Matthew Wright’s Reviews > A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society > Status Update

Hoping is a confident, alert, expectation, that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way, and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God, but bullying God.

This is why we are able to face, acknowledge, and accept life through suffering: we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line.

Finding the meaning of our lives, not by probing our moods and motives in morals, but by believing and Godish whale and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not shining the rise and fall of our enthusiasm. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.

Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of Godish faithfulness. We survive in the way of Faith. Not because we have extraordinary stamina, but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us. Christian, discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to Godish, righteousness, and the less and less attention to our own.

This as far from the truth as the Easter is from the West. The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner. Being a Christian is what we were created for. The life of faith has the support of an entire creation and the resources of a magnificent redemption. The structure of this world was created by God so we can live in it easily and happily as his children.

It matters very little how much money Christians make. It makes a little difference how our culture values and rewards our work.
“Work, You’re worried fingers to the bone.”
Our Society rewards, and admires that phrase; but seen by the psalmist as a sign of weak faith and assertive pride, as if God cannot be trusted to accomplish His will, as if we could rearrange the universe by our own effort.

My feelings are important for many things. But they tell me next to nothing about God, or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not, but what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors.

God is steadfastly with us, in Mercy and judgment, insistently, gracious. We get a feeling that everything is done in the shirt, certain environment of the God, who redeems his people. And as we learned that, we learned to live not by our feelings about God, but by the facts of God. I refuse to believe my depression; I choose to believe in God.