Restoring The Church
Change Your Mind
October 2008, Number 38
Why do you doubt ?
On spiritual health and wholeness
(Part five of a six part series on questions God asks in Scripture that can change your life.)
One of the most popular (and so, disturbing) game shows on television is NBC’s Deal or No Deal. Have you seen it?
The game goes like this. A contestant is faced with a set of twenty-six briefcases held by underdressed models. Each case contains a hidden cash value from one cent to $1,000,000. At the start of the game, Howie, the host, explains the rules and asks the contestant to pick a case he or she hopes contains the most valuable prize. The contestant then begins choosing the other cases one at a time to remove from play. When Howie says, “open the case,” the model opens the briefcase and the amount inside is revealed. An electronic tally board keeps track of which amounts have been eliminated and what remain. Periodically, the contestant must decide whether to continue or quit the game based upon cash offered from the banker, a mysterious man who sits in a shadowed room overlooking the stage. After a case is opened, the phone rings. Howie answers, listens, then conveys the banker’s offer, finally asking the contestant to decide the now famous words, “Deal or no deal?” As the game progresses, drama builds, options dwindle and the odds are calculated. The contestant wants to win the most money. The banker wants to give the least away. A few select family members provide advice while Howie provides encouragement and a studio audience screams “deal” or “no deal.”
Some version of Deal or No Deal airs in 68 countries around the world. The show has attracted attention from the media as well as study from economic experts who are fascinated by how people make decisions about money. What interests (and disturbs) me is how closely the game resembles a transactional view of spirituality.
Let’s make a deal
A transactional spirituality goes like this:
I am the subject of my thoughts most waking minutes of every day. I think about how I feel, what I need to do, how I can make myself or my circumstances better, and how to have some measure of control over past, present and future events. Sometimes my thoughts lead to joy, sometimes to doubts and fear.
My needs and desires, if you will, are tucked into so many briefcases I must discover or discard. Each demand action, decision and choice. What do I hold unto? What do I let go of? I must make the right choice and do the right thing. But how?
“Faith is the answer,” I’m told. “Just ask God.” Yet God lives in shadows high above. How does one do business with a silhouette? (Is He real? Is He really for me?) Ah, but there is good news. The phone rings. Jesus will help me negotiate with God.
The dictionary defines a transaction as "a reciprocal exchange,” or an “agreement between a buyer and a seller for the exchange of goods or services for payment." Transactions involve negotiation and if-then propositions, “if you agree to do such and such, then I will give you so and so.” Transactional spirituality is the belief that God offers me some good based upon some action I make toward Him. Of course, some form of transactional language can be found in Scripture, particularly in God’s covenantal relationship with Israel and the Gospel narratives about discipleship. Clearly, God promises salvation to those who repent, believe and obey. The word “redemption,” for example, has economic roots infused with spiritual meaning. However, the thrust of Scripture is always God initiating spiritual relationship, not a transaction, and certainly not a negotiation initiated by us. Yet today, in our highly individualistic, hyper spiritualized and capitalistic culture we’ve gotten this backwards. We infuse the spiritual with the economic. This has reduced evangelical Christianity, in some circles, to little more than Deal or No Deal, what we can get from God.
If-then spirituality
How much of your faith is if, then? If you heal me Lord . . . If you make my spouse love me . . . If we could just sell the house . . . If you would make this job come through . . .
Think about how you pray, who is the subject of your prayers? When crisis comes, do you bargain with God? We may joke about winning the lottery, but are we secretly hoping for a bail-out? Now, consider the practices and disciplines in your life? Is your goal greater intimacy with God or improvement of self? In other words, be truthful, are you more a consumer of goods than disciple of Christ?
Here is a simple way to test our actions and motivations: Ask yourself, “Who is the subject and what is the object of my prayers?” If the subject is “me,” not God, and the object is “my need” not His will, then I am moving away from God, not closer.
Where are you spiritually?
Spiritual health and wholeness is not what we profess to believe, but how we think and act. It is revealed most in the midst of difficulty, doubt and fear.
