David Morris

We'll muddle through some how

"Have yourself a Merry little Christmas..."

The strains of the holiday tune fill the air in stores and malls, in cars and concerts. The concluding paragraph of the original is of particular interest--

"Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow
Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now."

Yup...nothing like hoping your current lousy circumstances will change in the hopefully not-too-distant future (providing the blind work of fate pulls through for you) but, until it does, just hang in there, grit your teeth, and bear it. And hey--Have a Merry Christmas while you're at it.

But more than my perplexity at such an oxymoronic song is my concern that we as Christians have been infected by a similar pessimistic worldview, and that we have settled in our movements, our churches, and our own lives for "muddling through some how."

There is a decidedly negative perspective about our current state within Fundamentalism today. I am not sure where it came from, nor where to lay the blame, but I wonder if an overemphasis in eschatology and an underemphasis on sovereignty have led us to an essentially fatalistic perspective.

See, if the world is coming to an end, and we're in the last days, and men are waxing worse and worse, and there is no hope of revival or any substantial work of God, and that's all that is emphasized, pessimism is a logical consequence.

If Christianity is rapidly becoming more and more limp and lifeless, and persecution is only mounting, and evil is triumphing, then it makes perfect sense to lose hope.

We expect our churches to dwindle, our Christian testimony to slowly fade out, and our mission to be inherently defensive. Our view of "waiting for the Lord" takes all the meaning of "hold on to the Alamo," with the same expectation of eventual defeat. We content ourselves with holding on to any personal vestige of Christianity, while expecting our witness to have no affect on our neighbors and coworkers.

In effect, we claim God's Word is powerful while denying it could possibly work in our day and age.

We tend to dismiss signs of church growth out of hand, or at least approach them with some serious misgivings. We become skeptical of any church that is "successful," because of course any church that is growing and vibrant is an oddity and, in fact, must have sold out to some serious compromise.

We tend to give Satan and evil more credit than God and truth, as if somehow he and his minions will "win," until at last God is forced to strategically withdraw, pulling out His few remaining, shot-up, wounded, and ailing soldiers in a rapture, followed by a tribulation that will compensate for all the past sufferings of God's people and culminate in God's winning back the ground He lost in the church age and finally emerging victorious, which we thought He would but weren't totally positive about.

My concern is that, in these viewpoints, we demonstrate an inner malady of our spirits. While mixed with some truth, our woeful expressions of "hang in there, brother" and our self-focused bracing for impending persecution belie more doubt of God than belief and more despair than hope.

Can God really do a work in this century? Is it even possible for the Church to have a meaningful impact on today's society? Or is every minister doomed for a ministry of Jeremiah, to a people who will never listen, let alone heed?

Biblical truth says there is hope. Matthew 16:16-19 says there is hope. The entire doctrine of God's sovereignty says there is hope. The power of God's Word says there is hope. The true purpose of eschatology (whatever yours happens to be)--to state yet again God's victorious, sovereign, and wondrously designed plans and incur a response of worship--says there is hope.

Historical perspective says there is hope. We aren't the first Christians to wholeheartedly believe we lived in the last days. (those began with Christ's ascension.) We agree with Paul's condemnation of the Corinthians who sold all they had and sat on a hillside waiting for the Lord's return, yet sometimes it appears that we actually have the same mentality--there's either no more work to be done, or no more work that can be done. And a look at books like 1 Peter reveal that God's people have always struggled to cheerfully labor on in God's work in the midst of difficulty.

But God's truth intervenes for His discouraged, listless people, and so it must for us. We must identify attitudes of despair for what they are--unbelief, doubt, sin. We must strive for a daily balance in our perspective, decrying idealism and this penchant for pessimism as equally unbiblical.

God's Church--just muddling through? God forbid.

Posted by apelles at December 18, 2003 11:13 AM