Podcast: Help! My Christian Life Is a Mess (Lewis & Sarah Allen)

March 06, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

When You Just Want to Quit

In today’s episode, Lewis and Sarah Allen talk about the challenging situations, painful trials, and unexpected disappointments in our lives as Christians and what we should do when our faith feels weak or our walk with Christ feels like a mess.

Resilient Faith

Resilient Faith

Lewis Allen, Sarah Allen

Lewis and Sarah Allen encourage and exhort believers to approach life’s adversities in a biblically grounded way by leaning on Christ and committing to his church.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:44 - Why Do I Feel Like My Life Is Such a Mess?

Matt Tully
Lewis and Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Lewis Allen
Thank you, Matt. It’s good to be here.

Sarah Allen
Hello. Great to be here.

Matt Tully
I think it’s a pretty common experience for Christians to, at some point in their lives, feel discouraged in their walk with God; to feel like their faith is maybe particularly weak, or just to feel like their Christian life is a mess. To start us off, I wonder if you two can resonate with that feeling. Lewis, let’s start with you.

Lewis Allen
Thanks, Matt. I think emotionally and temperamentally I’m a very balanced person, but see me most Mondays—I’m a pastor, so Sunday is a big work day and a big focus—I’m feeling pretty messy, pretty weak, pretty tender. I still believe what I preached on Monday, but it just feels harder when you’re exhausted, and you see problems and you deal with problems and you see your own heart. So, definitely I can relate to that.

Matt Tully
How about you, Sarah? Have you ever felt like your life was just a mess?

Sarah Allen
Yeah, certainly. I think being a parent just brings with it so many joys, but also plenty of discouragements. I think our hearts are sort of bound up with the well-being of our children, so when our children struggle, we struggle. We feel hurt, we feel sad for them, we grieve with them. And so there have been times when our children have been going through really difficult things in their upbringing when I felt on the floor, to be honest, and really just clinging on, feeling like things are a bit out of control. Those have been hard times. I think just the nature of life, juggling different things—juggling involvement in church, family life, paid employment, just trying to keep all those different balls in the air—can just sometimes leave you so physically tired that that then impacts your spiritual life and your emotional well-being as well. You’re just trying to hold things together and you can lose perspective on what really matters.

Matt Tully
I know both of you have spent a lot of time talking with young people. You’re engaged with them a lot in your ministry and in your lives. Do you both have a sense that this experience—feeling deeply discouraged about our Christian lives, feeling like our lives are chaotic and messy—is a more common phenomenon today than it might have been in previous generations? Lewis, what do you think about that?

Lewis Allen
I do agree, Matt. Sarah and I are blessed with children; we’ve got three in their early to mid-twenties, a late teenager, and a mid-teenager. We found ourselves saying particularly to those in their twenties, Guys, we just had it so much more easy than you did when we were at that stage. In the early 90s the world was a simpler place. It was “easier” to be a Christian. The world’s a very, very different place. In many ways it just seems so much harder to be a young disciple today.

Matt Tully
That’s not what we often get from our elders. We often hear, Oh, back in my day we had to walk up uphill both ways—that dynamic. So what is it about the world that we live in today, and what young people in particular are facing, when it comes to their Christian lives that you two would say makes it harder, in some ways, to walk faithfully and have a vibrant faith?

Sarah Allen
I think specifically the advent of the internet makes a massive difference to all of us, doesn’t it? It affects our ability to concentrate. It means we’re exposed to so many different sources of information. There is so much out there. We’re not in our family, in our small peer group, in our churches, hearing those voices; but suddenly, a huge array of different voices, which we are attempted to be distracted and go after different things, to be caught up in different peer groups and maybe not be listening to simple, clear voices that are around us. So I think that can cause confusion and it can be overwhelming, just the amount of fast-paced change and information that’s around us, as well as just some really very destructive influences that young people can be exposed to online. So I think that makes life harder. Certainly, in the UK at the moment, financially, things are difficult. Houses cost more to buy. We are dealing with a great deal of uncertainty financially, which is really hitting young people. They just can’t get onto stable housing. And all these different physical constraints cause young people to really question, Where is God in this? What is a normal life? What does true life look like? And they have a lot of questions I think.

