God Can Hardly Wait to Fix That
God Can Hardly Wait to Fix That
He is holding you in the faith, even if you imagine your faith has failed you.
God can hardly wait to fix the problems in your life.
God can hardly wait to fix your sore throat. God can hardly wait to fix your cancer. God can hardly wait to fix your achy back.
God can hardly wait to fix your relationship with your child and bring them back to you. God can hardly wait to fix your relationship with your parents, even if they are dead.
God can hardly wait to fix your sexuality. Your frigidity. Your wandering eye. Your same-sex attraction. Your pornography addiction.
God can hardly wait to fix your anxiety. Your depression. Your ADHD. Your OCD.
God can hardly wait to give you a more rewarding way to spend your time because you spend too much time at work. Or too much time at play. Or too much time distracted, neither working nor playing.
Evangelists often promise that God will make this life better. And sometimes He does. We see many glimmers of divine intervention. Big miracles. Small turnarounds. But life is still tough. Someone goes into remission, but then later dies on you. Your back pain returns in full force. Your old habit resurfaces. Your restored friendship goes sour again. As much as we appreciate them, as desperately as we hoped for them, the small fixes don't fix things overall.
Think of Lazarus. Jesus allows him to die. But then He raises him (John 11:42). But as much as his sisters are comforted by having their brother back, this is not the real fix. Now Lazarus needs to watch Jesus die. Perhaps he has to watch his sisters be persecuted, or be persecuted himself. God didn't want to raise Lazarus to make Lazarus feel better. His resurrection was a return to all the cares of this life. God raised Lazarus to make things better for you so that you could see a glimmering of His power over life and death.
Nothing short of the final resurrection, with a new heaven and a new earth, will really solve your problems.
God can and does do some piecemeal fixes in your life. But anything less than a total fix is more a foretaste than it is a fully good thing. A major fix would probably just convince you that you did not need God in the first place. A total fix of your life would require an end to history. An end to history would mean an end to God’s hope of repentance for all (2 Peter 3:9). God could have ended history at Jesus' resurrection, and if He had, you would never be with Him in His kingdom. You and your loved ones would never have been born or been redeemed.
But anything less than a total fix is more a foretaste than it is a fully good thing.
There is no equal comparison between the evil which happens now and the glory that is to come (Rom. 8:18). What is promised is beyond any human experience. You may not be able to possibly imagine what it would take to make the evil you see worthwhile. You are tired of it, so tired you just want to give up. But even if your faith is weak, you will see it
Be assured that He can make it right. He will give you the renewed strength to enjoy seeing what this will be like after a deeper fix than you can imagine. Even if you tried to imagine all the wrong things in your life put right, you would fall short. (Have you noticed how any movie that tries to depict heaven only manages to depict a creepy amusement park nobody would want to live in for a minute?) Only the God who can make even a fallen reality contain goodness can make something truly better, and fix you to truly enjoy it.
“He is holding you in the faith, even if you imagine your faith has failed you."
In the meantime, you live by faith and not by sight. Not even by fixing your eyes on an imaginary ending, for you cannot imagine it fully. What He is creating has never entered the heart of man. You trudge forward to a hazy goal. If you could see it, you would be more motivated. But He thinks it's worth saving up for later. What? So you can ruin it all by falling into malaise? No. He is holding you in the faith, even if you imagine your faith has failed you.
One day, God will show you what He has been preparing since before the foundation of the world (Matt. 25:18). He can hardly wait, but He does wait in order to include many more, as He waited to include you. He waits in order to blow the minds of the world-weary. The most charmed life you see down here will look like something to run from when you see what is coming. You will know that your envy of the one who lived it was misplaced. But you won't waste a moment lamenting that. Go ahead and try to imagine the best, and know that He is preparing something better. God can hardly wait for you to see it.
