18. Religious Schizophrenia
18
Religious Schizophrenia
Ponder this passage from 1 John 1:5–10:
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.
The phrase “if we claim” is found three times in this passage, in verses 6, 8, and 10, and it describes the contrast between what we say we are and what we really are. The claims, of course, are lies, because they don’t match up with reality. In verse 6, we lie to others about our fellowship with God; in verse 8, we lie to ourselves about our sins and try to ease our consciences; but in verse 10, we lie to God! To lie to others is hypocrisy, to lie to ourselves is duplicity, but to attempt to lie to God borders on outright apostasy. The longer we lie, the faster our character deteriorates and the more God has to deal with us to bring us back to integrity.
It’s the second claim—lying to ourselves—that I want to focus on here. It’s a very subtle device of the Devil. He slowly leads us into thinking that our spiritual conditions are healthy when they’re really quite sick. We begin by allowing the Devil to deceive us about something in our lives that we consider very minor; then, gradually, we allow Satan to teach us to deceive ourselves about things that are really very important.
We think we’re safe because we maintain our religious practices—daily Bible reading and prayer, church attendance, giving, and a measure of Christian respectability—when all the while our thought life is polluted and our secret sins are multiplying. Like the people described in Isaiah 1, we use our religious practices to cover our sins, but the Lord knows the truth.
If we’re lying to ourselves about our secret sins, we’re out of touch with both ourselves and the Lord, and our prayers are a waste of time because the Lord won’t answer them. We’ve become “religious schizophrenics” of the kind James wrote about: “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do” (James 1:6–8).
Revival is simply a return to spiritual reality, which includes being honest with the Lord, other people, and ourselves. It means confessing our sins and stepping out of the darkness into the light.
I once gave a series of radio messages based on some of the unanswered prayers in the Bible, and the messages were later published in a book entitled Famous Unanswered Prayers. However, neither the broadcasts nor the book proved to be popular, and I wondered why. A friend suggested to me that most people don’t want to hear about failures; they want to be encouraged by successes. Then I remembered that the noted Methodist preacher Clovis Chappell had published a book called Familiar Failures that suffered the same fate as my book, and it was for the same reason: Who wants to read about failures?
But failure is a normal part of life and is usually a stern but honest teacher, and to ignore it may be to invite even greater failure. There’s a positive aspect to failure that every scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur can attest to: what Henry Ford called “the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
Lucy told Charlie Brown, “We learn more from our failures than from our successes,” and he replied, “Then that makes me the smartest person in the world!” Perhaps Lucy should have said, “We can learn …” because the opportunity to learn is certainly there, if we want to take it.
As Christians, we must realize that what looks like failure to us may be the Lord’s way of opening up a better opportunity for us. I appreciate the observation of Cheryl Forbes, that “[somehow] we never see God in failure, but only in success—a strange attitude for people who have the cross as the center of their faith.” If we examine some of the unanswered prayers of the Bible and seek to see the Lord and His truth, then our quest won’t be in vain.