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Christian Network

" I am not conceded, Lord, and I don’t waste my time. But I have learned to feel safe and satisfied, just like a young child on its mother’s lap." Psalm 131:1-2 (CEV)

Every time the Bible speaks of us learning to walk in some new comfort, grace or strength the anxious believer can breathe a sigh of relief. The key word here is "learning." Because we live in an instant gratification society we have come to expect that things we feel we must have must come to us in an instant. Combine this with the impatient voices that sometimes come from Evangelical pulpits urging us to change, seemingly overnight, and you have a recipe for constant frustration and fear among the more sensitive souls in our churches.

Verses like those above need to be sprinkled into sermons amidst urgent exhortations. Otherwise people will not learn a vital truth: that God rarely expects them to be transformed overnight. A recent check of a Strong’s Concordance for the King James Version of the Bible found 64 uses of words containing the root "learn" in both the Old and New Testaments. Beyond this it is evident in the very make-up of human beings that our Creator built into us a necessity to learn over time. Very little that we have achieved throughout our history as a race, both individually and corporately, has come without slow progress. While it is true that some important breakthrough in fields like the sciences have come "overnight" it is also true that those who were successful in making them always first spent years first learning about and working in their fields.

No teacher expects his students to take and pass a final exam on the first day of class. Why do we think the ultimate Teacher expects us to become spiritually mature in an instant? Part of the problem is that the impatience of our culture has subtly infiltrated the Church. The idea of gradually attaining to some good is becoming a more and more alien concept in Western society. We have become addicted to the spiritual equivalent of the get rich scheme. Just go to the altar and "surrender your life" and the unspoken implication is that the Lord will grant you peace, joy, purpose, etc. in a moment, or at least shortly thereafter. But spiritually maturity always comes through a lifetime of doggedly seeking after God and the things of God. No one becomes a seasoned Christian overnight and we should not expect anyone to.

The agent through which the modern zeitgeist of instant gratification has unwittingly become Christianized is, sadly, often the leaders who preside over everything from our Sunday services to our radio broadcasts to the authoring of the books in our bookstores. Exhortation is communicated to us far more than comfort in too much evangelical teaching today. Exhortation, in and of itself, is not an evil. What is an evil is exhortation that has more to do with frustrated pastors and speakers who do not see the life of Christ being reproduced in their listeners fast enough for their liking. Why is it that so many of our leaders are "Type A’s" who desire immediate results? Perhaps it is because we unconsciously applaud leaders who ape the world’s idea of success. Unfortunately that means rejecting the bedrock Christian principle that says true love is patient with men and woman who "but dust."

It is one thing to call on a sinning child of God to repent without delay. When a Christian is living in blatant sin immediate confrontation is often the most appropriate response. As stated, moral exhortation is not always a bad thing. But in contemporary evangelicalism there is a tendency to exhort people to change without showing them how and without telling them that real change takes time. The bottom line is that we may be saved in an instant but sanctification is a lifelong process, a process that is ordained by God. Too many believers, especially those with sensitive spirits, are being stripped of legitimate comfort and confidence in the authenticity of their Christian walk because we have publicly made a virtue of impatience. This should not be.