Matt Tully
It can be so easy for us to, when we think about our Christian lives, maybe want to put some of the physical, daily life realities, like our homes and our jobs, to put those to the side. But those are an important part of the story. But I did want to go back to something you said earlier, Sarah, about the influences—that maybe there are more of them now, pressing themselves upon us, in part because of the internet. How big a feature is that? It’s often the messages that we’re hearing, the influences that are on us, even our expectations about what life is supposed to be like—how often is that setting us up for frustration and discouragement, would you say, Lewis?

Lewis Allen
One of our sons was saying how few people in his peer group of friends really do have long-term ambitions. I think particularly post-pandemic, but life just seems very unstable, really tough economically. So few think about savings. So few think that housing, as Sarah mentioned, is within their reach. That’s just a hugely discouraging headspace to live with. And then to be a disciple, it’s like you’re doubling your load of difficulty. And, of course, the rapidly changing culture, which Sarah talked about, is just so much more hostile to orthodox Christianity and discipleship—obviously, around the sexuality question, but there’s just many, many others as well.

Sarah Allen
I think as well, it’s easy to look onto Instagram or Snapchat or whatever services people use and see glossy, easy lives, and compare yourself with those things and think, I just don’t match up. My life’s never going to match up. And I think that maybe is one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, for the lack of ambition that young people have. They think, Well, I can’t get that, so why bother trying? I’ll just drift along. It’s easy to feel disheartened and disconsolate because the ideals that are put before them are so glossy and glamorous. They’re so far reached from daily life and the struggles that they experience.

Matt Tully
We often think of those kinds of ideals in terms of monetary realities—wealth and power and prestige and the world at large. Do you think there are times when Christians also come up against Christian ideals that feel like they’re too far out there? Is that part of the story, that young people are kind of sold a message about the Christian life itself that isn’t realistic, or is discouraging?

Sarah Allen
Yes, I think that’s true. We can tune into amazing preachers online, or listen to fantastic worship experiences, or we can look at somebody’s Instagram posts of very pretty Bible verses with beautiful images around them. And that can just feel so far away from the daily life as part of a local church community, where the music might not be amazing; where the preaching is good meat, but it’s not some brilliant name preaching who’s got a great research team behind them. The daily and weekly ins and outs of church life and family life in the body of Christ has all kinds of gritty stuff in it, doesn’t it? And that is not presented, largely. It’s a very individualized spirituality that I think we encounter online of people’s personal work with the Lord, and we don’t see what it means to be part of the body of Christ, of bearing each of the burdens, of the going along to a prayer meeting, which is maybe not well-attended. We don’t see that on Instagram.

Matt Tully
The mundane of the Christian life.

Lewis Allen
But if I can add something, which is quite different from what you’ve just said, Sarah. I think a lot of preachers and older Christians also maybe feel they so want to empathize with and show compassion to younger Christians who are finding life just very brutally difficult. I wonder if in some ways we don’t always help them because we want to make so many concessions. We can be scared of speaking strongly and urging on a call to self-denial and cross-bearing, that actually we’re not helping young adults. We’re almost hyper-aware, which leads us to (I’m repeating myself) to an unhelpful, It’s all hard, isn’t it? And that can be as corrosive as any other pressure.

10:03 - What Is Resilient Faith?

Matt Tully
In a little bit, I’d like to explore a few specific reasons that Christians can often feel like their lives are a mess and dig into some of the specifics of why this might happen to us. But before we go there, I wanted to talk about this broader idea of resilience, of having a resilient faith. That’s something you two talk a lot about. Lewis, maybe to start with you, what do you mean by that term “resilient faith”?

Lewis Allen
I would say that, as we know, there’s been a huge secular industry, and an important one, of health in the workplace and in personal lives. Just think about keeping ongoing—grit; learning grit and developing grit. And obviously, whilst there are points of contact for the Christian, we believe in grace-based resilience, which is, I would say, learning to live with Jesus, for Jesus. Living with Jesus—learning, growing, dependence, and delight—and living for him—a life of sustained discipleship, which is cross-centered and costly, but should be marked with joy and hope.

Matt Tully
How would you respond, Lewis, to someone who hears that and says, That sounds good. Those are a lot of good theological words, but how is that actually different? Isn’t what we really need is just more grit. We need to be more determined, more committed, and just work harder. That’s actually the key to living faithfully in the Christian life and persevering.

