Miserable Christianity

By David Hobbs

Some of the saddest people around are young people who have been raised as Christians, yet have never met the Christ they profess. They try to follow the Christian moral code, while secretly longing for the fun their non-Christian friends seem to be having all the time. They’re torn inside, feeling that Christianity and its code of conduct are right, but wondering why whoever designed Christianity couldn’t have designed a little more fun into it! Their prayers don’t seem to get answered all that often, and they hope they don’t have to stand up in class and defend creationism over evolution while their classmates snicker and their teacher scoffs. And Please, please don’t make me explain why God sends people to hell forever just for not believing in Him!

Yes this Christianity can be a miserable business can’t it?

Paul touched on this when he said in 1 Corinthians 15:19—If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

There is no way to win the war of “Christianity vs. the World,” as long as we are locked into the natural realm. In the natural—the physical realm—what the world offers looks pretty attractive compared to Christianity. Strip away eternal life, final judgment, our heavenly home, divine approval, peace within, and Jesus’ atonement for our sins, and what are you left with? What the Bible calls the pleasures of sin for a season. As long as you don’t see outside the "season," it all looks pretty good.

And also as long as you’re in the realm of the human intellect, you will always be at a disadvantage when dealing with the power of worldly temptation. You can have all your intellectual arguments lined up why sex outside of marriage is wrong, but when a seductive face is inches from yours and your hormones are raging, those arguments don’t hold much restraining power!

So what’s the answer?

The answer, my friend, lies not in knowing about Christ, but in meeting Christ. It’s all in the meeting! When Jesus revealed Himself to me on that log pile off in the woods near the fire fighting barracks in Union Creek, Oregon that still, August evening of 1974, it revolutionized my life [P. 286 Out of the Fire, A Life Radically Changed]. I met the God of Power, the God who exists outside of creation and time, the God who not only created all things, but who is also upholding all things by the word of His power [Heb. 1:3].

I found I didn’t have to defend God and why He does what He does; He’s God. He can do whatever He wants. Why is there a hell? Who knows? Why does God send people to hell? I don’t know that either, He didn’t check with me first! But He does. Read the Bible for yourself and see how you interpret it! But that’s not the important thing; the important thing is that He made a way for us to escape and spend eternity with Him in heaven and it’s a free gift. Do you want to know how?

When you truly meet Christ, He comes into you and starts living His life through you. That’s when Christianity becomes the most exciting thing that life offers. What’s more exciting, a drunken binge with raging hangover the next day, or having Jesus heal somebody through you after letting you feel His deep compassion for them? What’s better, having sexual relationships one after another that always promise more then they deliver; or feeling Jesus’ white hot passion for you in a love that will go on throughout eternity?

You will be amazed at how the things of the Lord easily outstrip anything the world can offer, but only to those who meet Him and let Him live through them; only to those who yield their lives to Him and allow His divine life to flow out of them.

Keys to Breakthrough

By David Hobbs

When we find ourselves afflicted and oppressed, there is sometimes a spiritual key that, when inserted into the lock of our oppression, releases us just like a key releasing a lock. It's like a missing puzzle piece, that when placed in its spot in the puzzle, completes the electrical circuit of our healing and allows deliverance to “spring forth speedily” (Isa. 58:8). [Isaiah 58 is full of these spiritual keys for unlocking oppression and bringing God’s blessing down to our lives.]

Consider our friend Job in the Bible. As oppressed and afflicted as he was, yet the Bible says “After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before” (Job 42:10). Praying for his friends, who had falsely accused and maligned him, was the key that immediately freed him from all his troubles and returned him to God’s favor.

In my just-published book, Walking in the Spirit, I experienced a similar key to deliverance in chapter 13: “Demonic Opposition: Graduate School,” in the story “The War Raging Around Us” (pages 130-134). This was an intense spiritual battle which sidelined me while we were having a breakthrough worship conference at our church, leaving me totally unable to enter in. After struggling for the whole weekend, by the last meeting I was too weak to stand or sing along. All I could do was sit in my chair, tap my feet to the music, and raise my hands. But doing those two things which I could do proved to be the key to unlock my deliverance. As I continued doing those two things, the Holy Spirit began pouring into me until I could make some sounds, then sing along to the music, then sing louder, then stand, and by the end of the meeting I was totally restored like the whole thing had never happened!

I’m sure if I had sat through the meeting like a bump on a log feeling sorry for myself, the deliverance would not have occurred. But somehow, by God’s grace, I was able to meet that condition of His deliverance, and it happened miraculously from there on.

I bring all this up because I had a similar experience about 2 weeks ago which showed me again the power of this concept.

I was at our church’s Men’s Camp, which we have once a year about this time. I was desperately hoping for a breakthrough. For a long time I had been feeling rundown, tired and weak. I was finding it difficult to muster up enough strength to pray. I wasn’t able to get up and pray in the middle of the night like I had for so many years because of this fatigue. Even when I could make it out to the church, I was too tired to walk around and sing or pray or worship. All I could do was sit in silence and eventually fall asleep. Bummer! The hypochondriac in me was fearing Chronic Fatigue Syndrone. Satan was leering, “Here you’re coming out with this book on prayer, encouraging other people to pray and seek God and you can’t even do it yourself! Hah! What a hypocrite!”

