The dark night of the soul
I have gone through much harder times in the ministry than what I am about to describe. In fact, anyone who has several years of Christian living under his or her belt has gone through much more difficult trials. But the significance of my experience is not in its degree of difficulty, but that it almost made me renounce my divine calling.
In retrospect my problem was rooted in, to borrow Charles Dickens’s phrase, “great expectations.” They began when, as a twelve-year old, I came to know Christ and felt called to preach, which meant to my inexperienced, preadolescent mind that only great things awaited me. The positive side of this was that my teenage years were full and focused on ministry, despite some notable ups and downs.
My expectations were further increased when at age sixteen I preached my first sermon on Jonah and the whale. It was a sermon of doubtful quality and dubious wit, full of one-liners like “God has a whale of a plan for your life,” fleeing Jonah was “the chicken of the sea,” etc. I even announced that when the whale swallowed Jonah he was “down in the mouth.” It definitely was not a good sermon! But when you are sixteen and willing to preach, almost everyone will tell you that you did a “good job” or give the inevitable well-meaning cliche “God has great things in mind for you,” which of course was music to my ears. As a result I devoted myself wholeheartedly to ministry: my church, Youth for Christ, Open Air Campaigners, Campus Crusade, and other opportunities.
In my twenties, when I met and married Barbara, my ministry-minded, outgoing wife, my expectations further increased. And when I finally got to seminary I felt as if I had died and gone to Heaven. I was studying theology, the “Queen of Sciences,” and I loved my studies. I grew to so relish opening a critical commentary that I experienced an almost sensual thrill as I breathed its aroma and ran my fingers down the pages feeling the print. All of this, along with the many lifelong friendships I made in seminary, served to increase my expectations that great things were ahead.
During seminary I began ten years of youth ministry—a decade which almost perfectly coincided with the turbulent “up for grabs” sixties. As terrible as the sixties were culturally, they were great days of evangelism. During one banner year I recall there was hardly a Wednesday Bible study that someone of the nearly one hundred beaded, tie-dyed, bell-bottomed crowd did not come to Christ. When the seventies came, I felt it was time to begin preaching. So with the full, enthusiastic support of our church, I began a spin-off church. And expectations ran high! We prayed long and hard. We did everything scientifically, with aerial photographs, demographic studies, ethnographic surveys—you name it. And we worked hard. Everyone told me it would not be long until our church outsized the mother church.
But that is not how it went at all. In fact, after considerable time and immense effort, we had fewer attenders than in the initial months—the church was shrinking. My bright prospects were melting around me, and I descended into the deepest, darkest depression of my life.
One hot late-summer night in 1975, I felt a midnight of the soul and poured out all my dark, pent-up thoughts to my wife. Without being specific, I must say they were mean and ugly—and shameful. But I reached bottom when I said to my poor wife, “God has called me to do something he hasn’t given me the gifts to accomplish. Therefore, God is not good.” I felt as though I was the butt of a cruel joke, and I wanted to quit. In desperation I said, “What am I to do?” As long as I live, I will never forget her kind and confident response: “I don’t know what you’re going to do. But for right now, for tonight, hang on to my faith… because I believe. I believe God is good. I believe he loves us and is going to work through this experience. So hang on to my faith. I have enough for both of us.” And with that, being the fearless, gallant man that I am, I went off to bed. That dark night marked the inception of a process through which Barbara and I began to think through what the ministry is all about—a story which is chronicled in our book Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome.
I have told this story here to underscore from my own wretched experience the human tendency to imagine when things go wrong that God is not good, and even sometimes to say it! Perhaps all of us have had such thoughts at one time or another. Let’s face it—we sometimes think evil of God when tragedy comes to those we love, when we have been fired or have undergone a divorce, or as we observe the dominating presence of evil in human life. Honesty with ourselves reveals that questioning God’s goodness is endemic to the human condition.
Blasphemous moments may come and go to the believer’s soul, but if they lodge themselves in one’s thinking, they can neutralize and even destroy spiritual life. It is impossible to walk with God if we question his goodness. Further, if such thinking becomes part of one’s mind-set, the result can be disbelief and apostasy—like that of Thomas Hardy, who concluded his novel Tess by saying, “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.” Or consider Stephen Crane who blasphemously repeated in stanza after stanza in one of his poems, “God is cold.”
Some of the readers of James’ letter were in similar peril. Their miserable flight from Jerusalem and the ongoing persecution as Christians at the hands of fellow Jews had left them not only saying, “God is tempting me” (James 1:13), but mouthing the parallel logic that God is not good. James begins to respond to them in James 1:16: “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers.” This is a command which rings down the centuries to us: “For your soul’s sake, brothers and sisters, stop being deceived!” This command forms a bridge to James’ defense of the goodness of God.
In light of my questioning of God’s goodness, it is ironic that the very Scripture my wife and I announced our engagement with is the opening sentence of James’ defense of God’s benevolence: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17). How badly I later needed to be refreshed by this great Scripture!
God’s Goodness: The Gifts (V. 1:17a)
The opening phrase, “Every good and perfect gift is from above,” asserts that all goodness comes from God. The sense is even stronger in the literal reading—”All good giving and every perfect gift is from above”—because it emphasizes that the action of giving is good, and that all his gifts are telion (perfect/complete). Thus God’s giving is intrinsically and comprehensively good—totally good! The logical, implied sense is that nothing evil can possibly come from above.
Further, since his gifts are perfect, they, unlike those which come from human hands, manifest their perfection the more they are examined and experienced. This, of course, has been the experience of the saints down through the centuries. “As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is flawless” (Psalm 18:30). “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul” (Psalm 19:7).
Preaching the Word – Preaching the Word – James: Faith That Works.