Lewis Allen
Obviously, the Pharisees were very, very determined people, and they were very hardworking people. If Christian living is about learning techniques—learning to be strong according to non-biblical categories—they will take us away from a heart which is tender to the Lord and turn us in on ourselves.

Sarah Allen
I think you are right. I think the secular resilience industry, which is a part of the well-being industry—I’ve just had some training in my secular workplace about resilience. There are so many connections because I think we are made by God in his image, and so what the secular workplace offers is just a very shallow version of what the gospel offers. It is graceless, but it tells you to stand back up again after you’re knocked down. It tells you that you need community. It tells you that you need a long-term goal. It tells you even to sing. These are some things that are recommended in resilience. The danger is that Christians could just adopt that without the grace, because it sounds good. It fits with much of the gospel. But it’s without the grace that actually can sustain that, and which means that keeping ongoing is not just a keeping ongoing, but it’s a growing closer. It’s a depending. It’s a delighting. It’s not just about going through the motions. It’s not about standing up. It’s about delighting in God and growing in strength through depending on him.

Matt Tully
Some Christians can tend to maybe take that legalistic, or law-based, approach to the Christian life, where you just need to have more discipline and perseverance and that’s how you get through. I think sometimes others might fall into a different kind of category that we might call self-care. There’s another industry out there that is sort of related but maybe distinct that’s always focused on You need to take care of yourself. Give yourself grace. Give yourself permission to rest. That’s a big push, even in certain Christian circles. Sarah, how does resilient faith relate to this idea of self-care, but is maybe distinct from it as well?

Sarah Allen
Some of the things you mentioned there, like rest and just taking sensible care of yourselves, obviously that’s part of Christian resilience, and that’s something we talk about in our book. But it’s going back to it being grace and Jesus-focused. Self-care is just those two words.
If we don’t have Jesus in there, then it becomes self-oriented sin, doesn’t it? It just becomes, I’m just going to cosset myself. I’m just going to listen to myself. But real taking care of ourselves is when we take ourselves to Jesus. That’s how we are going to flourish. That’s how we are going to be strong is by taking ourselves back to Jesus and listening to his words of comfort, but also listening to his hard words—listening to his challenge, listening to his rebuke. And it’s also listening to other people, being part of his community. So often self-care is about having things easy, being on my own, the warm bath, walks in the forest—things that are going to feel great. But they can be just about yourself, not about really growing in community with others and a community that depends on Christ.

15:15 - “My Life Is a Mess Because of My Suffering”

Matt Tully
I’d like to explore a few specific scenarios now that probably all of us have experienced in some form in our lives. But maybe some people listening right now would say, Yeah, this is me. This describes where I’m at, and it explains perhaps why I’m feeling so discouraged in my life right now. I was thinking you two could sort of respond to this as if you were sitting across the table, with a coffee in hand, trying to provide some counsel or advice to somebody who’s coming to you like this. Sarah, let’s start with you again here. What would you say to someone who says to you, My life is a mess because of my suffering.

Sarah Allen
I’ve met plenty of people—a lot of young people, but certainly older people as well—who experience that. It’s very real. And we can all identify with that, can’t we? When suffering comes, we just feel like we’ve been knocked over. We’re flat on our back. Our normal disciplines and habits go out the window. Maybe we stop praying, we stop reading our Bibles. It’s just all too hard. And to people who are experiencing that, and then maybe also feeling real guilt or shame because they call themselves a Christian, and yet they feel like they’re not doing anything. They’re not doing the things that Christians should be doing. They think, I should be praying so much when I’m suffering, and it’s really hard to do that. So I think to people who are in that circumstance, I think it is about taking time to take the little steps of dependence on Christ. Listening to his word in whatever way you can, whether that’s in audio form. Praying those small prayers and crying out to him. But not retreating, not turning away from God. That’s the temptation, and we think, The worse I’ve done, the worse things get. I can’t manage. I’m failing, so I’m just going to hide in my shell. But actually, that is only going to create further problems. So, to creep out of your shell, to turn to Christ, and to see his compassion. To see how he suffered, and to see how he extends compassion to those who suffer. The Gospels are full of stories of him reaching out to those who suffered, whether it’s to the woman with her bleeding, who was in desperate measures. She just reached out her hand and touched his robe and met him. It was a tiny gesture; a gesture of reaching out to Christ. And in that, she found his power and his love, that he calls her daughter. So, those stories in the Gospels which show us Christ’s compassion are a great place to go to find that comfort. But to find that comfort with somebody else, to confide in a Christian who can then support and encourage and remind you of Christ. Who can be a reader and a prayer with you. Isolation is one of the worst things in suffering.

