It isn’t feasible to live on the knife-edge of thrill and excitement. Oh sure, I know there are adrenaline junkies, and they look and sound like that’s all they live for but even they must need to replenish their drained resources from time to time. On the other end of the spectrum is where we, the hoi polloi, live, where average is our happy place, where comfort zones are well-padded, right along with our waistlines. I suspect that where the problem comes in is when Jesus-redeemed folk live spiritual lives as if nothing of substance has changed for them, as if all the woes and shortcomings and fears and worries continue as before. Here’s Eugene Peterson’s response to this in his treatment of Romans 8:
‘With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, [the] fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing [us] from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.’
Maybe every time I surrender to temptation, every time I fear the storm, every time I shrink back from praying for healing or deliverance, every time I hide behind my imaginary curtain of powerlessness, Jesus shakes his head, thinking, ‘Still? Freeman, really, do you still not see all I’ve accomplished for you, what riches I’ve bequeathed to you, what gifts my Spirit has given to you? How much longer must I put up with you?’ And to this questioning, I have to plead, with that father in Scripture, ‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’ And, for the umpteenth time, he does. PD
