Adulting Made Easy: Psalms 31

 

Psalms 31

The goodness of the Lord is never ending and He remains a refuge in dark times.

I made the comment the other night on our men’s group chat that pastors have a tendency to make serving the Lord sound easy. I wasn’t being nasty or calling them out, but most of us in that group were raised in a mainstream, born-again Christian church.

 When we are young we don’t have a lot of experience in tough life lessons (there are exceptions). Whether a painful divorce or an addiction to drugs and alcohol, we hadn’t fully experienced some of the chaos of life. The pain is often a result of our poor choices in life but not always. Sometimes others bring about misery that affects those closest to them.

There is a childlike understanding of the how the world operates that eventually dies in us when hardship creeps in. The scriptures give us all the answers we need but how often do we really sit down and absorb them like we should? The Psalms are full of desperation and cries to God for deliverance. It takes going through real struggles to really feel his heart and cling to the Father for help. That desperation doesn’t ring true for kids the way it does for adults.

“I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind; I am like a broken vessel. For I hear the slander of many; fear is on every side; while they take counsel together against me, they scheme to take away my life.” (verse 12-13)

Much of that is specific to the weight of responsibility that comes from leadership. But it’s not just leaders that understand opposition, when we believe God for anything in faith the enemy will attack.

The ‘easy’ walk message with Christ is probably unique to the particular brand of protestant, faith centric religion I’m familiar with. But it’s also the way I used to understand the message of the gospel and not necessarily the intent from the speaker.

 The “Christian” designation is hardly telling of your belief structure. If you were fortunate enough to hear sound teaching from the scriptures at all, consider yourself blessed. But a lot of denominations focus on the suffering and struggle of a walk with Christ to the extent it feels like all there is. Which begs the question, what’s the point of believing in a resurrected Christ, Who conquered sin and death? Where is our hope in a life of victory over Satan’s attack?

Sometimes the straight scripture is muddled from teacher to student, a great example of why we need to read it for ourselves.  

When we move from adolescence into adulthood we hopefully “put away childish things” like Paul says in I Corinthians 13:11. We put away the gospel too, which we never truly learned, as if it were an inspirational book that held no clarity for our modern dilemmas. And as much as we want to throw some blame towards our childhood faith, we never grasped the true nature of faith.

We wanted the victory without the war.

We never read and believed it because we didn’t want to do the work of faith. We didn’t plant the seeds and water them. We didn’t speak the scriptures and put aside the creeping doubt that snuck in like an invasive weed. We didn’t hold fast to that truth when the drought came and the wind, threatening to destroy our promise from God. We didn’t plant ourselves, tree like, near the rivers and develop a root system that would sustain us through the dry times. Fortunately for Christians it’s never too late to start. Some just take longer to put away the toys.

 King David writes from a place of experience.

“I will be glad and rejoice in Your mercy, For You have considered my trouble; You have known my soul in adversities, and have not shut me up into the hand of the enemy; You have set my feet in a wide place.” (verse 7-8)

When churches teach success and victory it’s because that’s what Christ’s life was about. His victory over death, sin and disease is our victory too. But we need to do the work of reading God’s Word and applying it to our life. We need to know that ‘wide place’ that David knew. We need to know how to talk about victory and success in this life because we’ve seen our Heavenly Father bring us through the dark times.