Last Wednesday my wife, Karen, gave birth to our new daughter, Olivia.  We do have kids already, but she is the first that we have given birth to.  In our experience, kids typically enter our family via a few signatures; they come potty-trained and automatically sleep through the night.  Going through the pregnancy and delivery process has been an altogether different experience.  I knew my wife would work hard through labor, and I expected to put forth a lot of effort, too.  I had no idea just how exhausted even I would be afterward, though!  Of course, it is all worth it to welcome our newest child into the world.

At the same time that Olivia was leaving her watery environment to transition into a fellow air-breather, our normally dry basement was transitioning into a watery environment, thanks to some massively heavy rains in our area (Rain-mageddon – anyone, anyone?  We need a catchy name for this…floodnami?).  There’s this natural upheaval process that we expected to happen and even planned on as we brought Olivia home with us.  The added household trauma with our basement has gotten us to rather unprecedented levels of exhaustion.  As I peck out these words on my laptop, I’m looking at a living room crammed full of stuff, rendering both levels uninhabitable for all practical purposes.  The carpet installers have just left, so I’m looking forward to some normalcy…or at least getting to the new normal for us, whatever that will be.

People have responded with tremendous empathy for our situation, and I’ll confess to having milked it a bit in the process.  I have realized that when recounting either the basement or the baby with people, it is difficult to not include the other event.  They are inextricably linked for me, fused together by virtue of a shared calendar date and the big changes they represent.  Over time this will likely dissipate, becoming a footnote in Olivia’s birth story.  By her first birthday I do not expect to hold a candlelight vigil to remember the anniversary of carpet padding no longer with us.  Right now, however, they are both big events, and they remind me that in life we have to take the bad with the good.  In other words we know discomfort always comes with comfort, burden with blessing.

The life of the Christian is filled with both burden and blessing.  Those who attempt to embrace the comforts while jettisoning the conflicts will find themselves clinging to a belief system that reflects not Christ but a god fashioned in their own image.  This sort of thing happens all the time.  It usually begins at the point where orthodox faith runs at odds with culture.  The Christian chafes raw from the conflict of cultural pressure and spiritual responsibility.  Our Lord rightly said that no one can serve two masters (Matt. 6:24, a principle that applies to much more than God and money, which was the immediate context of these words).  One side will win.  It’s that simple.  There’s no other way.  When culture is chosen over faith, Scripture is minimized, the gospel is marginalized, and faith is capsized.

Where does these issues manifest themselves?  Just about anywhere, depending on the time, culture, current events, and personal disposition, among other things.  I see a lot of students who relinquish the idea that explicit faith in Christ is the exclusive way to forgiveness from sin and access to God.  Religious tolerance makes exclusivity pretty unpopular.  In a similar vein, there are those who deny the existence of hell or eternal punishment, much like Rob Bell in his book, Love Wins.  Speaking of books, Matthew Vines has recently made some waves by synthesizing arguments in favor of an acceptable biblical homosexuality in God and the Gay Christian.  The pressure to accept this lifestyle is so strong (especially considering his own orientation) that it is easier to perform theological backflips than to go against culture.

At other times attempts are made to generally discredit Scripture so that its own inspiration – an by extension, authority – becomes subject to human reason.  The most recent is the claim that Jesus had a wife, a claim that was debunked, much to the embarrassment of Karen King and the Harvard divinity school.  It turned out to be a hoax.  This is but one of many instances where God’s Word has been made to look false. Attempts like these are known for finding a receptive audience.  The issue comes down to authority.

Is God’s Word really authoritative for my life?  I remember one of my professors in seminary pointing out that when people stop believing something about the Bible, rarely, if ever, do they question one of the easy passages.  No, it’s the difficult passages that are questioned – the ones that find Christians in the hot seat.  Absolute disaster comes when the Church capitulates to cultural pressure in one of these areas.  When the Church, tasked with shining the light of the gospel in a world of darkness, begins taking its cues from  the world on what to believe, its light has been extinguished and its influence obliterated.

We need to sweat the hard stuff.  We need to work through the difficult aspects of our faith, knowing that the comforts cannot be separated from the challenges this side of heaven.  The difficulties should be expected, because those difficulties are major points of distinction from the rest of the world.  So to jettison the difficulties is to abdicate the God-given platform to live out our faith in a lost and dying world.  The result is something glorious.  I saw that in the delivery room last week.  In a much lesser way I saw it after all the labor to get the basement back into shape.  Greater than either of these is the glory that awaits those who remain steadfast in their faith to the end, not giving in even in the face of difficulties.

Scripture has a lot to say about this.  James tells us to rejoice in our difficulties to produce perseverance (James 1:2-4, 12); Paul tells the Corinthians to always overflow in the work of the Lord (1 Cor 15:58); to the Romans he says to rejoice in our sufferings to receive hope (Rom 5:3); and our Savior said that sticking with our faith secures the promise of salvation (Matt 24:13).  So do sweat the hard stuff.  Don’t set it aside or look for easier alternatives.  Let it build some spiritual muscle in you and help you look forward to the joy that is to come from this uncomfortable distinction in our faith.