For in Christ Jesus … the only thing that matters is faith working through love.

Gal. 5:6

How do you know that you have real faith in a Real God? That’s the big question that we’re always trying to answer in this here blog space. Last time we were especially thinking about whether the faith movement is real faith, or just another human attempt to build a God-life out of our own ideas and efforts. The conclusion was that faith movement constructs lead us away from dependence on the Lord and submission to his sovereign authority. In other words, it allures us into various forms of idolatry that – ironically, given the emphasis on “prospering” – end up robbing us of the perfect provision that the Father intends for us in every circumstance of our lives. Worse yet, they deny us our honored place as worshipers of the true King. The faith movement limits our praise to those times when we feel “blessed.”

All our critique with regard to the faith movement probably seems pretty obvious to us. But the more we find fault, the more we need to consider where we might fall prey to the very aberrations that we so confidently disparage. As I thought about where such pitfalls might ensnare us, four particular traps occurred to me. Each of them demonstrates the fact that the prosperity heresy is neither anything new nor particularly unique. An examination of the dangerous places reveals that we all are, at heart, proponents and practitioners of what we condemn.

First, expectations and disappointment. It’s not just Walter Mitty who spends hours constructing fantasy worlds about how life “should be.” Walter is just a caricature in whom we should recognize similar tendencies. For the most part, our visions are technicolor – positive, hopeful scenes of well-laid plans coming to fruition. In our darker moments – or, for some of us, in our normal pessimism – they take on hues of gray. We optimists sense the letdown when clouds dim our happy dreams; our pessimist brothers and sisters don’t generally know how to handle any outbreak of sunshine. Either way, we hold God to account for not doing our bidding.

There is too much evidence of this dynamic in my life to even begin a denial. From the little things like being delayed by an incompetent store clerk to the larger issues related to desires for my family, for service, for my future, the mutterings and sighings, the recriminations toward God and others, the bursts of irritation, the retreat into false consolations all testify to Paradise Thwarted. I may not name and claim, but I am ready to shame and blame (God, you, whomever and whatever) when ducks don’t line up in their assigned row.

Of course, we’re very careful to avoid an open declaration that God owes us anything. But I would hate to have you look inside my heart and mind, lest you discover that I really do believe that he does. Like the Psalmist, I hold the Lord to a pretty high standard of beneficence, ready at the smallest perceived blessing deficit to ask, “has the Lord forgotten to be gracious to me?” (Pss. 77:9).

Second, personal performance metrics. One of the fallacies of the faith movement is that you CAN and MUST demonstrate your election through the application of your own power of believing. I’m fairly certain that I have that disease. At best it lies dormant in my heart; often enough it breaks out in full virulence. I know I don’t have bootstraps, but I’m regularly tempted to see if there might not be a pair around to pull up.

While I’m scrounging around for some power native to myself that doesn’t really exist, I’m missing the gifts of faith and hope from the Father that connect me to himself, the greatest of blessings. If we look away from our two fantasies – that God owes me some version of the trouble-free life and that I can perform well enough to earn what’s owed – we come to what Paul calls his “secret of contentment” (Phil. 4:12): the ability to do all things by surrender to the one who alone provides the strength to do so.

Third, self-justification. When we are going after symbols of the “should be” life, it’s pretty common for us to – sometimes very subtly – manipulate circumstances, people, and our own thinking in order to attain our desires. Again, this might be toward positive or negative ends, depending on what the “should be” is supposed to resemble. Regardless of the direction, we look for favorable portents; we advance pretexts for chosen behaviors; and we propose various deals to make with God and the universe.

What I mean is this: When we’re tempted to get what we think is ours by right, we work hard to put our actions in the best light possible. We justify workaholism with the claim that the money made is for others, or that we’re just being prudent. We defend excessive leisure time with appeals to the need for balance. We excuse various fleshly sins with the rationalization that we are merely looking for a break from the ardors of daily life. We avoid taking responsibilities or roles set before us in the assumption that God has not called or equipped us to do so. It doesn’t matter that we haven’t actually submitted ourselves to the Holy Spirit. We are convinced that what we’re doing has divine sanction – or that at least it should.

Fourth, offense against love. One of the things that strikes me most about the faith movement is that I have never seen or heard any content that focuses on the biblical call to love. No doubt there’s a good deal about self-love, and much noisy confusion about what it means to know God’s love. But there’s little to nothing about agapé, the selfless offering of our lives that reflects the working of grace in our hearts. Agapé is the highest expression of the obedience of faith. It is the Spirit-inspired reflexive response of a disciple to the overwhelming goodness of the Trinity. A response to a goodness that was, and often is, most powerfully manifest through times of suffering and loss. Remember that “in all our affliction, he was afflicted” (Is. 63:9).

In the final reckoning, every characteristic of unbiblical faith movements, whether the larger spiritual trend or our own personalized versions, is an offense against love. Every imposition of self-serving expectations on God, immeasurable standards on ourselves, and demands on others that they go along with our little Kingdom of Me schemes is an assault on both of the great commandments. Even more to the point, they are declarations, in word and deed, that we are living in some denial of God’s love for us.

We began with our ongoing question: What is real faith? The more we ask that question, the more we see that the answer is a complex one. At the very least, though, we discover the sharp divide between God’s world of eternal promise and purpose and the alternate (un)reality of human striving and disappointment. Believing, trusting, obeying all come to us as a pure gift of love from the Father. A gift of love that means an offering of himself to us. A gift that he gives so that he can bring about his will even (and especially) when it saves us from the fulfillment of ours. A gift that he revealed in the darkest of all hours when the Son of God surrendered to death on an unjust (but wholly justifying) cross. And so a gift that is ours most powerfully when we face the darkness.

All the blandishments of our fantasy faith movements attract us with their false, sparkly present and future. Unfortunately, they are just one more part of the Devil’s unicorn theology. Like unicorns, they have descriptions and pictures that imitate something in God’s true world. Like unicorns, trying to ride them is nothing but a dead-end proposition.