Lewis Allen
If I just could add, very briefly, to your answer, I just get that image of the woman with her need reaching out to Christ. When I’ve gone through times of suffering, I think the devil has tempted me, and can tempt us in our suffering, by saying, You don’t have to do X or Y now. We feel we’ve got a free pass to step away and just to go inside ourselves. And we are tempted to feel entitled when we suffer. So they’re not reaching out to Christ. We need to be by those who love us and we know we are loved by them. We need to hear them urging us to keep on being godly, pursuing Christ, and pursuing him in community when everything about us does not want to. We just want to withdraw. Sometimes the answers really are quite simple, but we need to hear them freshly and humble ourselves to embrace them.

Matt Tully
Sarah, I’m thinking a little bit of the person listening who is hearing all this and would say, But you just don’t understand the depth of my suffering. Something has maybe happened to me, or something has been done to me, that is so painful that I can’t see how God could do this to me. I don’t want to have faith in a God who would do this to me. How do we cultivate a resilient faith in the face of that kind of pain?

Sarah Allen
I can think of some people who have sat in our kitchen and cried and cried and cried because of the extreme suffering they have gone through, whether it is a kind of mental health problem or a trauma that they are dealing with and are sharing. But I just think of those words of Peter to Jesus, “Where else can I go? You have the words of eternal life.” I think sometimes we need to ask ourselves, What’s the alternative? In my suffering, to face up to this grief, this pain, this anger. Am I going to sit with it because I’ve got nothing else? I could distract myself with things that might take a bit of pain away briefly, or I can go to Jesus and I can confess that anger and grief and confusion and pain. And sometimes emotional pain feels like physical pain. It really does feel like there’s something wrong with your heart when you are really experiencing pain. But to sit at Jesus’s feet, sometimes in silence, but to go, Lord, this is my suffering. I can’t deal with it, but I know you can. And to remind ourselves of Jesus’s own suffering. He knows how to suffer. He went through the cross, he went through betrayal, he went through being hurt so personally. There are so many resources in Scripture; the question is, Are we going to look to those, or are we going to say, No, actually, I’m going to deal with this on my own. And I think the answer is if we try and deal with it on our own, it’s going to crush us. We’re going to end up embittered and thin. We’re cutting ourselves off from life. So sometimes we need to challenge ourselves, even in the depths of suffering, to say, Well, I can go to Jesus. It doesn’t mean I need to be doing long Bible studies or to be doing all kinds of things. But it means going to him, to sit at his feet, to offer ourselves and say, Lord, I can’t bear this on my own.

Matt Tully
Do you think it’s possible that Christians can sometimes believe that and then try to live that out when they face suffering, but maybe have unrealistic expectations about what that means? It’s almost this too easy approach where if I just read my Bible enough, if I just pray enough, then the suffering will end. But that’s not what you’re saying.

Sarah Allen
No. And it’s not what Scripture says either. We think about so many examples. Think about David as he cries out in agony before the Lord in the Psalms. Thin about how Absalom treated him, and there’s just real pain. I’m pretty sure David was struggling with pain and grief over that betrayal for the rest of his life. And we think about Jesus crying out in agony with loud cries. The skies aren’t going to open and stardust come down and make everything pretty and easy again. That’s not what Jesus experienced, so there’s no promise that we’ll experience that. But we experience the knowledge, the promise of heaven, of future hope and the certainty of future hope, and the reality that we know fellowship in his sufferings. Again, it’s, Do I want to be on my own with my grief and my pain, or do I want to be confident that Jesus is with me, even if the pain is still there, but he’s with me in it?

23:12 - “My Life Is a Mess Because I’m Stuck in Sin”

Matt Tully
Lewis, how would you respond to somebody who sits down with you and says, My life is a mess because I’m stuck in sin. I know that’s the main issue I’m facing. It’s this persistent, difficult sin that I just can’t shake. I can see how it’s ruining my life. What would you say to someone like that?

