In Defense of Passive Christianity

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were leading sunday school class for some fifth graders, talking to them about the role Jesus should play in our lives when we’re angry, or afraid, or in those special times when punching a sibling in the face seems to make the most sense.

I tried to explain how I personally handle those moments, but it didn’t go very well. The kids chuckled, exchanging awkward looks, and my friend responded with, “yeah, but God’s not a gumball machine.”

Which is true, sort of.

In my years of trying to understand what it means to follow Jesus, I’ve learned some things about our relationship, and His character, that don’t jive with common narratives about faith, obedience, and God’s role in a hurting life. What follows might sound a little gumball-machiney, but I think, in some cases, that might be a good thing.

When I’m hurting, I often try to comfort myself with things that provide good, solid, short term relief, followed immediately by long term consequences. Overeating, drinking, judging others, too much TV, etc., all feel great when I perpetrate them against myself, but the comfort they provide doesn’t last long, while the problems they create do. It’s all exacerbated by a lockdown-induced drought of social interaction that’s left me isolated from the comfort of others, much more likely to pursue the comforts listed above.

I’m also a “7” on the Enneagram, a personality inventory resource that’s pegged me to the core (take a look if you haven’t yet, it’s brilliant). Very basically, like everyone else, I have a personality type that acts out in certain ways when I’m not intentional about healthy living. In these moments, I can feel empty, hopeless, grasping about for whatever quick fix I can get my hands on.

Finally, I’m human. Regardless of how well I might be living, I’m guaranteed to have moments of doubt, anxiety, hopelessness, and general all-around emotional/spiritual pain that will feel permanent, immovable, and incite me to find the quickest way out possible.

Like all of us, I’m constantly tempted to find comfort in the wrong places, compelled to say no, make better choices, avoid sin, etc. And in the moments when the eject buttons can’t be found, I only have two options outside of pounding a few martinis and watching movies ’til 4 AM.

Option #1 is what the psychotherapeutical world often refers to as “repression,” a method that involves sitting in the pain, denying our urges, waiting for it all to go away. This is how many of us consider what it means to be a good Christian. When temptation comes, it’s our job to flex our muscles,  don the “armor of God,” and fight the urge to do stupid things. This view of faith relies heavily on the idea that a good Christian is a fighter, an overcomer, a strong arm that resists the myriad temptations that come part and parcel to our crazy world.

It’s an “active” approach to spirituality, one that places the burden on faith on us and us alone. We might pray for God to give us strength, or ask others to pray for our battle, but that’s about as faithful as we’ll get. The rest is up to us. That’s how warriors roll.

And when we fail, as we often do, not only do we bear the consequences of our sin, we also bear a mountain of shame. We’re suppoed to be winners. Those who fall to temptation are the exact opposite – spiritual losers, weaklings, etc. When we see someone who couldn’t keep their marriage intact, or somebody who eats too much, drinks too much, etc., the judgments fly.

I don’t approach temptation this way anymore. It doesn’t work, and lends itself to too many unhealthy approaches to life, God, myself and the people around me. I’ve said goodbye to the conquering warrior view of Christianity and adopted something much more effective, albeit far less flattering.

When I’m hurting, I ask God to comfort me, to replace the fear and hopelessness with something else.

Tempation is not about sin, it’s about comfort. When we’re tempted, our mind/body/spirit is hungry for something. It is always uncomfortable. Cold. Lonely. To be sure, regardless of how we decide to deal with it, it always goes away, as St. Paul said it would, but it’s silly for us to sit in it and limit our prayers to “God, please give me strength,” because strength isn’t what we’re hungry for, or in need of.

I’ll share with you how I pray in these moments. You’ll be tempted to judge me, but allow a minute to unpack the theology behind my posture – you might find this compelling – it’s changed my life, and my faith.

“God, please take this away. I’ll give you fifteen minutes, then I’m turning to whatever sin I deem necessary to get through.”

Disrespectful, right? If that’s not gumball-machine theology, I don’t know what is.

But I pray that way because I’ve developed a different picture of myself. I’m not a powerful, all-conquering warrior, tasked with singlehandedly prevailing over the temptations in my life. Because of the teachings of scripture, and my ~ 30 years of attempting to follow Jesus, I now view me as a helpless infant, more in need of my morning feeding than anything else.

