, when he has seen our whole life and measured it to see if it is worthy of his being for us? That is not what the Bible teaches.

The moment we see (by grace!) this Treasure and receive him in this way, his death counts as our death and his condemnation as our condemnation and his righteousness as our righteousness, and God becomes 100% irrevocably for us forever in that instant.

I still don’t completely live this out well. Maybe one day I will. I hope this public reflection helped you if you’re going through the same thing.