One of the maxims of the physical world is that an object in motion tends to stay in motion… and on the same course, unless its momentum is shifted in some way.
This is a spiritual maxim as well. We often talk about our spiritual live as “stagnating,” but the truth is that we are most often either getting closer to God… or drifting away.
In that latter case, how do we break or bend that momentum? After all, it’s a given that we don’t want to just surrender to it.
A decade or more ago, during the period when I first jotted those notes and questions above (likely during a sermon at Normandy Christian Church) I would have said: What we need to do is break the momentum by remembering our basic spiritual disciplines, returning to fellowship, Bible study, and prayer. I also would have been forgetting the basic spiritual lesson I learned in 1993-1994: that, whatever problem I am currently experiencing, whatever I am currently dissatisfied with, the problem is me. And if the problem is me, how can I fix myself through my own efforts?
Today I would say: We don’t break our own momentum. God does, through His Spirit. So the question changes a little; it’s not, “How do I break the momentum?” so much as, “How does God intend to break the momentum?” And the fact is that God tends to break momentum in much more radical and painful ways than we are wont to do ourselves.
We tend to think of tweaking. God tends to think of transformation.
We want to blow on a rolling billiard ball. God wants a Tom Cruise Color of Money break.
The question really is: Do we want what God wants?
Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new. God has done it all! He sent Christ to make peace between himself and us, and he has given us the work of making peace between himself and others. What we mean is that God was in Christ, offering peace and forgiveness to the people of this world. And he has given us the work of sharing his message about peace. We were sent to speak for Christ, and God is begging you to listen to our message. We speak for Christ and sincerely ask you to make peace with God. (2 Corinthians 5:17-20, CEV)
My first reaction is to disagree on the basis of who’s responsible for changing momentum. But I can’t believe that I have the power to change direction without the help of God’s Spirit and His work on my soul. Spiritual growth ALWAYS requires a change of direction, if not momentum; they are are inextricably linked. So if I need to change my direction, the Spirit has to guide me. If I need a shift in momentum to grow in the knowledge of God and His truth, I need His Spirit to give me a boost.
So it seems that as much as I’d like to continue disagreeing with you out of devil’s advocacy, I have to admit, there’s no change in direction or momentum without intervention by God.
Thanks for the thought-provoking challenge to my paradigm. Something shifted–must be the Spirit!
Thanks for the encouragement, wifelet. As I noted… I didn’t come to the same conclusion when I wrote the initial note years ago. The evidence of how God has worked in your life (and in mine) over the last decade has persuaded me, however. As much as I might like to take credit for remaking myself between 1993 and 1998, I can see now that it was all driven by the Spirit.
There’s a danger, of course, in making personal experience normative for others; but in this case, I think the general application is pretty sound. It squares completely with Scripture.
You know, this is such an important lesson when dealing with each other. I have a tendency to be angry at my husband’s lack of change in certain areas, all the while full well knowing it took years for me to change some of those very same things.
Furthermore, to fully acknowledge that God was the author of that change is somewhat frustrating. Not because I’m not grateful for his changing me after 5 or 10 years of prayer, but because my husband has NOT changed with the same amount of prayer. Why couldn’t we grow together? And why not him first if he is the spiritual head of the home?
In short, it’s hard to accept that my spouse may not be changing because it is God’s divine purpose that he change later, or possibly never at all. It is hard to leave that matter in God’s hands and trust Him to work out the details of the task he has given me, regardless of where my spouse stands in the spiritual spectrum of maturity. Or another way to put it, it sucks to be the girl under the authority of a man God has not opted transform yet.
So my only recourse is to trust God regardless of the circumstance. To trust him both for my own life’s direction, and also for the promised restoration and healing for my husband.
And maybe that’s the point of the delay.
Yes, perhaps that is the point of the delay. What you have to to learn is different from what your husband has to learn… and how could you learn to trust God with certain things if he handed them to you instantly?
As a side note, I imagine that Jenn can sympathize with you. There as an extended period during our marriage when my spiritual development was quite fallow while she was growing at leaps and bounds. She was quite frustrated at my lack of spiritual headship.
Well, that’s encouraging to hear! Not because I didn’t believe God had a plan before, but because so much of the enemy’s input is negative, always calling into question God’s plan, surfacing doubt, creating dissension in my own mind about what (or more likely whom) to believe. I think his plan is to get me looking at the circumstances and try to rationalize them. And when they don’t line up or carry promise, to make me doubt God and his ability to come through. As if man’s will is somehow sovereign over God’s. As if when God decided to truly reveal himself any human could resist (I’m thinking Paul on the road to Damascus, the prophet Isaiah, John at the revelation, and many others.) All are smitten by his holiness, grace, and power.
I feel like in the last two years as he has been training me for ministry, I’ve seen one tiny fracture of light from his glory and that one occurrence still awes me. As do the ripples from it…I believe that in the year to come I will really take hold of him when I let go of my vices and, as you two have put it, allow him to change the momentum and direction of my life entirely.
Do you think total surrender speeds up the process? Or better said, that once He initiates change, our obedience and enthusiasm work together with his sovereignty to expedite the change he started? Do we have some part in it? I know that there have been times when I had great enthusiasm and obedience, but he did not move me forward at the pace I desired. He held me back until the foundations hardened. Only when his work was fully complete did we ever move on. So how much part do we really even have in sanctification?
”He who began a God work in you will be faithful to complete it.” Not…he who began a God work in you will hand off the baton and let you finish it your way…
I love that last bit, Melinda!
Yes, I think we cooperate with the Spirit in working our the completion of what God began. Be we are so temporal, and He is so atemporal, that our perception of what is going on and how it happens is hopelessly skewed. I’m sure it’s a chicken-AND-egg thing, and we get hung up in having to know which part comes first!