That made your stomach turn, yeah? It sounds weak, and, well… helpless. What self-respecting person of faith wants to see themselves this way? But if we enter into a moment where we really need some hope but can’t find any, or peace, or, especially, comfort, that’s exactly what we are. And it’s not a bad thing, unless you’ve tied your heart to the idea that you don’t need anybody’s help.

What I’m peddling here is dependence, something that us Americans tend to choke on – a uniquely Western cultural facet that’s leaked into our theology and our anthropology, leaving us at odds with the dependence that the scriptures call us to over and over again. As an American Christian, when I’m hurting, I don’t ask God to bring me comfort, I ask him for the strength to “not sin.”

That’s like a starving infant asking his parent, who’s standing over him, holding a bottle, to help him endure his hunger pangs.

Temptation signals a need, a lack of something good, and in many ways resembles hunger. Our broken places step in with fear and anxiety and try to convince us that bad things will happen if we don’t quickly turn to unhealthy remedies. Some folk say it’s the Devil that’s behind it all, a belief that I can’t entirely reject at this point in my life, crazy as it sounds.

Either way, temptation in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, it just means that we’re in want of something good, though we frequently twist, distort, and live in utter cluelessness about what that might be.

And in those moments when we can’t feed ourselves, why on God’s green earth would we not ask God to feed us? And while we’re at it, why not give Him a time limit? Does that disrespect God? Maybe, but not nearly as much as the division, injustice, idolatry, and all the other sins we find ourselves enmeshed in these days.

I can sit in my pain for 15 minutes. I can feel lonely, afraid, cold, empty, etc. if I know that there’s a clear end-point, that it won’t last forever. You might experience this differently, but within these 15 minutes, things always change. Sure, it might be psychosomatic, or simply be the nature of temptation – if you sit with it long enough it always goes away.

But in these holy moments, my temptation doesn’t just go away, it’s replaced by something that wasn’t there before, something that’s left me fully convinced that God is real, that He cares, and that I can trust Him when everything inside me wants to hit the fridge, or the internet, or whatever.

If this is truly making your stomach turn, it’s probably not because I’m laying down some brand of heresy – I can back all of this up with scripture if you’d like to debate. What’s upsetting in all of this is that it flys in the face of “active” spirituality, a brand of Jesus following that’s characterized mostly by doing, very little be receiving. Clearly, God wants us to do a bunch of stuff, and we live in a warrior/conqueror culture that shuns weakness, so our faith has become a very active proposition.

But we’re also in a relationship… with a deity…

If our friendship with God resembles human friendship (and God is the author of both), there will for sure be things that we’ll have to do, i.e., the active part, but there will also be things that we’ll have to receive, i.e., the passive part. I’ll argue strongly that the passive part is just as important as the active part, and vice versa. An imbalance in either makes for an unhealthy relationship, and in the case of our relationship with God, an unhealthy life.

Praying, “God, give me the strength to do the active stuff” is a great thing to pray, but when we’re dying from a lack of peace, comfort, hope, etc., it’s a little silly, and betrays a posture towards God and faith that makes temptation much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s much more effective to be honest about how we’re feeling, what it is that we’re tuly in need of, and ask God for that stuff first. Then, after we’ve received what we’re so desperately longing for and in need of, go and do all the other stuff.

So, I dare you. Give it a try. Next time you find yourself alone, frightened, anxious, cold, etc., feeling like the only way out is something you know you’re not supposed to do, ask God to give you whatever it is you’re hungry for, even if you can’t come to grips with what that might be.

You can be a little bit more respectful in your prayer if you want to: “Dear father, I’d love it if you’d show up in the next 15 minutes,” or something akin to that, but I like to be a bit more honest with myself when I’m praying. God already knows the disrespect and lack of faith that’s swimming around in my Mos Eisley spaceport of a mind, and yours.

If nothing else, according to scripture, this is the kind of dependence that God is looking for. To be sure, He loves our righteous deeds, but apart from the peace and hope that only He can offer – the stuff we’re supposed to receive from him – we run out of gas, limiting our involvement in this world to social media rants, and… ahem…. blogging, while the truly difficult things that can only be changed by the well-fed go unchecked.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” ~ Psalm 73:26

“He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” ~ Isaiah 40:29

“If you love me, do the stuff I told you to do, and I will ask God and He will send to you one who will comfort you.” ~ John 14:15