You are visitor: In Scotland the time is:
Christian Network

Facing reality is sometimes hard, but living in unreality is worse. The Christian journey is about moving from the unreal to the real. We are born into a world that calls delusion truth. In fact it calls delusion truth so effectively that at one time many of us fully believed we could have a healthy, happy and meaningful life while leaving the God of the Universe completely out of the picture. Only eating the horrible fruit harvested from living in estrangement from Him brought us to our senses, and to our rebirth. Part of that rebirth was seeing ultimate reality, His ultimate reality, for the first time in our lives.

But some of us have been to a place where, after enduring terrible pain we feel we did not deserve, we have been tempted to blame God and walk away from Him. For a moment we think of our old way of existing, as being somehow easier or better than facing the daily struggles that are part and parcel of the Christian walk. So we look back at the days we knew before Jesus came into our lives imagining something better was there for us. Usually such musings, thank God, do not last very long. This is because they wilt when we also remember the terrible meaninglessness of those days.

Such meaninglessness is the product of living in a "reality" that does not include God. We may have had money, power, pleasure or fame but it was in a spiritual vacuum and all these things ultimately led us deeper into the lie of the serpent, and into our pit. The serpent’s deception was simple yet profound, he told us we did not need God to find meaning, purpose and blessing in our lives. When we, in the guise of Adam and Eve, believed him our once real world become horribly unreal, though our fallen hearts learned to think otherwise. Only divine intervention could restore us to true sanity, which we mistakenly came to think was already ours. The blood of the Son of Man has achieved many things for us within the greater rubric of salvation. One of these things was the opening of our eyes to what is truly real, and always has been.

Of course this opening of our eyes was just the beginning. Discovering God’s truth is part of the grand pilgrimage we walk out in this life. Such discovery is progressive. In fact it is an ongoing process. This is why we say that no one believer has a monopoly on truth. There is always more to find.

There is also a need to test all we have come to believe is truth, for we still live in the serpent’s neck of the woods. The Devil is forever trying to lure us back into believing the deception he has personally fathered and continues to feed to an unbelieving world. You can be sure that when those "turn back from the plow" temptations hit us Satan and his surrogates are somehow involved.

The best thing to do when such moments come is to remember what made us Christians in the first place. Before our rebirth most of us rode the lies, the unreality we believed to be real, into the pit. The darkness finally became visible as it began to suck our will to live out of our being. All of the once pleasant things in our past, things that we had made idols out of in the absence of God, ultimately dragged us to the very gates of Hell. It was then that we cried out to our Lord and exchanged the dark lies of a fallen world and fallen self for the bright, blessed truth of God and the redemption He offers. When we remember the emptiness and despair we knew and compare it to the incredible fullness and hope we have found, the past does not look as good as it first did. We realize that our temporal troubles will pass away and we will once more know the joy of His presence.

We again understand that reality, ultimate and redemptive, is only found in Him, and it is Him that we truly want.