So I was desperate for a breakthrough at Men’s Camp to restore my strength. Doesn’t the Bible say if we wait on the Lord He will renew our strength so we rise up on wings as eagles? And I was sure waiting on the Lord. In fact in my weakened state that’s about all I could do!

But still it didn’t happen. I was entering in as best I could, but feeling as weak as ever. I got to thinking “How long is this going to be? Am I always going to be this weak from now on? Will I never again feel the power of God’s anointing lifting me as the wind beneath my wings?” Had I been as bold as David of old I would have been praying these things as he did in the Psalms. But I was just thinking them to myself.

The second day came and I was still going through the motions. Then, I’m not sure how it happened, but during the worship service the thought came to me that though I was longing for total strength to be able to worship God in power, yet-yet-yet God said “you are giving Me more glory right now by worshipping Me in your weakness, than you would if you were shouting it from the rooftops in total power!”

“OK,” I said to myself, “if this weak output really glorifies God, then let’s get it on!” I started singing out with all the intensity I could muster, now that I was sure it was pleasing to Him. And lo and behold, I had found the key to unlock my prison! Suddenly I could feel the power of God entering me again and that horrible spirit of weakness draining out of me like water being soaked up by dry sand.

Sometimes, in addition to praying for deliverance, we should pray that God would open our eyes to discover the key to the deliverance. It might just be as simple as that!

Failure and Success

By David Hobbs

Failure and success are intertwined in life. While you can have failure all by itself, it is safe to say you can’t have success without failure. The greatest homerun hitters in baseball also listed high on the all-time strikeout list: Babe Ruth was 95th on the list, Barry Bonds 39th, Mark McGuire 32nd, Mickey Mantle 21st, Sammy Sousa 3rd, and so on.

In the Bible also, some of the greatest figures also had spectacular failures. Moses, though he delivered Israel from Egyptian bondage, received the law from God, built the tabernacle in the wilderness, brought forth quail and manna from heaven, and water from the rock to sustain them, and led them through the wilderness for 40 years up to the Promised Land… yet the whole generation he brought out of Egypt died in the wilderness without entering the Promised Land, nor was Moses able to go in himself. And perhaps his biggest failure was an inability to change the hearts of the people he was leading. As God told him shortly before his death, in Deut. 31:16 … “You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.” Moses himself said the same thing to the people in verse 29: “For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you.”

So while one part of Moses’ mission was a smashing success, another part was a sad failure.

And so it goes through the Bible. The Apostle Paul was such a success he “turned the world upside down.” Yet at the end of his ministry he said that “everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me (2 Tim. 1:15).” And when he was brought to trial in Rome, “At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me (2 Tim. 4:16).”

Jacob, after fathering the 12 patriarchs who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, told Pharaoh at the end of his life that “My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers (Gen. 47:9).”

But the most spectacular mission failure was Jesus! Though we concentrate on His successes (and rightly so), it’s easy to forget that His original mission was to save the "lost sheep of the house of Israel." In spite of His powerful, unparalleled ministry (The temple guards testified, “No one ever spoke the way this man does” [John 7:46]; the blind man testified, “Nobody has ever heard of the opening of the eyes of a man born blind” [John 9:32]; when He healed the paralytic, the crowd testified, “We have never seen anything like this!” [Mark 2:12]; and “people brought to him all [my emphasis] who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them [Mt. 4:24]”—in spite of all this and much more, at the end of His public ministry the Bible says in John 12:37—“Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him.”

There was a purpose behind the healings and signs Jesus did. The purpose was to turn the nation back to God. This is shown in Mt. 11:20, where “Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent [my emphasis].” And though He was successful in doing the miracles, the desired result never occurred—the nation didn’t turn back to God, but rejected the One God had sent.

This is clearly shown in a prophetic conversation between Jesus and the Father recorded in Isaiah 49, hundreds of years before Jesus came to the earth. After giving the background of His equipping and call in verses 1-3, Jesus says in verse 4, “But I said, ‘I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.’” Though Jesus did everything the Father told Him to say and do, yet it didn’t have its intended effect. Jesus successfully completed His assignment, yet the mission failed!


And what was the Father’s response? “Oh no, I misjudged the people?” “Sorry. I gave you faulty instructions?” “The devil got the better of me this time?”

You gotta love this. The Father said, “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the lost tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth (Isa. 49:6).” The Father said that Jesus was so great and His mission went so well, it was worthy of way more than just bringing the Jewish nation back to Him. Instead God would expand its achievement from saving the Jews to bringing salvation to the whole world! God allowed His first mission to fail, even caused it to fail by hardening Israel’s hearts (John 12:39-40), so that it could be expanded many times over and we Gentiles might be brought in. You have to love the way God works. With Him, failure is never what it seems. God is the master of the “Phoenix Effect,” raising out of the ashes of failure a grand scheme of glory and victory.