Is it All Worth it?
Let’s be real, life as a Christian can be tough. Sometimes you are on a mountain and so close to God and life couldn’t get better. But other times you’re in the valley, God seems so distant, and life couldn’t get any worse. The great theologian Martin Luther said that “They gave out Savior a crown of thorns, why should we expect anything less”. So being is Christian is tough in the respect that people hate us. But life as a Christian is tough in another regard. We have been set free from our sin, and yes and amen to that! But we are stuck in the time between Christ’s saving death and His coming again and the beginning of the reign of the Kingdom that will never end.
New Desires Bring a Struggle
This is tough in a couple of different ways. With being a saved child of God comes new desires of our heart. Once we have been saved we desire to follow Christ and abstain from the things of this world. We now have a completely different attitude towards our sin. We are no longer apathetic towards sinning but we hate our sin and want so badly to keep from it. And thank and praise God for our newly given desires to fight our sin and seek Christlikeness, but there does lie a problem. We want so badly to grow and avoid sinning because we have been saved but sadly it’s impossible. Never will we be sin free until “He who began a good work in [us] bring[s] it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6). We are saved and thus have received the Spirit, but sadly these bodies we still live in are fallen, and are of the flesh meaning that we inevitably will sin. Now before I move on let me say that I am not saying that since we are going to continue to stumble we might as well not fight temptation. We do need to fight temptation; we are required to carry our crosses. But I am also not saying that by fighting our sin we are more loved by God or more saved. We are saved by Grace alone and this will inspire the desire to pursue Christlikeness.
The Struggle
We have all heard the saying “struggle with sin”. And that is the problem I am referring to in the last paragraph. We want to avoid sin, but because of our flesh we can’t. And this becomes disheartening at times. And if I am honest sometimes the struggle is so intense that it makes me wonder if I should even continue battling my sin. I wonder if it’s even worth it at times because it would be a lot easier to just give up fighting and let my flesh dictate how I live. This weekend I was thinking about this paradoxical thing that happens where we want to be sin free so much but alas cannot. I asked myself “I have been freed by the death of Christ, and I now have the desire to pursue Christlikeness, but to no avail I continue to stumble. How is this freedom? If I'm freed why is there still struggle?!” Now before people get worried about if I’m thinking about dropping Jesus moving to Mexico and getting a tattoo that says YOLO let me reassure you that this is not the case. In fact as I was sitting in Nathan Cachairas’ living room thinking and praying about the struggle of pursuing Christlikeness and living in a fallen body I had a thought (by the way I think that God speaks to me through thoughts I have so yea) that lead me to a conclusion. And the thought takes us back to the Old Testament specifically the Exodus of Israel.
The Wilderness
If you look at the struggle between pursing Godliness and sinning it looks a lot like the struggle that the Israelites had when they were in the wilderness. God had just saved them from the Egyptians; they were finally free and for the most part enjoying life. That is for about one chapter; after they cross the Red Sea and start walking for three days they get thirsty and need some water and realize this exodus thing might be a little tougher then they first thought. Then “on the 15th day of the 2ndmonth after they had departed from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 16:1) Israel starts grumbling because they didn’t have enough food and really start questioning this whole leaving Egypt business. This sort of episode happens several times throughout the Exodus. The people wonder if it was all really worth it. They ask over and over again “How much better is it that we die here in the wilderness instead of back in Egypt”. And understandably so; people are dying from things that they didn’t in Egypt, they for the most part struggle with food and water, and they spend 40 years in the wilderness. They look back at the life they had in Egypt: sure they were slaves, but they had more than enough food, plenty of water, and besides having no freedom their quality of life wasn’t so bad. Then they look on the “freedom” they had in the wilderness, struggling and dying in the wilderness and wonder if it’s really even freedom since it’s such a struggle and if it’s really worth it or should they just go back to slavery. But they have resolve, and they keep going on, they keep listening to Moses, yes they mess up and make some idols along the way but they persevere and keep on going. Why? Not because it was easy, not because it was fun, and definitely not because it was what they thought it would be. They keep going because they see the end result, the promise land. They keep going because they owe that much to the God that freed them. And they keep going because the God that lovingly freed them tells them to because He knows what is best for them and what He has planned for them.
Our Wilderness Journey
This Old Testament story embodies the exact same thing that our present day struggle does. We too have been freed from slavery (sin), we too are journeying through our own form of wilderness (fighting sin), and we too are looking forward to our promised land, the Kingdom of God. But along the way even though we desire to follow God’s commands, we will inevitably build some idols that we will have to work at to destroy. Along our journey it will be easy to question if dealing with the struggle is worth it. We will be tempted to look back at our old life of slavery and see that we could do what we wanted. We will be tempted to look back and say “sure we were slaves to our sin, but there was no struggle because we didn’t know any differently”. This struggle between the pursuit of Christlikeness and sin, this wilderness we will be in until the day of Christ will be a crazy one. There will be times of lush grass land where food and water abound and all seems to be going great in our journey with Christ. But there will be times of arid dryness; where the valley is dark and the cannons are wider. There will be times when we wonder what we have gotten ourselves into and even wonder where God is and question whether or not we should just turn back.
We Mustn’t Loose Heart
But like the Israelites we must have resolve. We must find heart and carry on in this journey. We must continue to battle sin and pursue Christlikeness. Not because it is easy, not because it will be fun, and not because it is what we think it should/would be. We must continue onward because we see and long for the day when the Kingdom is established on Earth and we want to be a part of it. We must continue on because we owe it to God, not because we can earn our salvation but because at the Cross we see what Christ has done for us and we now desire to give to Him all we have. We must persevere because our loving Father knows that it is what is best for us. We must do it because it is what God has planned for us. We must push on with all the zealousness we can muster because the pursuit of Holiness is what God has called all of His children to and if we are His children then we will obey; knowing that one day our King will come again and establish his Kingdom on Earth forever and all of our struggles will be over, and we will be able to take part in rewards of keeping the Faith and battling onward. We will reach the promise land and will “consider the trials of this present time not worth comparing to the glories to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).
So is the battle of pursuing Christlikeness and sin treacherous? Of course it is, but is it worth it? More than we could ever imagine.
-Zach Hollifield