“13 Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. 14 I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. 15 For if your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom Christ died. 16 So do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil. 17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. 19 So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. 20 Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. 21 It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble. 22 The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves. 23 But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” (Romans 4:13-23 ESV)
Christians taking stock come up against a strange, beleaguered, Fact: God answers prayers in His time and according to His delight. Indeed, to the unbeliever or atheist it can seem that ninety percent of the walk of faith is simply self-reinforcing, imagining its own prescriptions as fulfilled, false comfort. When God allows us to doubt, to slip into sin, to clamor just for a little assurance, it isn’t that He has abandoned His people, but rather that we walk by Faith and not by sight. And miracles, they require the right trust fall, to see them sometimes. They require amongst two poles of thought to choose that pole where Everything is Miracle. By contrast to Nothing being miracle (the other pole). God is nearer to us… we live and breathe His presence… our acts of spiritual violence against the very Fact of His Creed bearing weight, His Spirit offering succour, His Son rabidly or impatiently Racing to the scene of the crime.
God races to us, because Doubts are getting people all hemmed up or killed, in the spirit realm. It Matters, that we choose to self-identify in a room deeply divided between two gospels: to self-identify as Saved by Grace, not by coasting along on a river of grace. That we believe in Original Sin, yet as to that first pole, also we share in that liberal (theologically liberal) claim of God being unknowable, of Jesus being an Historical Figure, of Spirit being polite and gently salvific. The alternative is spoken by some of our friends “in the room” about Confrontation with the Godhead, about External inbreaking of Christ’s person, about knitting and aggressive Tactics of the Spirit.
Christians vis-a-vis their role as Soldiers of Christ, take stock in such manner as to lift all deeds done up to the Altar, that we may Understand: nothing is “ill-begotten”, nothing “false comfort”, nothing “too corrupt”, but rather all things were designed in order that we might draw Closer to Him. If today we wrestle with beasts at Ephesus (1 Cor 15:32) then rather let us go Sublime in the good name of Him who is present with us in all environs, Ephesus included. Let us go Proactive in the good name of Him to whom is due all laud, honor, and glory. If the dead are not raised, then we—we who like maniacal children needed to prove and question and ask for ourselves all things—we are most to be pitied.
Therefore our testimony is beyond the question of, “What’s your alma mater of faith”; our “alma mater of faith” is that really we were down and out, worse off After our conversion then Before, because God is a mighty force who Humbles and still speaks to us in querulous parables even from the staid church body where we’ve worshipped for a decade. God humbles… the proud? The self-righteous? The one not bearing up under His charge to love on and pray for our enemies? The one forgetting so much is “plausible” when—out of hasty avoidance of the discomforting Questions our presence Raises—we show up on the doormat of the church.
Plausible we live in a less magical, but only imagined, reality. Plausible that our lively Spirit is in fact gonna go Flat. Plausible that we are in all kinds of endemic, simpler sins, because after all “it took me ten years, to be discipled, personally”. No, God will mock us and use us as vessels, but never will He deny we are saved from the Outset, from Day One.
The soldier is tasked, therefore, with surviving the maelstrom of “Fitting in”, which is an ambition never fulfilled. Never will we quite be sanguine or peaceful with all comers. Always there will be something we try to inject or interpose into the Equation. Notwithstanding friendship, notwithstanding being fellow laborers in the vineyard. Our mission is front and center, to preach the Good News to a hasty and immature generation.