The Father’s relentless, gracious pursuit of us is meant to deliver us from our consuming desire to love and serve ourselves above everything else.

I don’t think that it would be shocking or controversial for me to say that Jesus is not particularly tolerant of unbelief or that he strongly opposes our indulging in or submitting to fear and anxiety. A number of messianic sayings leave no doubt as to his attitude: “O you of little faith, how long do I have to put up with you.” Or, “If you who are evil know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give gifts to those who ask him?” How about, “A wicked and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but none will be given to it.” Not exactly weak medicine.

It’s not that the Lord is impatient or unkind. He simply agrees with all of Scripture’s adamant rejection of unbelief, fear, and anxiety as normal life states for those who belong to God. We tend to accept all three as things that “just happen,” even if that acceptance is not explicit. It’s this contrast between the divine and human attitudes toward trusting in the Lord that lies at the heart of biblical sayings that chastise us for living in denial of his gifts.

God’s word is clear: Accepting the unholy triumvirate of fear, anxiety, and unbelief as familiar companions is a repudiation of the Father’s good purpose for us. If we wonder why we don’t walk in joy, hope, or obedience, the answer lies at the door of our too-friendly relationship with whatever in or against us opposes faith. I say too-friendly, but at the same time we feel a love-hate affair is going on. We are aware – whether vaguely or acutely – that our dalliance brings about manifold and obvious difficulties for us. As those who are objects of God’s invasion of love and mercy, we understand that it is simply not possible to walk the broad middle path and expect to flourish as a human person.

Jesus has warned us that strolling the common, wide road reflects the condition he calls lukewarmness, a potentially fatal disease. Despite the admonition, it is a consummate challenge for us to sustain a radical, thorough, and lasting break with having a divided heart. We’re like chain smokers who know that the chances of cancer skyrocket for nicotine addicts; who waste embarrassing sums of money on the instruments of death; and who don’t really enjoy the habit all that much anyway. The struggle to find freedom and faith is somewhat akin to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief that people traverse when facing serious loss. For the believer, the movement from unbelief to trust involves the most crushing of bereavements: the destruction of our idols; above all, the pulling down the false, but powerful god of self, the locus of all fear, anxiety, and unbelief.

Any war against this idol is necessarily one of attrition. It is long, marked by highs and lows that we often exaggerate, and presses us at the core places of our identity and self-regard. An outside observer might wonder if it really has to be this way. In light of the “good, good Father” about whom we sing, should it not be the most natural of choices to forsake whatever hinders us from his blessings and run pell-mell into the embrace of God and his kingdom? And sometimes that’s exactly what happens, especially in our first encounters with Jesus. But the tragedy of our “mature” discipleship is that, instead of an easy capitulation to grace, we follow a version of the aforementioned Kübler-Ross grieving paradigm. The path is not linear, uniform, or a one-off, but more a generalized picture of the confrontation with our deadliest foe. In the words of Walt Kelley, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Our most reflex reaction to the thought that we are anxious, unbelieving idolaters is simple denial. To reprise the trademark question of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, “What, me worry?”  Unlike the honest man of Mark 9:24, who prays for help with his doubting, we claim that we believe (but pay no attention to the unbelief behind the curtain). If I seem anxious, it’s really just that I’m “concerned.” It’s not that I don’t trust God, I just want to be prudent. Boldness and courage are just not my personality. Even if none of these sentiments ever pass our lips, they certainly inhabit our psyches and inform our actions.

Inevitably and fortunately, cracks in our faith begin to manifest themselves. The failures arise at all kinds of pressure points, almost always implicating a call to obedience. Jesus may speak to us about our money, about our serving others, about using time for his kingdom, about reconciling with a brother or sister, about confessing sin, about letting go of desires, opinions, preferences. The denials and justifications all wither under the reality of God’s inexorable commandments. This distressing blow to our self-confidence elicits various forms of grief; we mourn the loss of what we thought was the solid ground of our moral and spiritual security, based on our own sense of goodness.

We are now at a crucial decision point. In light of the revelation of how deep our unbelief runs, the question arises: To whom and to what will we turn? A “strong” response is to engage in (Impotent) resistance and (futile) attempts to take down the idol on our own. I speak as a veteran of such tussles. I have countless belt notches for the vows and declarations that I have made, the campaigns I have waged, the blustery smoke I have blown – but few equal marks commemorating enduring victories. The “weak” alternatives are things like self-hating depression, liberal blame directed outwardly, gathering our marbles and going home (aka spiritual pouting), self-flagellation …

To take any of these paths is to keep ourselves in a dysphoric loop. As I mentioned, my insanity of choice used to be the constant devising of self-improvement programs. The results included discouragement, occasional self-pity, resorting to the comfort of familiar sins, or some sense of resentment that my idol was, at the same time, both ineffective and under divine assault. We all find ourselves locked into our own chosen behaviors. From time to time we break out of the mold and try something new: The passive become angry; the active begin to pout; many of us question the Lord’s desire or ability to deliver (silently, of course); we all try at least half-hearted prayers. To me, anger might be the most fascinating of our responses to the fact that the god we are asked to give up is not a particularly competent or worthy divinity.

In the midst of all this ineffectual self-absorption, and even when we question him, the Lord persists with the intensity of the one who gave everything he had to have us for himself. And although we may do so less often in our youth, as our discipleship years add up, we more often accept his grace and surrender to faith and to the God of faith. We not only fall out of love with ourselves, we see the illusion of “being like God” for what it really is: a cruel, deceptive trap that makes us less like him the more we try to make it work.

In C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the hyper-obnoxious character, Eustace, finds that he has become a dragon, mostly because he has been acting dragon-esque. In his distress, he begins to tear at himself, working to remove the offensive reptile fell. The exercise proves minimally fruitful; layer, after layer of flesh falls off, only to reveal still further excrescences. As Eustace becomes ever more despondent, Aslan – the Christ figure – appears and offers to complete the un-dragoning. With Eustace’s assent, Aslan plunges in one sharp claw that tears through the serpent hide and reaches its deepest point, then peels off the entire warty growth so that Eustace becomes “smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been.”

As with Eustace, and as with the Gospel man with the epileptic son, so with us: Desperation leads us to cry out for and receive God-faith, to trust less in ourselves and more in him, to allow the deep cut and blessed discarding of our dragon-hide. And, as the Duracell commercial says, “Trust is power.” Power to obey, to go or to stay at the Lord’s direction, to walk on narrow roads without fear, to find joy in him in all circumstances, to rest and be content and even luxuriate in the release of our burdens into his hands. Like Abraham, we don’t even need to know the destination because the Father will show it to us in his good time.

With the emphasis on good.