Larry Crabb believes God says
to believers: “Every sorrow you experience will be used by My Spirit to deepen
your desire for Me. He will speak to you about Me. Listen for that voice. You
will hear him most clearly when suffering humbles you enough to want to hear
him, to know you cannot go on without hearing Him” (p. 129). Crabb’s
thesis in the book Shattered Dreams
is that “only the pain of shattered dreams has the power to weaken the
stranglehold of the flesh,…the belief that there is no higher good than feeling
better now…The flesh is the energy that allows us to evaluate everything that
happens in our lives according to how it makes us feel…Something bad
happens, I hurt, I feel unhappy...I do whatever I can to make at least a few
dreams come true…I shift from walking in the flesh to walking in the Spirit
when the pain of life destroys my confidence and my ability to make life work…That
is brokenness” (Shattered Dreams, Larry
Crabb, Waterbrook, 2001, pp.136, 152, 154).
In the book Crabb wrestles
with the battle believers wage between their desire for a comfortable life full
of God’s blessings (as they understand blessings) and God’s desire that they
discard their preoccupation with their own soul pleasure and come to God alone
as their highest joy. He makes a
legitimate case for the power of suffering to drive believers to seek God’s
definition of good in their lives – a good that includes an encounter with God,
fellowship in community with other broken people and the transformation of
their soul. It is an important book on the role of suffering.
Mary
Lou Codman-Wilson, Ph.D. 1/18/14
Some Excerpts:
Our Need:
“God wants us to recognize
our utter helplessness and need for Him…He want us to humble ourselves…to let
the Spirit know we need Him to change our hearts, to confess to our community
of our close friends the weaknesses we should have resolved by now”(pp. 17, 18).
Soul Pleasure:
“Trusting God is dangerous
business. Unless we are trusting Him for what He has promised to provide, the
step after trust is disillusionment…That is my problem with God (and perhaps
yours): to people whose souls have been inundated with pain God seems so
unresponsive. We pray and nothing happens…That’s the question: what does it
mean to hope in God as we continue to live in a world where good dreams shatter
and God seems to do nothing about it?” (pp.
29-31).
“The problem is we long to
experience a compelling pleasure that eliminates all pain. The pursuit of soul
pleasure remains primary…As long as our purpose is to have a good time, to have soul pleasure exceeds soul pain. God becomes
merely a means to an end, an object to be used, never a subject rightfully
demanding a response, never a lover to be enjoyed” (p. 32).
When our dreams shatter we
can be brought to the realization that “The greatest blessing is no longer the
blessing of a good life. It never was.
It is now the blessing of an encounter with God...Now, in the new way,
the greatest dream is available”(p. 3).
Lessons from Naomi in the Book of Ruth:
1. “Our fondest dreams, the
ones we naturally believe are essential to our happiness, must be fully
abandoned if we are to know God well. But we cannot abandon them without help.
The help we need most often is suffering, the pain of seeing at least some of
our fondest dreams shattered. Shattered dreams are necessary for spiritual
growth” (p. 52).
2. “The realization that God
could have fulfilled a shattered dream pushes us into a terrible battle with
him…Only an experience of deep pain develops our capacity for recognizing and
enjoying true life [in an encounter with God](pp.
52-53). “Brokenness creates a space only
God can fill” (p.158).
Pretense:
“The Christian community is
often a dangerous place to be when your dreams shatter [because] two unwritten
rules surface in response to one who hurts. First, mourning has a time limit…At
some point we insist on victory. Second, we think there is a proper way to
mourn. Ugly battles should remain out of sight” (p. 65).
“Church is too often a place
of pretense and therefore a place without hope…When you hurt, hurt. Remember
what brokenness is. It’s the awareness that you long to be someone you are not
and cannot be without God’s help. Admit your brokenness to your safe community”
(p. 73).
Naomi didn’t play act. She
was a bitter old woman, angry with God, and told her welcoming neighbors so.
[But] in Naomi’s story two things happen. One: “She returned to Israel at the
time of the barley harvest. It was a time of joy for the people; it was also a
time for reaping. Two: Ruth, her Moabite daughter in law, took the initiative
and went to gather wheat that was left over by the official workers…Ruth,
unfamiliar with both custom and geography, wanders off to find a field. There
is no record that she prayed, no indication that she strategized or sought counsel
in her decision. With naïve simplicity she goes off to do good…As it turned
out, she found herself working in a field belonging to Boaz who was from the
clan of Elimelech, Naomi’s husband (Ruth
2:3)…When Naomi heard where Ruth happened
to work that day, she immediately recognized the hand of God. “He has not
stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead” (Ruth 2:20). Naomi
was given a glimpse of the movement of God” in her darkest, most hopeless hour (pp. 82, 83).
