Devotions

I wonder how many Christians reading this message right now are in a cloud of confusion. Does this describe you? Perhaps your prayers go unanswered. You’re constantly downcast. You face things in your life that you can’t explain. You’re disappointed in your circumstances and in people. You continually doubt yourself, you’re plagued with questions, and you constantly examine your heart to see where you went wrong. You feel gloom, despair, indecision—and you can’t shake any of it.

You may be a mature believer. For years you’ve sat under pure gospel preaching but now you doubt yourself, and you feel inadequate. You don’t sense the joy of the Lord the way you once did. So now you wonder if the Lord has a controversy with you.

Let me ask you: Do you trust His promises? Do you embrace His precious Word? Do you go on the offensive against Satan with the Word that you’ve heard preached? Or do you ignore the Lord’s past faithfulness to you? Do you not trust that He stands with you, in control of everything pertaining to your life? If so, then you’ve opened yourself to darkness.

Jesus describes the person who lives in darkness, saying, “He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth” (John 12:35). In other words, “Such a person has lost his way. His steps are confused, he’s indecisive, and he walks in blindness.”

I know what it’s like to enter such a cloud of darkness. Things get confusing. You can’t hear a clear word from God. You want answers quickly, crying out to God, “Oh, Lord, I’m not seeing or hearing You like I used to.” You end up asking Him to be more sympathetic, more pitiful toward your condition. But the truth is, the Lord has no pity for outright unbelief. He’s grieved by it. He expects us to walk in the light we have received. We are to trust in His Word and lay hold of His promises. When we come back to our knowledge of His Word, and to the conviction of the Holy Spirit, will we exit this darkness—but only then!

“Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you” (John 12:35). Darkness here means “spiritual blindness, confusion, loss of clarity, gloom.” At first, I wondered, “Darkness on those who love Jesus? How could such darkness come upon God’s people?”

I readily admit, I personally have been flooded with the light of Jesus. In my more than fifty years of ministry, I’ve witnessed the Lord’s power to raise the spiritually dead. I’ve seen many walk out of the tombs of drug addiction and alcoholism. My book The Cross and the Switchblade was all about God’s miracle-working power. I’ve had a lifetime of watching the walking dead come alive through His resurrecting power.

I’ve seen many other rays of light—from the life-giving names of God, to His New Covenant promises, to the fulfillment of His prophecies. In a sense, I’ve witnessed everything John 12 describes and much more. Indeed, God has revealed to His people today what the eyes of those Jews couldn’t see. We know not just from Scripture but by experience that God has prepared great things for those who love Him. We’ve been given a New Testament to instruct us in this and we’ve been given the Holy Spirit to teach us. Likewise, we have “better promises,” so we can become partakers of His divine nature.

We’ve also been given anointed teachers, pastors, evangelists and prophets to flood our hearts and minds with the light. They immerse us in truth, fill us with glorious promises, and remind us of God’s faithfulness to deliver us time after time. I ask you, with all these wonderful blessings, how could we possibly have clouds of darkness over us?

Usually, when we think of spiritual darkness, we think of atheists. Or we think of jaded, sin-satiated sinners groping about in sorrow and emptiness. But that isn’t the kind of darkness Jesus describes here in John 12. No, this darkness is a cloud of confusion, a spiritual blindness, indecision, a gloom of spirit and mind—and it comes upon believers. 

When those times come, when we’re besieged by temptation or despair, we’re to say with confidence, “You’ve delivered Your servants supernaturally throughout history. Do it again and let Your strength be made perfect in my weakness.”

We must take to heart this word from Christ’s parable: “O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt. . . . Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?” (Matthew 18:32-33).

The question for every Christian is this: “Do I forgive my brethren? Do I put up with their differences?” If I refuse to love and forgive them, even as I have been forgiven, Jesus calls me a “wicked servant.”

Don’t misunderstand; this doesn’t mean we are to allow compromise. Paul preached grace boldly, but he instructed Timothy, “Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (2 Timothy 4:2). We are to be bold guardians of pure doctrine.