Lewis Allen
It’s tempting to go to plans and strategies for recovery. But like any Christian grace, the Lord is teaching us. It begins at the cross. It’s about the encounter with the unconditionality of grace, which knocks us out, softens our heart, woos and wins us all over again. You just have to walk through the gospel tenderly, firmly, clearly, starkly. Show them the alternatives to grace. Show them the glory of God’s unconditional acceptance through Christ.

Matt Tully
I think one of the things that we’ve all experienced when it comes to our struggle against sin is at times there can be this hopelessness with it. There can be this I know God loves me and I know that I’m saved in the gospel, but I still feel this cynicism about my ability to conquer this sin or that sin. That can really affect our whole Christian walk—every facet of our lives. So how do you help people get over, or get through, a hopelessness that’s set in when it comes to their sin?

Lewis Allen
We must be very careful not to promise some full recovery or full victory, because the Holy Spirit may or may not achieve that this side of glory. We don’t want to give promises which the Lord has not given to individuals. But we do want to bring encouragement and set the expectation of a degree of recovery. And I think as we talk to and walk with a dear brother or sister in these areas, it’s just the loyalty, the commitment. How will they be confident the Lord is for them and is walking with them if we, the very person they have bravely disclosed to, is pretty half-hearted about it? There’s a big emphasis on us as the encourages, the exhorters, the prayers, and the personal accountability. Sarah?

Sarah Allen
Sure. I think one thing that maybe helps when we are thinking maybe about our own sin and just feeling really defeated and at a loss because it’s just happened again—whether it’s whatever losing our temper or not getting up in time to read our Bible or something which feels much more major like envy or greed or whatever it is that is besetting us—and we just think, I can’t make progress. I can’t go any further with this. That’s it. I’m just going to have to side that and concentrate on other things because I’m never going to conquer this sin. But I think just thinking, This is the day that Lord has made—that each day is new. Waking up in the morning, we still have the resource of the Holy Spirit, we still have the promise of the gospel, the assurance of heaven, the knowledge that we are justified. Those gospel truths are not eradicated by besetting sins, by new sins or old sins that just won’t seem to go. Those truths are true every morning, and so every morning we can come and say, Lord, please help me today. I failed yesterday, but this morning, today, I need your help. I need the power of the Holy Spirit to change. And that honesty about ourselves, just really being honest with ourselves that this actually is a problem, and being honest about our lack of conviction that we can change, being honest about our lack of real trust and faith in the Lord in it. But confessing those things and coming back to grace and saying, Lord, I’m struggling to believe. I’m struggling to trust. I’m struggling to change. Please give me your grace by your Holy Spirit. And then, I think as Lewis said, working out what are the small steps? What are the practical things that we can do? Whatever it is, removing ourselves from situations, but trying to break things down into small units. Okay, this is one thing that today I’m going to do. Okay. And then tomorrow we get to the end of the day and say, Okay, so tomorrow can I do that thing again? And maybe there’s something else I can do. Breaking things down and asking for God’s grace. I think that’s what we’re meaning about dependence. Grace is a big, big word, and the gospel is infinite in size for us to enjoy and to explore. But we can also experience it in the small things and in the little nitty gritty and the things that trip us up. Because it’s often that gap between getting the big picture and then bringing it down to the immediate situations we find ourselves in. I think that’s one of the motivations for writing the book. Some of the people who we enjoy spending time with are the young people in our church. They get the big picture, but the issue is actually, What does that mean on Monday morning? What does that mean when I get home from work and I’m exhausted? What does that mean when somebody else is not interested in me? So, applying the gospel to those and breaking things down into small units to deal with.

28:43 - “My Life Is a Mess Because I Feel like a Failure”

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful because it is easy to kind of know the theory at the 20,000 foot level, but to then struggle to actually implement it and think about how it applies to the small things. Maybe as a final scenario to respond to, Sarah, how about someone who says, My life is a mess because I just feel like I’m failing. There’s not a particular sin that I would point to, but it just feels like whether it’s in my marriage or with my children or in my job or just life in general, I feel like a failure. I feel like I can’t measure up. What would you say to a person like that?

Sarah Allen
I don’t know about the US, but certainly in the UK people have really gotten into talking about imposter syndrome.

