Hypocritical Christian Part 2

There is something else I thought about the other day while walking to work. For years I prayed and cried for something I wanted God to do. But God in His infinite love and wisdom did not give me what I had asked for! If He did allow it to happen then I would have been absolutely miserable for the rest of my life! And you know what? Five years later while I was talking to Him about it I realized He did it because He loved me, and I thanked Him! Five years later I thanked Him! You know, if a stranger holds a public door for me for 2 seconds then I would thank him whole heartedly and without hesitation, yet I waited five years to thank my Savior and Heavenly Father for freeing me from an absolutely miserable life! This is a perfect example of the idolatry of self-contentedness: my pain, my dreams, my hopes, my desires, my self-worth, and so on.

I also thought about something I pray for my future wife to have, and that is: for her to have a quiet spirit. I do not mean she speaks little or does not tell jokes, but not to have a restless spirit—to be resting in the Lord. The reason I pray for this is that many women I come across have restless spirits, and this restless spirit leads them to set goals and pursue them impatiently. For example, I know women who married men simply because they reached a certain age and that they had set a goal they should be married by a certain age; in other words a man entered a marriage based on love but his wife married him for no reason other than he was the most available man at that time! And the cycle continues: after they get married they become restless until they have their first child, then they become restless until they buy a house. In other words their whole lives are characterized by jumping from one idol to another. Then I realized what a hypocrite I am by asking my wife to have a quiet spirit, when I have not attained it myself—nor have put any meaningful effort into obtaining it!

With all my idolatry God, in His mercy and love, did not treat me as I deserve. Often times I come across people who say that they can’t believe in God because He is a cruel and unjust Judge. But from my personal experience He seems to be the opposite: He is a very loving and just Father. I do not know where I would be today if God is not loving, but I do know that I will end up in hell. In the first few years of my Christian life I thought God mainly responds to us according to our obedience, but as I am growing older in my Christian walk and look back at my life I realize that is not true: God mainly responds to us, His children, like any parent would do and that is according to His love—and what an infinite source of sacrificial and enduring love He is!

(Toronto, ON; summer 2011.) by Fadi

I just described to you above what a deep well of idolatry my heart is, even though on the outside I might seem like a “good Christian”. And if God has overlooked all my other sins and just considered my idolatry alone and treated me according to that, then I would be in a whole load of terrible today. Yet, God treated me according to His love: He watched over me, and protected me—even when in my ignorance I asked in prayer for those things that will harm me. It is like when the apostle Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:13:

“Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.”

Why was God good to me? I do not know any reason except that He is good. It is like our Lord said in Matthew 5:45, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” God does not say, “Oh, this man sinned! Let’s starve him to death!” No, He sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous; He is patient because He desires that all may come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ as Savior and be saved.

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

Sometimes I like to think about the reason God has been good to me as in Genesis’ account of the creation. For example it says in Genesis 1:3, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” He created light because He wanted to. Why is He good to me? Not because I deserve it, but because He wants to—because God is love. That is why another way to summarize my life is this: Fadi’s unfaithfulness. God’s faithfulness.

There are just two more things I want to say about idolatry. The first is that the opposite of idolatry is intimacy. And intimacy is not prayer, reading the Bible, worship, singing praise songs, attending church, fellowship with believers, preaching, serving, or even trust and obedience; those things can increase intimacy and can be the product of intimacy but they do not necessarily mean intimacy. The best action that can describe intimacy is the word “rest”; that is: to rest in the Lord. The reason I say action is that resting is difficult when we have “so much” to do. We are driven to do this and that and resting in our world is often times equivalent to losing. Let me tell you how I imagine intimacy:

Suppose that I am married to a woman whom I am in love with and she is in love with me. Suppose she is a housewife and I am employed outside the home. I come home from a very tiring day and I terribly miss my wife; she too had a tiring day and misses me too. I enter the house and I sit on the sofa. What do you think I want my wife to do for me? Bring me a cup of cold water? Prepare me food? Give my shoulders a message? No, I will desire none of those things. The thing I would want the most is for her to come and sit beside me, resting her head on my shoulder, and wrapping my arm around her. I want to rest in her presence. That is what intimacy about.

Now if God stripped away everything dear to us, then out of need and loneliness we would start to spend more time with Him—we would become more intimate with Him. But this type of intimacy does not show true love. True intimacy is driven by love and not need of things; true intimacy is driven by the need to be with the one you love.

The second thing I want to say is this: often times our lack of intimacy with God is because we simply do not care anymore. Sin, of course, leads to lack of intimacy with God because God is holy and He abhors sin. But often times we simply do not care for being intimate with Him anymore. Strangely I found that I can love God but not like Him. It is very strange to say that I can love but not like a person but it is true. Sometimes because of disappointments with God (mainly because of unBiblical expectations we had of Him) we grow bitter toward Him. And even though we love Him by obeying Him, we become less fond of Him as a person (not as a human, but as an entity with a personality)—He starts becoming to us more of a good King than a loving Father. To protect ourselves from further hurt we stop caring for God or against God—we become lukewarm. And that means we stop expecting good from God and that is a very damaging thing to our intimacy. Let me tell you a story:

For the last year or so I did not ask anything from God in prayer: I just stopped expecting goods things from Him (for many reasons which I will not get into now). Then about 4 months ago I was listening to John Piper and he said something like, “Requesting things in prayer is not just something God wants us to do! Oh no, He commands us to ask!” I thought to myself, “Oh wow! It’s been so long since I asked anything from Him!” So I went to pray and it was a very difficult thing to do because I was breaking an emotional and spiritual protest against God. I simply asked Him to help me find a job because I had just graduated from university and I needed to find a job. That same week I got an evening job which I like, and next week I got an interview to a very good morning job that has to do with my university education and a couple weeks later I got that job too!

For the year 2012 I really want to start to get to know God…intimately! Not just know about God, but know God. I remember Paul Washer saying something like, “I am tired of knowing someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, who knew God! I want to know Him personally!” Is there idolatry in your life? Some hypocrisy too, may be? Do you know God, not just personally but intimately? Do you even care to know Him intimately? And the answer is not a “yes” or a “no”; the answer is the answer to the question: What is your priority? If we are willing to become more honest then we can even ask: Does getting to know God intimately even make it on the list of the top five priorities in our life?