The Divine Vending Machine
In the darkness of our
shattered dreams “we worship a divine vending machine. Insert the right
spiritual change, punch the right button, and God delivers. What do you want? A
new zest for life? No more homosexual desires? Godly kids? Coming right up.
Just stick in the right coins – daily devotions, disciplined prayer, determined
obedience, faithful church attendance. God will do whatever you ask. Naomi
endured ten years of pain - from the death first of her husband and then of her
two sons. Ten years with no visible evidence of God’s involvement. It would be
enough to turn most of us into deists. But it is in the pain that we face the
truth that there is no other answer…only
God. We come to really believe that so we abandon ourselves to him and we wait. In
their frustration and despair, people usually turn to their lesser desires that
reap more immediate dividends and buy pleasure on demand” (pp. 91, 96).
When life seems darkest, “we
must appeal not to experience, where God seems remote or aloof, but appeal to
truth. The Bible is clear, God exists. Most important he exists in us…The life
of the Trinity flows in our being (Col.
2:9-10, 1 Cor 3:16, John 14:23). Our
search for God is therefore an inward search…Beneath every heartache beneath
every moral failure, beneath every shattered dream, a divine Presence is
waiting to be discovered” (p. 100). “Our false self and desire for control hides his
presence…We must go through not around whatever keeps us from Him. The process
is what spiritual people call brokenness and repentance...True abandonment,
giving ourselves to God in utter dependence on His willingness to give Himself
to us, pleads only mercy. It allows no room for control” (pp. 100-101, 110).
Feel Good Christianity:
“It isn’t always good to be
blessed with the good things of life. Bad times provide an opportunity to know
God that blessings can never provide…Suffering is required if we are to
discover a desire for God strong enough to help us decline the worlds
invitation to an immediate good time, to resist the devil’s suggestion that all
goodness may not reside within God, and to see through the false reasoning of
the flesh (that I deserve to be happy and comfortable)” (pp. 159, 160).
“In our day of feel good
Christianity, we have come up with the wrong view of our spiritual journey. We
think of suffering as something abnormal as evidence that we lack faith. We
work so hard to escape suffering that we fail to realize that good things might
be happening in us as we suffer…Our deepest desire is for a kind of life only
mercy makes possible, a life only grace provides. It is life for God, life with
God, life from God. And we have it, we have had it since the day we trusted God
to forgive our sins. But, it took shattered dreams to put us more deeply into
the core of our being where Christ lives, where we are alive...He is the only
one who can end all our pain and satisfy our souls…That encounter with God
captures our hearts, and liberates us to enter into community with one another
[a community of other broken people] and to experience profound transformation
in the way we think and live our lives” (pp.
166, 168, 176-177).
A Shrunken Christianity
“God insists that in our
suffering he is doing us good, a greater good than relieving our suffering. The
problem is with our blessing-based, happiness-centered understanding of
goodness. It’s too small. And with our small idea of goodness we dream small
dreams, and small dreams lead to small prayers” (p. 180).
“The evangelical church has
made a serious mistake. For years we have presented Christianity as little more
than a means of escaping hell. Knowing Jesus has been reduced to a one time
decision that guarantees the chance to live in a perfect pain free world
forever…we’ve shrunk Christianity into a neat little package full of blessings
that if opened will empower us to feel good now and feel even better in the next
life…[But] Jesus defined the abundant life as knowing Him…as the most wonderful
person there is. It’s about glorifying God by enjoying Him more than any other
source of pleasure...If we believe that there is more pleasure in something
other than God, than our obedience will never rise above required duty. Our
prayers will never aim higher than using God and
our joy will always leave an emptiness that drives us to further self-centered
efforts to find the fullness we demand” (pp.
181-183).
Those who have shattered
dreams “welcome those dreams as friends. They enter their pain and discover an
arrogant spirit that says “I don’t deserve this.” They tremble in their
un-holiness before a holy God and discover how passionately they want to have a
good relationship with him. Then He reveals the new way of grace, the gospel
that allows them to draw near to God and discover how wonderful He is…We can
live beyond shattered dreams” (pp. 197-198).