Excerpted from my forthcoming book What Every Man Wishes His Father Would Have Told Him. From the chapter “Never Move Past the Gospel.”
There
will come a time, as comes in everyone’s life, when your progress is
halted by the unwelcomed barnacles that attach themselves to our
fallenness: marital strife, adultery, life-dominating sin, personal
failure, an emotional breakdown, a rebellious child, a sick spouse, the
tragic loss of a loved one, unconfessed sin, depression, anger,
financial ruin, the ubiquitous test result for cancer which takes a
brutal seven days to come back, etc. Everyone eventually gets to
helplessness. In that moment, if you are like the rest of us, the last
place you will turn will be to Jesus Christ. The Gospel, streaming
invisibly as a ticker across the bottom of your life, will seem
powerless to affect the more “complex” issues of your existence. You
will immediately assume your modern predicaments require more
sophisticated solutions than the Gospel. The Gospel is comforting, but
ineffective deep into the thick of life.
In
the shadow of the unexpected you will be half insulted at the
suggestion of the Gospel’s sufficiency. You will most likely turn away
from the Gospel, not turn toward it. I know this makes little sense,
but it’s usually true. Standing under your worst moments, turning to
the Gospel will sound like the naïve counsel of a caring grandmother. A
veritable milk and cookies answer. The stuff of flannel boards and
nursery rhymes. A vast oversimplification of your refined pain.
“Christ and Him crucified” will appear as nothing more than a tattered
cliché. But, such is what men (even regenerate ones at times) have
always said about the cross – it is foolishness. Continue Reading...
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