Yet we are not to use doctrine to build walls between us. That was the sin of the Pharisees. The law told them, “Keep the Sabbath holy,” but the command itself wasn’t enough for their flesh. They added their own safeguards, multiple rules and regulations that allowed the fewest possible physical movements on the Sabbath. The law also said, “Do not take God’s name in vain.” But the Pharisees built even more walls, saying, “We won’t even mention God’s name. Then we won’t be able to take it in vain.”

What was the king’s response to his servant’s ingratitude in Jesus’ parable? Scripture says, “His lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him” (Matthew 18:34). In Greek, this translates, “taken to the bottom to be tormented.” I can’t help thinking Jesus is speaking here of hell.

So, what does this parable tell us? How does Christ sum up His message to His disciples, His closest companions? “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses” (18:35).

As I read this parable, I shudder. It makes me want to fall on my face and ask Jesus for a baptism of love toward my fellow servants. Here is my prayer and I urge you to make it yours as well: “God, forgive me. I am so easily provoked by others, and too often I respond in anger. Yet, I don’t know where my own life would be without Your grace and forbearance. I am amazed at Your love. Please help me to understand and accept Your love for me fully. Then I’ll be able to to be patient with my brethren, in your Spirit of love and mercy.”

What is behind judgmental strife? Why do servants of God, who have been forgiven so much personally, mistreat their brethren and refuse to fellowship with them? It can be traced back to the most grievous sin possible: despising the goodness of God.

I came to this conclusion only as I searched my own heart for the answer. I recalled my personal struggle to accept God’s mercy and goodness toward me. For years, I had lived and preached under a legalistic bondage. I tried hard to live up to standards that I thought led to holiness. But it was mostly just a list of dos and don’ts.

The truth is, I was more comfortable in the company of thundering prophets than I was at the cross, where my need was laid bare. I preached peace, but I never fully experienced it. Why? Because I was unsure of the Lord’s love and His forbearance of my failures. I saw myself as being so weak and evil that I was unworthy of God’s love. In short, I magnified my sins above His grace.

Because I didn’t feel God’s love for me, I judged everyone else. I saw others in the same way that I perceived myself: as compromisers. This affected my preaching. I railed against evil in others as I felt it rise up in my own heart. Like the ungrateful servant, I hadn’t believed God’s goodness toward me (see Matthew 18:32-33). And because I didn’t appropriate His loving forbearance for me, I didn’t have it for others.

Finally, the real question became clear to me. It was no longer, “Why are so many Christians hard and unforgiving?” Now I asked, “How can I possibly fulfill Christ’s command to love others as He loved me, when I’m not convinced He loves me?”

Paul admonishes, “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:31-32).

Jesus says: “Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2).

Christians who bear fruit get pruned? That’s not what most of us expect from a life of service to God. Deep down most of us expect a reward. After all, isn’t that fair?

What Jesus says here is counterintuitive and countercultural. When I grew up, it was tough to get a compliment for any achievement. Today, if a child merely participates in a team sport, he or she is awarded a trophy. Don’t think I’m some bitter old guy who thinks he never got his due. And I’m all for the amazing support many parents give their children today. But our society is starting to discover a negative effect of coddling our children. It teaches them to hate being corrected and when they’re celebrated for everything they do, they believe everything they do is right.

This describes much of the church today. As Christians, we enjoy unconditional love but we hate being corrected. In His analogy of the vine, Jesus says our Father wants us to know a deeper love than that of a coddling parent. Our loving God says, in effect, “Yes, you’re bearing good fruit, and that pleases Me. But I want to increase your joy of abundant life. And I will accomplish that by pruning you further.”

“He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Most of us do not get this concept. My wife and I learned it the hard way last year when a gardener took a pruning blade to our plants. We returned from a trip to find every green thing in our yard reduced to nubs. Our beautiful garden looked like the barren landscape of a lonely planet. We were ready to fire the guy! 

But when spring came this year, every plant had doubled its blossoms. Each one had shot up faster and fuller, and what was once clutter was now clean and beautiful, with flowering fruit. God’s pruning work in our lives is like that. It isn’t easy on us—in fact, it’s painful. And it isn’t pretty—but it yields glorious fruit that could not have come in any other way.