When Faith Becomes Complicated

Would you say your life has gotten more or less complicated as time goes on? 

I suspect most of us would say, “More.” 

Take child rearing, for example. We didn’t realize when we brought our three-day-old baby home from the hospital that caring for the needs of a newborn is rather simple. Keep them warm, dry, and fed. That’s pretty much it. 

Now consider the needs of a teenager. Without even listing their needs (which I considered doing, but it made my head hurt), you’ll agree they’re far more complex than the needs of a newborn. 

What about our professions? 

When I was 12 years old, I delivered newspapers. Now I write for them. Waaaaay more complicated than picking up a paper, stuffing in an ad circular, and flinging it in a customer’s door. 

For years, I thought the faith life also grew more complicated as time passed. 

When I was a new believer, the faith life was quite simple. Trust and obey. Trust God with every area of my life – my decisions, my direction, my destiny. Obey his word. As best I can, with the Holy Spirit’s help, obey what he tells me to do through the Bible, sermons, and the input of godly men and women. 

But then it got complicated. 

I learned big words like election and predestination. Propitiation, regeneration, and sanctification. Legalism, hedonism, and sectarianism. I grew bogged down with head knowledge but didn’t experience much practical growth. I learned a lot, and thought a lot, but not much of what I discovered translated into practical Christian living. 

Then the tide turned. 

I committed to read my Bible through in a year. (It took me 15 months.) The more I read, the more I learned. Theology, yes, and a greater understanding of how God’s plan of salvation worked itself out through the ages. How grace and law danced in perfect partnership. 

But more than that, I learned about the heart and nature of God. 

I heard him express his pleasure in us, his creation, when he declared, “It is very good.” 

I heard him weep as he slaughtered the first innocent lamb to cover Adam and Eve’s sin. 

I heard his heart crack open as he banished the man and woman from the Garden and sentenced them to work “by the sweat of their face.” 

My journey through the Bible showed me how God set before his people every blessing and promise imaginable – theirs for the taking – if they would simply walk with him all the day of their lives. 

“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live,” God pleaded with his people (Deuteronomy 3:19). 

And I read the unimaginable horrors of what life in rebellion to God looks like. Because God is a righteous and just God, he had to punish sin. And he did, when his people rejected the thousand second chances he mercifully extended and flaunted their sin in his tear-stained face. 

As I’ve journeyed through the Bible year after year, I’ve learned that the Christian life isn’t complicated after all. It’s really quite simple. 

I’ve come full circle to the mantra of my early days: Trust and obey. 

Trust God with every area of my life – my decisions, my direction, my destiny. Obey his word. As best I can, with the Holy Spirit’s help, obey what he tells me to do through the Bible, sermons, and the input of godly men and women. 

A scene unfolded outside my window recently that summed up what I’ve learned. 

An elderly grandfather and his tiny granddaughter walked down the road. They held hands, which wasn’t hard, because the grandfather’s stooped back brought his hand to the perfect height for his granddaughter to grasp without stretching. 

Their pace was matched, toddling and shuffling in awkward tandem. As they walked, they stopped to marvel at a dandelion, a butterfly, a neighbor’s friendly cat. Delighting in the simple wonders, they were more similar than their eighty-year age gap might allow. 

This grandfather, the CEO of a successful company in his prime, had come full circle. 

Following the footsteps of a tiny girl, wide-eyed with toddler wonder, he was relearning the joy of simple truths. 

The same is true of the faith life. When you strip away dialogue and the diatribes, the theology and the theoretical, what’s left are these simple truths: Trust and obey. 

Perhaps this is why Jesus asserted, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). 

If you’ve wandered from the simple path and find yourself snarled in a tangle of complexity, open your Bibles and your heart. 

Become like a little child. 

Trust and obey. 

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