Significance or Safety?

"Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" I hadn’t considered before that John the Baptist asks this question from prison after he has already professed that Christ is indeed the awaited Lamb of God. Yet, he asked the question. Like John, I ask this question. “Hey, are you gonna come through for me? I thought you were the Son of God. Should I find somebody else?” Jesus didn't come through. Later, when John was beheaded, Jesus was around. I guess no one told him how the game works.

I was just reading about this in Erwin McManus’s book The Barbarian Way. He writes, “The civilized view of Jesus is that he always comes through for us. Like Superman, he always shows up just in time to protect us and save us from disaster. His purpose is to ensure our safety, our convenience, and our comfort.” I guess somewhere along the way, I became civilized. If I’m faithful to him, he’ll come through for me, right? As I read this account in Luke 7, I realized I’m a lot like the people Jesus described,

“They are like children playing a game in the public square. They complain to their friends,
‘We played wedding songs,
and you didn’t dance,
so we played funeral songs,
and you didn’t weep.’”

Jesus wasn’t playing their games. He won’t play mine. He doesn’t respond the way I think he should. I’m coming to terms with my own tendencies to exploit and manipulate God and others to get what I want or think I need. I start with pleasing. If that doesn’t work, I rely on pity. I’ll resort to complaining and even tantrums if I have to. “Hey, are you gonna come through for me? Should I find somebody else?” But God has another purpose that is beyond me and my plans. It’s not about me.

McManus says, “Even then Jesus understood his purpose was to save us not from pain and suffering, but from meaninglessness. For Jesus, John was exactly where he needed to be, fulfilling God’s purpose for his life. Why would he save John from that? … God’s will for us is less about our comfort than it is about our contribution. God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance.” God invites us to enter his grand epic. But he didn’t say it wouldn’t cost us. So why am I insolent when it does?

My pastor, Eric, said on Sunday that he’d give up everything else— friends, possessions, status— as long as he had Christ. Bold. I mean, what if God heard? I guess that’s what is meant by surrender. “He wants us to surrender our lives to Him and follow Him into the unknown. And if it means a life of suffering, hardship, and disappointment, it will be worth it because following Jesus Christ is more powerful and more fulfilling than living with everything in the world minus Him.”

Do I believe it? If I do, if I want to enter the story, I think it means I have to stop writing my own subplot with a script full of insolence and ease. Gotta surrender my pen.