The Cost of the Deeper Christian Life

I loved the Lord. I spoke in tongues. I got to be president of this or that or the other, and people, and I spoke to thousands, and then all of that ended, and now nobody loves me, and everybody hates me, and I’m going to go off and eat worms. I was a member of this wonderful group, and I was an elder, and I got to be an elder. I eldered in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evenings, and boy, I really eldered a lot of people, and I laid elder on them, and it was fun. Then the church got into a fight, and I got accused of being a heretic, and they “diseldered” me, and now I’m mad, and I’ve been sitting out here for 15 years, and I’m still mad, and I’m going to keep on being mad, and I’m hurt now. I don’t like Christians, and I’m not sure I’m liking God too much, either.

I watch brothers and sisters get involved in movements, and when they enter those movements, they are of the Lord Jesus Christ. When that movement gets in trouble, or they get in trouble with that movement, or that movement gets branded, or they get thrown out of that movement, or there’s a split in that movement, and people get hurt, you go try to find that Christian, and he doesn’t love the Lord anymore because of the conditions. Two Christians marry, they have a knockdown, drag-out, and they get divorced, and because of the conditions, the passion, love, and commitment to Christ are no longer there. When God conditions come, love stops.

Where is unconditional love for Him, that is not affected by whether you are an elder or in the world’s only great movement, or whether or not it’s wet or dry, or whether you are in good health or poor health, or whether you’re married, single, or divorced? I love the Lord a whole lot, and I never did get married, and the Lord never gave me a husband. The Lord never gave me a wife, and I don’t like those conditions, so I don’t follow Him anymore. He loves you unconditionally. And I want you to know if you seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ into the depths, your conditions are going to get very dire. They are going to get bad. The Lord’s going to watch, I suppose He watches, to see if you love Him conditionally or unconditionally. I will love the Lord as long as the Lord’s people like me. As long as I’m receiving approval. As long as everybody listens to what I say and does what I tell them to do. As long as everything is peaceful and calm and in order, as long as I can just do those things I like to do, as long as I get all the glory, each of us has conditions. I’m really concerned about single brothers and sisters who get with the Lord and into the things of the Lord, and conditions that they anticipated do not turn out, and they leave the Lord. Whatever happened to consecration?

I never liked this term, but this is where Guyon used the term “divine indifference.” You have to be indifferent to what’s taking place in you. I don’t think you should be indifferent; I think it’s all right to cry a little bit. I think it’s okay to even get discouraged. In fact, I think it’s all right to get despondent and in despair. But you can be despondent and in despair and not give up on the Lord. Well, I haven’t given up on the Lord. I still believe it, and I still believe there’s a God, and I think Jesus Christ is the Savior. I even believe the Bible’s the word of God. But you look at that person, and you can’t say that he has the commitment that he had years ago. You have to go and talk to him with kid gloves on. Be very careful. Or you have to speak to him and encourage and admonish him to come and be a Christian again. That’s not unconditional love toward the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord will change your circumstances, and he will sit back, or he will stand back, or whatever he does, and watch to see what you do when the rug comes out from under. Am I saying this happens more to people who seek him in the depths than to people who don’t? I think I’m saying yes, or maybe it’s just the difference in priorities. The person who never really makes the Lord his greatest priority has all these other supports to hold him up. When you make the Lord Jesus Christ your priority and your concept of the Lord, the props are removed, then you fall. Or maybe you don’t. By the way, all this was about the psychological. I’ve already mentioned the physical. This is the tremendous psychological impact that can come in the circumstances being changed, but the worst of all, the worst of all is what John of the Cross called a “dark night of the soul,” and more accurately, it would be called a “dark night of the spirit.”

I have a very dear friend who read something I wrote in The Inward Journey on the Dark Night of the Spirit, and this is what he said to me. He said, “Gene, you wasted your time and energy writing that chapter. Those who read that and don’t know what it is won’t know what it is and won’t have the foggiest idea of what you’re talking about. And those who do know about it don’t want to be reminded, and they don’t want to read about it, and they don’t want to hear about it.

Have you ever read Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis? It’s a great saga. It’s an adventure that goes everywhere. And one of the places they go is to the Dark Island, and there is a shield, an area of darkness, and their ship goes into it. The front of the ship is dark, and the back is in the light. They have to light torches, and they disappear into the darkness. And even just as they go in, they feel they’ll never find their way out. Queen Lucy says, “Oh, Aslan, please get us out of here.” They come up alongside an island, the dark island, and they hear this hideous scream, and a man plunges out into the water, and there are people or something chasing him. And they pull him out of the water onto the boat, and he is stark-raving mad. They get him calm, and they turn the ship around, and they get out of the darkness into the light, and everybody is just horrified at what that man must have gone through on that dark island. The man looks up, I think, in the face of Prince Caspian or whoever it was, and says, “I beg you one thing. Never, never ask me what happened on that island.” And Caspian says, “Sir, I beg you for one thing. Never, never tell me.”

That’s a perfect description of the dark night of the spirit, and it happens to some Christians, and it’s the best reason I can think of why you ought not to get interested in the deeper Christian life. No one has ever tasted that bitter cup and come away with anything but horror. It actually seems that when the Lord begins to love us in those beginning days of loving Him, and He just loves us, and He begins to draw us truly into the deep things of Christ, He wants to introduce us to His sufferings. He wants us to know what he’s gone through.

I don’t know any statistics, but I would say one Christian in a thousand gets a real hunger to know the Lord in the depths, and that’s, you know…he doesn’t want to evangelize, he doesn’t want to teach the Bible, he doesn’t want to speak in tongues. Those are not his paramount drives. He no longer wishes to be a great theologian. He doesn’t wish to be a missionary or a martyr. He doesn’t want to be a Bible teacher. He doesn’t want to be well thought of as a good Christian. He’s no longer interested in prayer. He wishes to know the Lord Jesus Christ, to personally know and fellowship and embrace and adore and know Him. That’s rare. But for every one of those, if you would go collect them, one out of a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred, I don’t know if go and collect them and get a hundred of them together. I would say not one in a hundred will keep their original desire to go on and never back up.

Maybe my statistics are too pessimistic, but by the time you have known social authorization, by the time you have done battle with the intellect, by the time you have found even the difficulty of the pursuit, when you have been wooed and won and then left at the altar or left somewhere by the Lord, at least it seems, when He has taken you into His suffering, and when those things deepen and deepen and deepen, I’ll tell you, you lose at least your youthful enthusiasm.

Sometimes you don’t blame the Lord; you blame circumstances. If things had been a little different, it would have been a little better. I wouldn’t have lost that warm puppy feeling. It’s not true. If it hadn’t been one thing, the Lord would have thought up…He’d have dreamed up something else. I’ve watched a lot of people plunge into knowing the Lord, and I watched a lot of people just stake out their place somewhere along the road and say, “Well, this is fine right here.” I don’t even know what the end is. Ask me when I’m 80 if I’m still alive. I don’t know if this adventure has a Cair Paravel at the end of it, or I don’t know if there’s an enchanted land out there. I don’t know where this is supposed to bring us. I only know part of the journey, and I know I’m supposed to make that journey. I know I should really want the Lord with all my heart and mind, but most of us stake out a claim somewhere before it seems.

There’s one other thing about it that would wreck your life, and why you shouldn’t get interested in the deep things of Christ. Because eventually, if you get to know Him well and begin to see and know Him, you’re going to get interested in something else. You’re going to get interested in His church, and that if the Lord won’t wreck you, his church will. If the Lord can’t wreck you, his church will.