Bonus article: I’ve posted a review of the newly released movie A Great Awakening over on my other Substack page, The Next Great Awakening (had to with the name, right?). Rather than reposting here, which would unfortunately give dual subscribers the same post two days in a row, I’ll simply provide the above links for those who are interested. Now on with today’s article . . .
Excerpted and adapted from Unburdened: The Secret to Letting God Carry the Things that Weigh You Down.1
I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon in mainstream evangelical Christianity. I call it “yes-but theology.” In our well-meaning attempts to prevent people from misunderstanding the Bible, we focus much of our teaching on all the possible abuses and false interpretations of a verse or passage. Then we draw narrow lines around the text so people will learn precisely what the verse or passage intended to say.
But in doing so, we often draw the limits too tightly or too rigidly; or we draw the limits perfectly accurately but then focus entirely on the limits rather than what’s inside them.
The result is that with any truth or principle that seems too good to be true, we say “yes, but . . .” and then explain why it doesn’t mean what it looks like it means.
Take, for example, the passage in which Jesus told his disciples, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”2 I’ve heard sermons on that verse in which 90 percent of the teaching is about what it doesn’t mean. It isn’t giving us permission to “name it and claim it”; it doesn’t mean we can just ask for selfish desires; there are a lot of conditions to prayer; we have to ask according to God’s will; and so on.
And while all of that is true, by the time the sermon gets to what the verse does mean, Jesus’ words have pretty much lost all the power they had in their original form. There’s nothing inspiring left in this promise. Its truth means practically nothing when it’s surrounded by theological barbed-wire fences saying, “Don’t get too close to this one.”
For some reason, Jesus uttered this statement in bare-naked form. He just put it out there for the disciples without any noticeable caveats around it. He did what we’re afraid to do: state a bold truth and let people embrace it and perhaps even misunderstand it.
Why did he do that without warning against its abuses? I believe it’s because of the way we fallen creatures perceive the world. We question good news readily and accept it reluctantly. In order for us to have a balanced view of his truth, he has to emphasize the extravagance of it. We’re skeptics by nature. We don’t need help thinking of reasons the good news isn’t all that good. We need help believing it.
Sometimes It’s Simply True
The same dynamic works for all those verses that tell us not to worry, that God bears our burdens, that we can trust him, and that we’re free. Our natural reaction to them is “yes, but . . .” followed by multifaceted explanations of all the possible exceptions. We have a mind-numbing capacity for making simple theological truths complex, and it usually shows up when we’re interpreting scripture through painful, real-life experience.
That’s understandable. I know, for example, the thoughts that can come to mind when we read through the benefits of trusting God above. We can think of people who don’t fit the description — people who trusted God and still died of cancer or remained unemployed for a year or two.
I can imagine John the Baptist sitting in prison with Psalm 50:15 on his lips: “Call on me when you are in trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will give me glory.” I have no doubt that John trusted God, yet he was executed anyway. And I don’t think situations like that require us to redefine “rescue” or “healing” or anything else we normally redefine when we wrestle with a promise. There are times when God chooses, for very good reasons, not to do what he indicated he would do as a general rule.
The problem is when the exceptions loom much larger in our own minds than the fulfillments do. Most of us say “yes, but” much more easily than we say “thank you, Lord.” Somehow we have to reverse that tendency and assume that, in most cases, God will do for us exactly as he said he would do. And we have to refuse to worry about the possibility that he might not.
Through the Lens of a Promise
I can’t explain the exceptional cases that cause us to question God’s assurances. Maybe there are times when God chooses not to act because the person in question really didn’t trust God, or maybe the hardship he or she went through was actually a means to something much greater or part of a much bigger plan for which, in the eternal scheme of things, God rewards his participants amply.
I do know, however, that even in hard situations, he never violates our trust in him. He never proves untrustworthy. He doesn’t tease us with false promises. If we’re told so emphatically that we can trust him, there’s a very good reason we can. He means for us to read his Word and be filled with confidence that he will behave in a way that is consistent with his character and true to his promises.
He also means for us to trust him before we see how the situation plays out. If we’re waiting to see what God is going to do in our circumstances before we trust him, that isn’t trust.
That’s why we’re told that faith is the evidence of things not seen,3 that we should fix our eyes on what is invisible,4 and that we walk by faith and not by sight.5 Whether we’re looking ahead to eternal realities or trusting God day to day, we have to learn to rely on spiritual senses and not on what our eyes see and our ears hear. We have to be able to depend on God in the midst of our crises. He generally waits until we trust him before he shows how trustworthy he is. In the meantime, he gives us his Word and tells us to hang on to it without fear.
I’m determined not to live with a yes-but belief system. When my experience and a particular promise don’t line up, I want to look at my experience through the lens of the promise rather than looking at the promise through the lens of my experience. I want to bring my understanding up to the level of God’s truth, not bring his truth down to the level of my understanding. I want to accept the extravagance of his Word without focusing on all the exceptions I can’t explain.
That’s the only way I know how to live by faith according to the words he has spoken. And I believe this is the only way we can live in the freedom he wants us to have.
Chris Tiegreen, Unburdened: The Secret to Letting God Carry the Things that Weigh You Down (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2009), 79-83.
Mark 11:24, NIV.
Hebrews 11:1, NKJV.
2 Corinthians 4:18.
2 Corinthians 5:7, NKJV.