Tim Challies on the Sweet Drudgery of Faith

I'm stealing the following from Tim Challies, unedited.  Great Stuff Tim!

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One of the most destructive forces that has faced the church in
recent years is the teaching that God gives Christians faith so they
can exercise it to their own benefit. This gospel of health and wealth
teaches that our faith allows us to demand from God whatever we desire
and that He is beholden to give it to us. If only our faith is strong
enough, we can have whatever we want or need. God will give us money,
power, or good health if only we ask in faith. This teaching is
destructive on many levels. It focuses the attention of those who claim
to be Christians on themselves rather than on Christ and teaches that
God exists for our benefit and enrichment. It leaves men and women
broken by their supposed lack of faith when they summon the heavens for
riches or healing and are met with only silence. It also brings forward
into this life benefits that God has reserved for life eternal. Nowhere
in the Bible does God promise us that we will live lives of complete
fulfillment on this side of eternity. Rather, the Bible tells us that
only in heaven will we have our every desire satisfied and only then
will we escape the sin, pain and suffering of this life. God, in His
grace, will bless us with desires that far exceed what we desire now,
and will be gracious in meeting those desires.

The fact is that this Word Faith gospel seems to promise what it
just does not deliver (but, apparently, for a select few). We cannot
escape pain in this life. We cannot escape suffering and cannot escape
poverty, drudgery and discomfort. This life is difficult and sometimes
seems to just drag on and on, day after endless day. So much of life
and faith comes down to routine, to the day-to-day tasks that repeat
themselves endlessly. Depending on a person's vocation this may be
doing dishes or changing diapers, repairing brakes or changing oil,
choosing songs or preparing sermons. There may be a sameness to life
that just seems to never end. So much of life is consumed with
drudgery--hard, monotonous, routine work.

I was talking to my mother the other day, and we were discussing
various and sundry aspects of the Christian life. Mom spends a lot of
time thinking about issues related to biblical womanhood and has a gift
for being able to lovingly exhort and encourage other women, and young
women in particular, to serve the Lord. As we spoke, she was talking
about a book she had read recently and I'm quite sure she said it was The Pastor's Wife
by Sabina Wurmbrand, the wife of Richard Wurmbrand who founded Voice of
the Martyrs. She told how Sabina wrote about women who had been
arrested for their faith and how, as they languished in prison, they so
regretted ever begrudging the routine, the drudgery of daily life. As
they sat in prison they would have given nearly anything to be able to
scrub dishes or wash their husbands' socks. Only in retrospect did they
find a new appreciation for the routine, for those small but unheralded
parts of life that they had so often complained about. One of mom's
challenges to young women is to embrace even the drudgery of life now
and to see it as a time for joyful service. After all, a time may soon
come when there is nothing you desire more and it would be terrible to
have to live with regret for wasted days and bitter evenings.

What is true of life can be true of faith. It often seems like
drudgery to wake up early in the morning to spend a few minutes or an
hour reading the Bible and coming to the Lord in prayer. Going to
church and worshiping with the Lord's people or spending time reading
an edifying book can seem hard and monotonous. This Christian life can
become routine and we can begin to despise the monotony of it. And this
is precisely where the gospel of health and wealth appeals to people.
It promises a glorious life, a carefree, fulfilling, abundant life in
the here and now. But this is a mere counterfeit of Christian doctrine.
It bypasses hard work and offers short-term, selfish fulfillment and
calls it godly, abundant fulfillment. It is a fraud.

I've found that I need to seek to embrace the drudgery of life,
thanking God for the comfort of routine and the security of sameness.
And I've found that I need to embrace even the hard work of becoming a
godly man, even when it can seem like monotonous drudgery. I
know that the perceived monotony is only a product of my own sin and
selfishness. I know that even the day-to-day task of reading the Bible
and praying to the Lord should be glorious and wonderful. This is how
it should and can be. Sometimes it is. Often it is not. But even in the
routine of pulling my tired body out of bed to spend time with the
Lord, I know that God uses these opportunities to open my eyes to His
glories and to see past grumbling and fatigue to the glories of Jesus
Christ. By the time I have read the Bible and poured out my heart to
Him, I find that I have to repent of ever having grumbled about the
beautiful routine of spending time with Him.

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