The following is a brief excerpt from a helpful article that my wife sent me earlier today.
There’s a recent trend in American Christianity to speak of spiritual life as messy.
We’re sinful, broken people, this view argues, and even in our redeemed and reconciled condition we make mistakes that affect our and others’ lives. The messiness is pervasive, constant, and unrelenting. There’s no hope for the eradication of sin this side of Christ’s return, so the best we can do is embrace the mess and encourage one another to keep wading through the mire. The Christian life is a series of messes with a few mountaintops in between.
No doubt, this description is often used with honorable motives. We want to express humility and provide solidarity and support for our struggling brothers and sisters or new Christians—as we should. But there’s something about describing the process of sanctification only as “messy” that seems a little off. It’s certainly true that believers struggle with sin, pain, failure, and turmoil. I continue to wrestle with those things and more, so there’s a sense in which sanctification is messy. I definitely feel that myself.
Yet I also realize that Jesus didn’t die so we could live a merely messy Christian life. His desire isn’t for us to simply hop from crisis to crisis, doomed to failure, discouragement, and depression this side of glory. The gospel is more about joyful transformation than messy complacency.
If we’re not careful, a merely messy Christianity fails to do justice to a biblical view of the Christian life in at least three ways.
For the full article, click here.