Disappointed and Disillusioned

Are you disappointed in your relationship with Christ? Are you disillusioned by the fact that you don’t feel the presence of God near you? Most of have been there. Many have made an attempt at diagnosing why we are there. But how do you overcome your disappointment? How do you change your outlook to become enamored by Christ and encouraged in your fellowship with him? That is not an easy question to answer. Because it is so personal, I have found that it is a process worked out by God himself in our lives that is very difficult to articulate. However, I found the following quotes from Paul Tripp’s new book Broken Down House very helpful. I pray that you will too. You can follow more quotes from BD House on Twitter.

BDHouse

“Here is a sad truth: Celebrating grace is an act of war. The worship of God doesn’t come naturally to sinners like you and me.”

“It doesn’t take long for us to imagine that perhaps life really can be found apart from Christ.”

“We do the unthinkable: we take grace for granted and stop celebrating the one thing in life that should amaze us for eternity.”

“We have to be committed to fighting for our hearts. We have to remind ourselves daily how quickly we get distracted, seduced, & hooked.”

“We need to warn ourselves again and again against disappointment and the danger of looking for life where life cannot be found.”

There is no easy answer here. Tripp describes grace as an act of war. I think what he means is that living in the grace of God and overcoming despair is hard work. It takes commitment, even when the feeling of God’s presence is absent. It takes lectures and warnings to ourselves in which we tell ourselves the truth about who we are, who God is and what He has done. And we wait, repeating the same steps over and over again, trusting that God in His Providence is using our despair to finish the work he began in us.

Blessings, Mark