Matt Tully
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Allen
Saying you just don’t feel up to it. As you were talking then, it made me think about people struggling with imposter syndrome. I think that’s everybody, isn’t it? I think we all think, I can’t do this. I’m this year’s old, and I should be able to do this but I can’t. And yet again, I’ve just not got my life together. I think we often, in those situations, are comparing ourselves to some imaginary ideal maybe propagated by the media, or maybe just living in our own heads where we think, II should be this person, and I’m not. Again, I think one of the things we need to do in those situations is to really be honest with ourselves and with the Lord and with the people that we’re close to—Christians we’re accountable to. We should say, Actually, this is who I am. This is where I feel I’m not getting things right. And to then try and break that down. I think being realistic and asking, Have I got an inflated idea of who I am? Do I think I’m this great person who should have this wonderful life, and I’m just feeling a general malaise and feeling like I’m failing because I haven’t got a beautiful house and my children don’t do what I say quite a lot of the time? Or, My career isn’t going as well as it should be. Or, I’ve got this qualification and yet I’m stuck in this job. I think we often are dealing with ideals which are just fabricated, and so we need to be honest about that struggle and try to diagnose where that struggle is coming from. What’s going on in our hearts? Have we got idols? Is the reason we feel we’re failing is because we’re chasing after something, after an idol, which is never going to fulfill us? And then going back to Jesus’s description of what the Christian life looks like—a life of joy, of community, of struggle, of times of rejection. To be refreshed to find again, Well, what is he calling me to? What does the normal Christian life look like? I think, actually, that’s the life maybe that I should be living, or I am living, and to re-embrace that journey with Jesus, in community with people who are a bit messy, and with life circumstances that are going to be messy. So, just acknowledging that that is reality and that is a good reality. Does that answer the question?

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. Lewis, I’ve read stats and surveys of pastors and heard that oftentimes pastors would say that one of the things they struggle with the most is feeling like a failure—feeling like their ministry isn’t good enough, it’s not big enough, it’s not fruitful enough. Is that something that you personally have ever wrestled with, or that maybe other pastors that you know and talked with? How do you think about that in relation to this idea of resilience?

Lewis Allen
I wrestle with it all the time. So often when I preach I can barely get eye contact with people in the church. And I’m not meaning individuals; I’m meaning the whole church. I’m just like, I’m disappointed. I’m sure they’re disappointed. I feel uncomfortable. I’m sure they do. But I know some of that can actually be motivated by pride, because deep down I want to believe that I’m something rather special, and I want them to believe that. And when the mask slips again and nobody’s convinced, least of all me, it’s all too painful. So, I’ve learned slowly over the years to detect that prideful spirit, such that when I think I’ve done a bad job, it’s usually not a sign of humility. It’s a wicked brew, and I’ve thought such a lot about it. But I think we pastors just need to root ourselves every single day, hour by hour and Sunday by Sunday, in Christ’s imputed righteousness and his declaration that we are so treasured and loved. Through the cross, we’re adopted, we are united with him. We just preach the gospel to ourselves. And we should not be surprised when we fall apart and our ministries fall apart. Earlier I was talking about realism. We just need to be profoundly realistic about our limitations, the reality of the devil, and the problems of life. Often, we pastors long for ministry to be clean and manageable. Usually when it’s clean and manageable, nothing’s happening. Nothing good is happening. But for pastors who like to be in control, like to be orderly, it’s a difficult thing to go out and to embrace uncertainty and risk and danger, because we feel very much like we are inching closer to the edge of the cliff of failure. So, a slightly broader answer, Matt, but you’ve really touched a chord in my heart. We pastors, we’re an insecure bunch. We’re always forgetting our security comes in Christ. We grow to depend on him, and that should breed resilient ministry.

34:39 - Building Resilient Faith through Habits

Matt Tully
The next thing I wanted to hit on was the issue of habits; distinctly Christian habits that help us to build resilience into our lives. Habits is another one of those topics that has received a lot of attention in our broader culture in recent years. Speak to that and how that can help us to think, and why that’s an important part of the puzzle when we think about resilience.

