It seems that mainstream Christianity is always looking for feel good stories. Miraculous stories about how you overcame such and such a sin, or how God delivered you from an impossible situation or circumstance.

These kind of powerful testimonies. And if you don’t have one, then you don’t exist.

That may be the exaggerated interpretation for some of us who don’t have it all together and haven’t hit rock bottom and needed God’s help in an extraordinary way, but are just trying to do the best we can.

But doing the best we can doesn’t often make the highlight reel. We may not get “face time” for our faithfulness, or our “average” everyday struggles in faith and following God.

And no, I’m not bitter.

Who wouldn’t want to have a great bang-for-the-buck testimony, a  Hollywood worthy experience, complete with drug addiction, serious deprivation and one foot in the grave… until the Love of Christ broke through? I’ve always been envious of those whose testimonies are all about God moving in a mighty way to instantly free someone from a crack addition, cigarette smoking or porn habit.

Some how God doesn’t work that way with me.

And to be honest, it bugs me. I want to be made whole and I want it now. I want to be set free from my besetting sins, and I want it now… without all the need for struggling and winning and falling and losing and on and on.

Why do we get it so wrong?

Testimonies are meant to build your faith, to give you strength and hope for your circumstances. But sometimes they have the opposite effect. They make you depressed and bummed out about how you are struggling with something that someone else was miraculously and effortlessly, delivered from.

But maybe that’s the problem. My expectation is that God will do it. That He will somehow, even magically, zap me with His magic wand and I’ll be “all better.” No more sin habits. No more sweating it out through human effort. Just God.

And I think this kind of thinking is fatal. It excludes the need for commitment, for picking up ones cross, for dieing to ones self and being faithful when things aren’t supposedly happening.

Can God miraculously touch my life right now, or at any given moment, with supernatural power and divine intervention? I’d say yes. But that’s not how he always, or even usually, works. In fact, the expectation of a life free from what we might call our weakness can’t be further from reality.

Which brings me to something I read on the Internet Monk’s website about this matter. As Christians, we may have the power of Christ in us, but Michael Spencer reminds us we are not above human. And because of this, we will still struggle and wage war with our flesh and its rotten desires.

It means your depression isn’t fixed. It means you are still overweight. It means you still want to look at porn. It means you are still frightened of dying, reluctant to tell the truth and purposely evasive when it comes to responsibility. It means you can lie, cheat, steal, even do terrible things, when you are ‘in the flesh,” which, in one sense, you always are. If you are a Christian, it means you are frequently, maybe constantly miserable, and it means you are involved in a fight for Christ to have more influence in your life than your broken, screwed up, messed up humanity. In fact, the greatest miracle is that with all the miserable messes in your life, you still want to have Jesus as King, because it’s a lot of trouble, folks. It isn’t a picnic.

This is the reality we as Christians live in. This ongoing battle between doing what comes naturally, such as lust after women, or choosing that higher and much more narrow path that Christ has set before us. But we can rejoice that in our weakness we are strong, as the second half of 2 Corinthians 12:10 tells us. The Internet Monk concludes that:

Weaknesses are with me for the whole journey. Paul was particularly thinking of persecutions, but how much more does this passage apply to human frailty, brokenness and hurt? How essential is it for us to be broken, if Christ is going to be our strength? When I am weak I am strong. Not, “When I am cured,” or “When I am successful,” or “When I am a good Christian,” but when I am weak. Weakness- the human experience of weakness- is God’s blueprint for exalting and magnifying his Son. When broken people, miserably failing people, continue to belong to, believe in and worship Jesus, God is happy.

So we absolutely miss the point if we somehow think we’ve failed if we don’t measure up to some golden standard set before us by the brightest and best Christ-followers among us. We should be mindful of the perfection that Christ has called us to (Matthew 5:48), and should make honest attempts to live a sin-free, holy life. But let’s not fool ourselves in thinking that we can arrive at some extra-spiritual plane, where the pull of the flesh has no power.

It’s not that sin’s power can’t be weakened in our lives, or that its lustre can’t lose its shine. But we must remain realistic and clear-minded about the nature of the battle and the reality of our weaknesses. And all the while, we have the assurance that Christ is our strength, and that he is with us.

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 8:38-39 NKJV