Everyone goes through dark times. I know I have.
I’m writing this right after watching a sermon on Psalm 88 by Tim Keller. He made some very good points. Probably the best one is this: Why are you a Christian? To serve God, or for God to serve you?
Just so there’s no confusion, there’s a bit of self-serving in all of us. That includes Christians. If He wouldn’t accept you in Heaven, would you still worship Him? Isn’t that a little selfish? But that’s not the point of this blog post.
I’m an author, and there have been plenty of times I’ve questioned . . . not His existence, but my own dedication to Him. “If I’m really serving Him, why am I writing excrement?” That’s the polite way of saying it.
You see, when I first started the Ebony Sea: Season One series, I was cranking out an episode every month. For four straight months I published a new not-really-that-short story. Most shorts are less than 5,000 words, and mine were between 10k and 15k. They were pretty good, if I’m qualified to judge my own writing.
Then another project came up, I spent a couple of years getting that book published, and at the beginning of the year I went back to Ebony Sea. And it was garbage.
I’d been half-way through #6, I hadn’t polished #5 sufficiently, and my attempts to finish #6 were . . . less than successful. Looking back at what I was able to do in the first four stories left me feeling depressed.
Let’s bring this back around to God. I questioned myself. If I were to honor Him with my writing, why was my writing so worthless? I wouldn’t even read it to my wife. She had no idea how bad it really was. All she remembered was how good I had been.
“But Mark, those other stories are all polished and published.”
“I did each of them in about thirty days. This one I’ve been working on all year and it’s still a heap of refuse.”
So if it’s that bad, am I really serving God or simply deluding myself? That’s the question I’ve had for months on end. Followed up by this one. “If it’s not serving God, why am I bothering?”
The ending of Psalm 88 has the author pointing out that “darkness” is a closer friend that God. Tim Keller suggests the point of that is the author saying “darkness” is a better friend that God. I look at it a tad differently. My opinion is that the Psalmist is saying God is more distant than “darkness.”
So the question every Christian has to answer is this: Are you in it for the goodies? That’s the charge Satan made about Job. He suggested to God that Job only serves Him for the toys he gets. Without the benefits, which for Job were humongous, would he still worship God?
In the end, we see Job say he’d serve God regardless. In Psalm 88 the writer is complaining as much as Job, but like Job he complained TO GOD. In neither case did they turn away. In the darkness, they held on.
“In this world you will have trouble.” That’s John 16:33. Being Christian doesn’t mean you won’t have trials and tribulations. “A servant is not greater than his master.” That’s John 15:20.
When He cried out, asking God why He’d forsaken Him, Jesus had more darkness than either Job or the Psalmist.
He didn’t quit.
Don’t you quit.
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