I went to a different church on Sunday which is starting a new series called ‘The Secret.’ As you may have guessed, it is a play on the book which got some notable popularity a few years back, but the name (and graphics of the title) is the end of the similarity. Whereas the book declares that the secret of living the life of your dreams is “the law of attraction” which allows you to draw the things you want to yourself by believing you’ll get them (which is a load of hooey - but that would require another post(s) to demonstrate), his series is getting at the core of living the Christian life. Today and tomorrow, we are going to look at this concept.
The first look we’ll take is an aerial view of secrecy because something struck me as fascinating. If someone came to us and said, “Hey, in this envelope, I’ve got the SECRET to impressing your boss and never failing at work. In this one, I’ve got the SECRET to finding love and living every day in it. And this last one has something you’re really going to like, it’s the SECRET to getting personal messages from God on a daily basis.” How eager would we be to open those? Don’t we want to be in a vibrant love daily, to never fail at work, to talk to God daily? If there’s a secret, we want to know it.
But there’s something funny about all of this. Implicitly nested in these desires to open the envelopes is a suspicion of a really important conversation we’ve been left out of. Not only that, when the desire to know really rises powerfully, it seems that we are just one secret away from living the life we should be. If only we could know it! And deep inside this cry are two truths and a lie:
1. There is something wrong and life is supposed to be better than this (truth)
2. The something wrong is fixable, but the answer is outside of us (truth)
3. If someone would just tell us, it would all be better (lie)
The two truths are worth camping on briefly. These are two things which are universally believed and which, in one way or another, constitute what it means to hope. Hope is faith applied to the future about a present situation which could be better; it is this aspect which should be defining for us. We still grieve, but as those who have hope (1 Thess. 4:13). We suffer, but know that hope isn’t eradicated in its midst (cf. Rom. 8:28-30). We even rejoice in hope (Rom. 5:2). It is hope (the recognition that things are not best, but that they can be) which is implicit in every secret, but where do we find the lie and should we expunge it?
The pastor leading the series posted this as his Facebook status a day or two ago, “Taking spiritual shortcuts makes your journey longer than it needs to be.” The lie which sometimes exists in our view of “the secret to this or that” is the expectation of a silver bullet or magic pill - that the hard part is finding the secret, not living it. And when one turns to the Bible, we find that this sort of view of the secret to life is a broad, easy, and wide road, while the way Jesus walked and the road He carved is narrow and hard. There is a secret out there and it is the answer to what’s wrong with life, but it would be a mistake to think it to be a quick fix.
So, what do you think this secret is? If it’s not a “quick fix,” why not? How is the secret applied if not quickly?
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