Resilient Faith (eBook)

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Where Troubles Take Us

Learning to Retreat Like Jesus

. . . Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

Hebrews 12:2

Sometimes when someone asks me how I’m doing, I (Sarah) answer, “I’m fine,” when I’m not. That might be because it’s the wrong time or place or even the wrong person to talk to. But sometimes it is because I just don’t want to face the issues all around me. I don’t want to expose myself to other people’s help. I kid myself that I’ve got my own strategies for dealing with my problems. I think that I’m all right on my own.

Pressure Points

There was a time when my friend Nell thought exactly the same. While drowning in the demands of college deadlines, she told me she was fine and put on a fake smile. She stopped replying to my texts and didn’t pick up the phone. She didn’t only push me away, she pushed the God she loved away too. She couldn’t concentrate when she tried to pray, so she stopped praying. Reading her Bible was overwhelming, so she stopped that too. Still, she turned up at church and Bible study. She knew all the right answers to give in discussion and polite conversation. Ask her how she was doing, and the reply would come back, “I’m all right . . . really. How are you?” But inside, she grew more and more distressed.

Nell’s strategy of masking her difficulties by smiling wasn’t working for her. She had felt that time was what she needed and that being on her own would help. She thought that if she could get through this crisis on her own, it would be easier and less messy. But her experience of retreating from church friends and the Lord proved scary. In the end, she came to realize that separation is death-like. Retreating into yourself and relying on yourself, she discovered, can feel deathly.

How Jesus Responded to Pressure

It was good news for Nell to discover that Jesus retreated at times, but that his retreats weren’t about panic or self-reliance. In Matthew 13–14, we hear about some of the pressures Jesus was under. First, he was in Nazareth, his hometown, but although people were amazed at his teaching, they rejected it and took offense (Matt. 13:53–58). Second, he heard that his cousin, John the Baptist, had been beheaded by Herod, and that Herod was now terrified that Jesus was actually John brought back to life (Matt. 14:1–12). Rejection, grief, and perhaps concern about Herod’s next move must have created the temptation for Jesus to despair. We know that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness (see Matt. 4:1–11). But think about this: he faced the human realities of stress and trouble and sorrow throughout his life. Temptation for him must have been ever present. He was fully human in every way. And so, he reacted to these pressures in a fully human, fully sinless way by retreating into relationship.

In Matthew 14:13, Jesus “withdrew . . . to a desolate place by himself” and, as he was interrupted, later he went farther, escaping “up on the mountain by himself to pray . . . he was there alone” (14:23). Matthew couldn’t be clearer about Jesus’s retreat to be away from people to be with his God, on whom, in his human nature, he depended. Exposed on the mountain in all his human vulnerability, Jesus could pour out his heart and be understood. He could be comforted through knowing his Father.

Of course, intimate dependence and comfort is what you want when you’re stressed, isn’t it? That is what we all yearn for. And it is obvious that seeking God’s help is what we should do, isn’t it? Apart from all the other useful strategies we will take time to explore in the course of this book, taking time to rest consciously in God’s love has to be number one. There are no substitutes.

Does this truth sting a bit? Perhaps (as I do) you feel regret or sadness or even guilt as you see Jesus’s perfect response to pressure, and as you reflect on your own kind of retreat. Rather than retreating into relationship with our heavenly Father, we so often hide in distraction and worse. Whether your go-to distraction is binge-watching, binge-eating, compulsive shopping, or something darker, or the (often, but not always) healthier options of fiction, gaming, crafting, social-media, or exercise—it still isn’t prayer, or at least, not in-depth prayer. The issue, very often, for us Christians isn’t that we don’t know what to do, but that we don’t do what we know is best.

Turning Back—to Him

What then are we to do?

Reflect for a moment on why Jesus would have journeyed to the mountaintop in the dark. God is love: the Son and Father and the Holy Spirit are always one in essence and united in joyful, delighting, superabounding love. Now incarnated in a limited body, Jesus went to spend time with his heavenly Father, to find rest in this love. He did it because it was the best thing for a tempted and pressured man to do.

This loving retreat, what one theologian has called “a perfect openness,”2 was an expression of obedience. As a perfect man, Jesus obeyed his Father by remaining in his love (John 15:10). To love God, for him (and for us as his followers) means seeking to obey; to obey means persevering in love. So often, the right-thing-to-do seems to us like drudgery. Dull but necessary, like cleaning the bathroom or drinking plenty of water, writing thank-you notes or checking the oil in the car. But Jesus shows us here that to obey is to love. He obeyed because he loves his Father, and he loves us. Now that is a remarkable thought! Here I am at my desk, typing on a laptop in a Yorkshire town on a snowy February evening. Jesus walked up a mountain in the warmth of a Galilean spring two thousand years ago, and he did it out of love for me. This loving obedience of his, as he retreated to wrestle in prayer, was part of the righteous life he lived that I and so many millions more might know him now and into eternity.

In Romans 5:19, Paul tells us that “through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous” (NIV). This means that the minute-by-minute obedience of Jesus’s earthly life, and the ultimate obedience of dying on the cross, have changed the identity of all who have been joined to him by faith. If you’ve put your trust in him, you’re joined to him, and if you’re joined to him, you’re given his righteousness. It’s as if you now have an ID card stamped “righteous.” All the boxes you’ve ticked and those you’ve left blank are now superimposed by that stamp. Righteous.

So how does this help you when you yet again turn your eyes away from the Bible on the shelf or ignore the texts and calls of your Christian brothers and sisters? Well, for a start, it tells you that’s not who you are. Christians have been called righteous. And to be righteous is to be connected and dependent, not disconnected and self-reliant.

This means that turning to Jesus in trial or in worry or even in boredom is to walk through a door he has already opened for you by his own obedience. You might feel the battle to concentrate or struggle to be honest about the state you’ve slipped into but turning to Jesus means entering his loving embrace. Jesus did the right things you couldn’t and wouldn’t do, and this means that now you can take that step into conscious dependence on him. How do you start? Perhaps by confessing the independence that has kept you from coming to him and the desire you have to keep away from God and his holiness. You must ask him to give you a hunger to keep turning back to him and for the day-by-day strength to form new habits of reliance.

Nell’s recognition that separation was doing her no good was the start of rediscovering her strength in the Lord. It wasn’t an easy start, and there have been quite a few backward steps and pauses in her journey so far. Through God’s help, she’s learning to keep retreating to God, to speak honestly with her Lord about where she is. That step has led to her speaking honestly to a few other people too. Knowing their support, she has found that her practical problems aren’t so overwhelming as they once seemed.

Reflect

1.  In what ways do you hide from difficulties? What are some habits that you have developed as a way of avoiding dependence on others or on the Lord?

2.  Reflect prayerfully on these extraordinary verses from Hebrews:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Heb. 4:14–16 NIV)

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. (Heb. 5:7 NIV)