“The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again. But one disaster is enough to overthrow the wicked.” Proverbs 24.16 NLT
This generation has a big problem with demanding proofs from God of His love and goodness. Fact is, we’re the ones who need to prove it, not God. Yet He constantly does, and when you open your eyes to look for it, you see it everywhere: in another sunrise, in the way the Master Artist paints the foothills with light, constantly different in every season. But too many of us too many times have come to verses like these and used them to self-justify behaviors we don’t want to let go of for the sake of our comfort.
God has been speaking to me lately of sources, especially those that have in the past comforted me. I notice my tastes are changing again. I just don’t find any enjoyment in some of the things I used to find enjoyment in; they’re empty now.
And this is a good thing.
It took me many years to learn the discipline of pressing toward arrival at the place of bittersweetness, of finding the old to be dry and empty, of finding the new—that is, the kingdom of God—to be light and life. But I know it pretty well now, and I recognize it as a regular sort of stop on the way. It’s like a depot for offloading waste cargo.
Depending how one reads between the lines of the definition of the word entertainment, it can be construed as a diversion meant to hold you. Have you ever calculated the hours you spend with your eyes on a screen of some sort, taking in situations that aren’t real, representations that have nothing to do with the actual world? Have you ever considered how that tweaks your perspective of the things of God?
We recently took our team on a weekend trip away from the rush and crush of the big city into the mountains to lead worship at a camp. In the wake of our arrival, it was stunning how real everything was up there. All the strident voices carrying messages of doom and apocalypse were silenced, and I heard one voice, a witness to truth, still and small but powerful, and He spoke peace to me through the majesty of what He had made and continues to sustain even now by the power of a word. And I saw how vain all my entertainments were.
Our falling, even falling seven times, isn’t a worry for God. It is a worry for the wicked because as the above proverb points out, one disaster is enough to remove them. As for the righteous though, the big difference isn’t that we don’t fail anymore. Far from it. We prove the goodness and mercy of God over and over by rising from failure in faith, again and again, that God is good and He keeps His promises. If it takes time, God has His reasons, and His grace is sufficient to carry us through to the end, who, by the way, is Christ Himself.
So we journey on, we strive, we try, we walk, we follow Jesus, and as we do, we sometimes fall. Unlike the wicked, whose journey would be ended by a single failure (because everything in their world depends on them), we regard every failure as proof that the mercy of God is more than adequate to restore us, that the blood of Jesus is more than enough to save us, that the grace of God is renewed with every sunrise, and it is by faith in this grace that we rise from failure again and again, not until we are perfect, but until Christ is fully formed in us. And that is a far better thing than perfection.
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