Giving Credit Where Credit's Due
The whole concept of giving credit and thanks to God seems simple at first glance, but often can be more complicated than we would like it to be. The ten lepers had it easy. Jesus strolled by, saw their plight, and healed them of their disease. Sure, only one in the exuberance of the moment remembered to return and thank Jesus, but they all knew where to give the credit.
Sometimes it's not that easy. When God sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the crowds thought the disciples were drunk. What was really God's work got attributed to baser causes. Then there are tensions amongst churches these days. Many of us involved in the emerging church and serving in ministries have been told that we actually are in service to Satan. According to these critics, any growth or blessing of our ministries is just Satan's attempts to destroy the true church. Of course, we view it differently, but it highlights the human tendency to attribute to God the things we understand and already support.
I wonder about our haste to assume that when God gets involved in what we are doing it automatically means what we are doing will succeed. I've heard many Christians blame failure and mishaps on Satan, but I often get uncomfortable with that stance. What if it was really all God and we were just meant to fail?
My favorite example of this, which I may have mentioned here before, is what occurred at a youth ministry conference I attended a few years ago. This was one of those things where students are taught the "correct" formula for sharing their faith. They are forced to do street evangelism in downtown Chicago – using surveys to trick innocent bystanders into saying "the prayer." They also had to choose four "unsaved" (or at least not conservative evangelical) friends or family members to pray for that week. By the end of the week they had to write four letters to these friends explaining why they thought said friend needed Jesus and how they could get Jesus. I found it all a bit creepy and contrived – but was of course told that any reservations I had was just Satan trying to hinder the gospel. In fact there was a lot of talk about Satan hindering this endeavor. These letters were mailed from the conference and the leaders spent a long time telling us how fervently we needed to pray over the letters because apparently every year Satan manages to prevent nearly half of them from being delivered. Now I realize that lack of deliverability could easily be due to reluctant youth simply putting false addresses on the letters, but I also was a tad miffed at how much power the leaders were attributing to Satan in this whole thing. We had prayed to God to guide this process, why not trust that God was doing exactly what we had asked of him? The leaders were so convinced of the rightness of this out of the blue evangelism tactic, that I don't think that they ever considered that some of the letters might be more of a hindrance than a help to the spread of the gospel and may have destroyed good relationships. Perhaps God knew that the best thing was for those letters to simply disappear never to be seen by their intended audience.
I don't deny Spiritual Warfare, but I am also uncomfortable with giving Satan or the forces of evil so much credit all the time. I'm not saying that God is in the habit of doing evil, just that we shouldn't be so quick to assume that if things don't happen to go our way that evil must be afoot. I don't mean to come across as wishy-washy "good or bad it must be God" either. I'm just learning to see God as bigger than I ever imagined – and that means that I have to be willing to see God work outside of my ideas regarding what I want him to be doing. Plus I've become ever more wary of calling the work of God satanic. If Jesus wondered why the nine other lepers didn't return to thank him, I'm sure he would have bigger questions for those of us who have rejected his blessings as the work of the devil. But maybe that's just me.
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I couldn't agree more.
Well said.
I share some of the same concerns. From what I believe, Satan is under the power of God. So, if Satan does impede our work/ministry, the underlying question we need to ask is, "Why has God let Satan do this?" Only when we start reflecting on the divine purpose behind events (good and bad) can we progress in faith.
yep that satantic postal service has a lot to answer for! Of course who knows those letters might just be delivered at a much better time or never at all – what if it was God stopping the process cos we were forcing the pace rather than waiting for him????
Great questions and helpful thoughts. Whenever I think too hard about these issues my head starts to hurt. You get pretty quickly into deep waters of sovereignty and free will – what does God allow and then bring good out of, vs. what does he purposefully do for his own good reasons, and is there a difference?
Well, the problem is that you are smart and thoughtful, you see. Bad news for you.
I say that with a touch of humor, but I'm 45, a minister's son, and been involved with the church my whole life. And there is a lot of weak and uncritical thinking going on.
I'll try not to hijack this and be short: My church is very small, in part because we do church in ways that seem right to us. But not many want to join us. Have we succeeded or failed? If we reached out more, perhaps others would have found us. On the other hand, the introverted and unchurched people who have found us might not have been involved with any other church.
I think that God's ideas of what are successful are likely so far beyond and outside of our minds that we're better off doing what we think is right and leaving the rest to God.
Karl – I think we can never fully know the answers to most of those questions. I've not one to see God manipulating every action, but when I do consider it, I'd rather trust that God is in control.
RLP – We are facing a very similar situation in our church plant right now. At this point by next summer serious changes will need to be made (possibly even closing the church) because we are so small. For awhile I struggled with the "we are failures" for not making the church grow thing. But the church has done amazing things in the lives of the people who are involved. This was what they needed during these few years – how can I call what has happened a failure when it has served and helped people? Just because it didn't fit one particular mold of success doesn't mean that God isn't using it for what we wants it to be.
I suppose you could justify just about anything that way. Yuck.
I think that the kinds of problems you describe arise from a theology that does not take into account the real agency of human beings, the actual power for choice people with normal faculties have, and the reality of how all those choices and their consequences work out. I don't believe God is the Chess Master in the sky. He made us in his image, and that includes, superbly, the ability to love; and the root of love is the ability to choose.
Why do we want/need to deal with the responsibility for our own decisions? Well, I have some ideas, but I don't want or need to fill up your combox!
sorry, that should be "Why do we NOT want/need to deal…"
That is creepy.
Also when you take this viewpoint, WE become the ones fighting the spiritual battle – when we are so not equipped to do that. We also take all the power away from God. Some of the best lessons I've ever learned are in the failures – and I know that He was leading me through that purposefully. It wasn't an accident.
Wouldn't it be a better ploy of the enemy to give us all that we wanted all the time like spoiled little children – that we would never NEED God?
We give the enemy way too much credit.
You're right – and I'm right there with you – I want a bigger and better view of God.