Want to Calm Down?
These are difficult days for faith. Sometimes it is hard to see what God is doing. Religion seems divisive. Many have been wounded by the church. A lot of people seem hostile or apathetic about spiritual things. Is God losing? It is easy to feel that way. And it can stress you out.
One underutilized resource when we are anxious is perspective. When we are stressed, we often just see the problem. And we tend to miss resources that are right in front of us.
One of the amazing resources we have as Christians is history. We have a rich (with both good and bad) 2000 plus year history. The church has survived through plagues, wars, terrible leaders, schisms, misplaced allegiances, hypocrisy and much more. We have thousands of years of lessons teaching us how to walk faithfully and answer the questions and objections of those outside the church.
As Christians, we have a legacy of faith and failures to learn from and be inspired by. God’s people have been here before. Paul boldly proclaimed the gospel to Gentiles even while others in the church opposed him. Augustine penned his great theological works while Rome was falling apart. Luther proclaimed justification by faith to a church that had grown corrupt and spiritually dull. William Wilberforce relied on his Christian faith to abolish slavery.
We also have the resource of a global perspective. Jesus told us to take the gospel to the ends of the world. The church may be struggling here, but in other parts of the world, like Africa and Asia, it is exploding. I visited the largest church in the world at the time when I adopted my son Matt in Seoul Korea in 2005. I heard one report say that if you took all the Christians that have ever lived before today and added them all together it would be LESS than the number of Christians currently alive today. (That is probably because there are so many people alive today, but still……).
Is your faith taking a beating? Look backwards, remember all that God has done through His people. Look around, God is still working out there.
The Christian faith is a resilient one. Because our God rose from the grave. And that should help all of us calm down.
God bless,
The Donohues
