Isn’t it great to see that our God is limitless in His capacity to bring goodness out of that which might seem to be sheer evil at the moment? How many times have we looked back into the shadows of our lives and seen the work of Christ in those painful trials? We shudder at the thought of unveiling the secrets of our past, but we maintain an inward longing to show it to the world. We fear that those closest to us might think less of us if we show them our brokenness. At the same time we fear that hiding it might make us so numb and coarse that we will become unable to distinguish that which is pure from that which has become tainted and blemished by sin. In spite of our longing to break free of our entrapment, our desire to appear free before others overcomes the real thing, and we find ourselves enslaved to a desire without reality. Shame emerges the victor, and freedom is but a distant hope that seems too far fetched to be real.
The desire to be free is perhaps the single thing which we all share in common. The world around us is but a taste of the real thing. The shadow may prove that there is sunshine, but how will we know until we see it rising over the nearby mountain? Looking at a shadow only presents a vacancy of brightness. It is only a glimpse of what puts it there, but it is not the sunshine itself. Our hunger may prove that we are in need of something, but until we partake of substance, we will never know what the truth is and will never know that there is something better than hunger itself. Hunger is only the omission of the life giving substance. It is only the evidence. In this same way, the things this world offers us comes without the rich blessings that Christ so selflessly gives. They are but a taste. They cannot satisfy. The only thing they can prove is that, in their insufficiency, there must be something better.
In our innate longing for freedom, for something to satisfy our hunger, we must relinquish those insufficient things that we have filled ourselves with so that we can be filled with the living water of Christ. We may have convinced ourselves that we can find freedom in the things of this world, but when those temporal things have faded, nothing will remain… Nothing but the shadow of what could have been.
We may feel that God is doing us an injustice when we face difficulties in life. It may seem a contradiction to think that God can be love and at the same time let us suffer. But until we have seen that there exists no satisfaction outside of Christ, we will forever be occupied by money and sex and the million other temporary fixes, but will never be truly free. Freedom in Christ comes at the expense of freedom in the world, because true freedom recognizes that we must submit to slavery of the soul. The things we encounter in life which bring a stinging pain to the heart are only evil if they oppose the glory of Christ. Pain may be the equivalent of evil, but I believe that this is a rare event, for those things more often let us see that the world cannot satisfy the soul and bring us to a place of vulnerability before an Almighty God. If we believe that what is good is simply that which feels right and not that which glorifies Christ, I submit that such belief rises out of something darker and more sinister inside of us than we like to believe, and this can be the only reason we resist the power of confession.