During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Matthew 14:25-32
What was Peter thinking when he asked Jesus to call him? Was it impulse or act of bravado? Jesus had just spoken, “Take courage” and “don’t be afraid” based upon three key words, “It is I.” Yet, Peter’s question undermines the premise, “Lord, if it is you . . .” Propositional faith invokes an iffy god.
The father of a boy possessed by an evil spirit rushes up to Jesus and exclaims, “From childhood the spirit has been trying to kill him by throwing him into the fire or into the water . . . if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” Jesus answers, “‘If you can’?” “Everything is possible for him who believes.” Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” Mark 9:22-24
Spiritual maturity is overcoming the kind of agnosticism that pervades conditional belief. Belief in circumstances is no belief. Belief in courage is no belief. Belief even in God’s ability to act is no belief at all. These are variations of the same propositional game, deal or no deal. Spiritual health and wholeness requires placing one’s trust simply and entirely in the One who says, “It is I.”
After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.” He also said to him, “I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.” Genesis 15:1,7
And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Exodus 3:12,4
When the earth and all its people quake, it is I who hold its pillars firm. Selah Psalm 75:3
It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts. Isaiah 45:12
Therefore my people will know my name; therefore in that day they will know that it is I who foretold it. Yes, it is I.” Isaiah 52:6
“See, it is I who created the blacksmith who fans the coals into flame and forges a weapon fit for its work. And it is I who have created the destroyer to work havoc; Isaiah 54:16
Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson? Who is this, robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength? “It is I, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save.” Isaiah 63:1
I will not look on you with pity or spare you; I will repay you in accordance with your conduct and the detestable practices among you. Then you will know that it is I the LORD who strikes the blow. Ezekiel 7:9
Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” Luke 24:39
Peter offers the proposition and Jesus says, “Come.” Peter’s if became then.
Sometimes God grants our feeble requests, but for altogether different purposes than we ask. Sometimes illness is healed, a marriage is restored or the home is sold. At other times, the “offer” returns less than expected. Disease spreads, divorce comes or the bank forecloses. Transactional spirituality mistakes the former for faith and the latter for fate, yet both rise little higher than superstition. The wind and waves reveal our self-deception every time.
What is your storm? Jesus shouts over wind and waves to you, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
Fear is to courage as doubt is to faith. Fear and doubt reveal our false gods, the limit to our feeble assumptions, expectations and vision. Fear and doubt reveal our preoccupation with human knowledge and personal need. Peter spent his life on the water. He knew the unforgiving law of the sea. “Come,” Jesus says. So he steps out and walks between faith and reality. But, “when he saw the wind, he was afraid and began to sink.”
What do you do when belief is shown for the unbelief it is, sinking miles off of sure? Could it be that God is waiting, with hands outstretched, for you to cry out like Peter, “Lord, save me?” God wants us to face our fears and to “doubt our doubts.”• That is, God desires that we be changed in heart and mind and soul, so that, by becoming His new creation, we have the capacity to grow in ever increasing, and never ending relationship with Jesus Christ and His Kingdom family. The outcome is not what God wants out of us. The bottom line is not the main thing. There is no end product. We must renounce our transactional idolatry.
What Jesus wanted Peter to know and for you and me to embody is a faith in God, not circumstances, based upon Who He is, not what we want. Perhaps it was Peter sinking in the storm that James pictured when he wrote, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.”
Christianity is a faith of hearing, not seeing. What we see we think we can control, consume and transact. But hearing requires trust in the midst of fear and doubt. Jesus calls us out of our temporal knowledge and limited sight into a life governed by a promise that cannot be proved except through obedience. Christian spirituality is the capacity to trust and to obey in the absence of proof. It is absolute surrender. God uses our fears and doubts to move us to brokenness so we can truly cry out, “Lord, save me from my petty self and my deal or no deal idolatry.”
Jesus asks, “why do you doubt?” Spiritual health and wholeness requires that we walk by the Spirit, as with Christ, through desire and storm.
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law . . . But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Gal 5:16-25
Why do you doubt?
--Jim Van Yperen
Footnotes:
• Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Dutton, New York, NY, 2008
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