The Established Path of Discipleship

I remember pulling up into my driveway one day, and before I went into my house, I sat there for a minute and asked, “Is this all there is? If this is all there is to the Christian life, then I do not want it.” I did not realize what I was asking or saying at the time. By God’s good providence, I now understand what I was experiencing.

What I was asking that day was for a different experience. I was unsatisfied with the experiences I was having in the Christian life (i.e., struggle with sin, boredom, should I be doing more, etc.). Surely, there must be more to life as a Christian than what I was experiencing. I sought what R. Scott Clark calls the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience (QIRE). QIRE is a “quest to experience God apart from the mediation of the Word and sacrament.”[1] I wanted to point to an experience for proof/assurance that I was pleasing to God.

The problem with my thinking was looking for experience to give me what only the word of God (God’s definitive revelation), mediated to me by the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:12), can give. My experience can never assure me that all is right with me and God. Why? Because my experiences change daily. They are blown about by the winds of my emotions and circumstances. The ground of my justification, assurance, and the ability to lay my head down on my pillow at night and sleep knowing that I am okay with God is the Gospel. And where do I find that Gospel? I find it in the word of God.

So, what’s the answer to the question? Is this all there is? The answer is yes. This is all there is on this earth. We struggle with the world, the flesh, and the devil (1 John 2:15). We struggle with our sins, sometimes making us feel like we are losing our minds (Rom. 7:7-25). We watch the brokenness of this fallen world, and it often causes us to despair. So, if this is all there is, where is the hope?

The hope is that I have been freed from the law of sin and death that darkens this present world (Rom. 8:2). I do not always feel like it, but I know God does not now, nor will he condemn me in the future (Rom. 8:1). How do I know this? I know because Jesus “was delivered up for our [my] trespasses and raised for our [my] justification” (Rom. 4:25). The hope is that this world is not all there is. There is a new heaven and a new earth that is coming (Rev. 21:1-4), the likes of which no one on earth has ever experienced. Yet one day, I will experience that place, and the God who prepared that place for me is all the experience I will ever need on this earth.

     [1] R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice (Philipsburg: P & R Publishing, 2008), chap. 3, sec. 1, Kindle.