Sweet Friend, Cling To Christ Not Your Dream

It's not a secret, I have a distaste of false spiritual statements that are cheesy, puffed up, legalistic, or self-centered.  I've written about the tumultuous path of false spirituality here and here.   Honestly, most of the stuff produced by women who write and market themselves other women via the mainstream postmodern Christian culture falls into this category of false spirituality. Or a spirituality of glory.  I am not trying to engage in any particular personal attack on any of these women, that's simply not the goal.  My case is against the false teaching that these devotionals and social media posts promote.  Typically many of these things deal with our feelings, personal experience, Christian living, and individual purpose.

Here is a prime example of the kind of material, that sends shivers up my back, and not in a good way.  This was posted a few weeks back by popular author Lysa Terkeurst.

"Sweet friend, I don't know where you are as you read these words. I don't know the circumstances of your life. I don't know the dream God has given you. Maybe you don't either… yet.

But I do know you're reading this post for a reason… to be reminded that God has a plan for you. A dream you can't even imagine, an assignment you can't figure out and wouldn't even dare to consider as being for you.

I pray that you will find great hope in these words today that God really can use any woman who surrenders her inadequacies and circumstances to Him. ‪#‎WalkinFaith‬" 

You may be wondering why this sort of thing bothers me.  Perhaps, you think I am a bit of a curmudgeon and I should learn to lighten up a bit, after all, the advice helps so many, and it makes people feel good.  But what is the hope that is uttered in these few short sentences?  Where is the spiritual center?  At the end of the day, the focus of these words is founded on a dream, and not a very concrete one at that. Sure all of this jibber jabber may be just the therapeutic Facebook post you thought you needed at the end of a long day.  Yet in reality it's lofty, vague, elusive, and abstract. This sort of material confuses Law, Gospel, and the blessing of vocation, by encouraging us to get closer to God and His blessing by what we can produce from within ourselves.  God's will is so much deeper than just achieving our earthly dreams.  I know our Old Adam, our sinful, nature wants to do whatever possible to clamor up to God, to find signs from within that indicate a hidden knowledge of what God's will is.  But the thing about our dreams is that often times they are quickly fleeting and lead us only to want the ideal (fake) green grass on the other side of the fence.  Simply put, statements like this do not genuinely offer the relevancy the modern Christan woman claims to crave, these statements do not offer the truth about the kingdom of God.

We need more. 

We need more than fancy strings of words that only point us back to ourselves.  

We need more than the hopes and dreams of our flesh.  

We need more than the devil's temptation that we can somehow know and hear the will of God deep within ourselves or a self-appointed spiritual guru.  

The path to God and what he wills for our lives is not found through our surrender.  We can never surrender enough.  Christ is our surrender. Our dreams and our imagination can not bring us to God, The path to God is the cross.  We are brought to God through Christ who sought us through His sinless life, death and resurrection.  Jesus says of Himself "I am the truth the life and the way".  Jesus breaks into our lives from outside of ourselves.  He finds us in our inadequacies, brokenness, and dark circumstances. The blood and water that poured from His side is our healing balm.  Salvation from sin, death and the devil is God's will for us.  His will is done, finished on the cross through Christ.  Christ Himself declares it.  This surrender of Christ makes us whole, gives us life and frees us to love and serve our neighbor.  In this new life, there is no dream too small, task too mundane or purpose to trivial.  We are free to be daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, co-workers, friends.  By faith, we know that God uses our hands to care for others, pray for others, and deliver Christ to others. 

Sweet friend, I call you my friend in Christ our Savior.  We may share the life of motherhood together, or our circumstances may be completely different.  We struggle beneath the cross of Christ together, we may have achieved much or our dreams may have been shattered.  Yet, in our brokenness, the light of Christ breaks through.  His loss is our gain.  His Word is our life.  His truth is our truth.  We are yoked together through Christ's surrender so that we may be called redeemed, the apple of His eye, a servant to others, an heir to eternal life.