Sarah Allen
I think it’s easy to feel that we’re either somebody who’s likes habits (we’re a methodical person) or I’m just not that kind of person (I’m a creative; I kind of do things spontaneously). I think even for Lewis and myself, we fall slightly to either one side or the other of that. But I think habits are essential even if we don’t feel like we are the habity person, because sometimes we just need things that we just got to do. We don’t have to think about them. We don’t have to make that decision. We know that in the morning the kettle goes on and we make the coffee and we open the Bible, and that’s the time with the Lord. We’re not having to make a decision every day about when that happens. Or, when we get our food, we close our eyes and we thank God for his grace and goodness in providing exactly what we need. And those habits of prayer at set times of the day—when we’re giving thanks for food or when we’re going to sleep at night—they become lifelong, don’t they? We model them to the people we live with, as housemates or children, and they shape who we are. Habits shape our ways of thinking. They shape our ways of feeling and responding so that when we are then then in crisis, we’re more likely to be carrying on. If we’ve got set times in prayer, when we get some awful illness or something dreadful happens, we are less likely to get derailed because we have the habit of This is just what I do. And even if it feels like going through the motions, we are there. And the Lord can use that.

Matt Tully
It’s so helpful to think of those habits as they are things that we want to get in place before the emergency strikes, because at that point it’s too late to try to build a habit.

Lewis Allen
I was very helped as a very young Christian reading J. I. Packer when he effectively said, Holiness is habit. And for me, from a very secular background and not with a Christian upbringing or training, that really took a lot of the mystery out of holiness in a very helpful way. How was I going to become more like the Lord Jesus? By developing Spirit-led and empowered habits, which meant that I thought in certain ways, behaved in certain ways, desired in certain ways—habits. All the secular resilience and leadership books will say nobody achieved anything without habits. As you said, Sarah, we all slightly rather want to be impulsive and chase the next exciting or big thing, but it’s the same in the Christian world. We learn the right ways to think, feel, and behave. The Spirit helps us to go to those reactions to the world or set those ambitions day by day, and he shapes us to be like Christ, because of the ways of seeking or responding to his grace. I often pull back against what I know is the right need—to do just the same things each day. But when I do those things, life is simpler and clearer and almost always more fruitful.

38:13 - Resilient Faith and the Hope of the Gospel

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final point here, the last thing that I wanted to highlight that we really need to have in place, which you draw out throughout the whole book and you’ve even mentioned it in this conversation a number of times, is just that future hope of the gospel and kind of what we’re looking forward to. I think this is one that’s easy for us to assume. As Christians who have been in the faith and been in the church for a long time, it’s easy to kind of want to skip over it because it feels so familiar and so almost trite sometimes. Lewis, why would you say we shouldn’t do that? Why shouldn’t we brush past our hope in the gospel?

Lewis Allen
We need to lean into our disappointments, our failures, our mistakes, and not brush them off. We need to allow them to teach and remind us that what the Bible is full of on almost every single page, that life is hard, life is disappointing, and life is vapor. It’s soon going to be gone. Our hearts get broken or embittered when we think, But this moment, this dream, should last forever and should come to fulfillment! We just have to think of death many times, every single day, but flip it and ask, What comes next? We must really train our hearts, and therefore our values and our living and our habits and our disappointments on the inevitability of experiencing God’s infinite love infinitely in the world to come, urging our brothers and sisters to do likewise, and to weigh everything in the light of those coming certainties.

Matt Tully
Sarah, anything else you’d add as we close?

Sarah Allen
I think it’s really easy to think about the nuts and bolts of the Christian life. That’s what we’ve been talking about—the habits and how to deal with suffering in the here and now. But all of that is within the context of our heavenly hope. We are doing those things because of the greater reality which is yet to come, that which we have a foretaste of in the gospel. And if we didn’t have that hope, why would we bother with all of those things? We do that because, and so we do need, as Lewis said, to be reminding ourselves that we’re not going to be reminded by the world we live in. Our daily work life, cleaning the house, or whatever we are doing is not going to remind us of heaven. We have to actively remind ourselves that this life is so transient and so futile and so frustrating. And we have such glory ahead of ourselves. And that is such food for us. It’s food that will keep us going amidst all the frustration and difficulties. We know that there is great glory and a great Savior—his personal presence ahead of us. So that is such motivating, such delight and sweetness. I certainly know times when I felt really desperate and I thought, But there’s heaven to come. And it is a sweet thing to reflect on and to meditate on, and even in the best of times we need to be reflecting on the fact that this is just a shadow.

Matt Tully
Lewis and Sarah, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing a little bit about lessons you’ve learned about what it means to pursue a resilient faith in our lives as Christians. That’s something that we all want to do more and more. We appreciate you taking the time.

Lewis Allen
Thank you, Matt, very much.

Sarah Allen
Thanks, Matt.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.