A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (The IVP Signature Collection)

by Eugene H. Peterson

Patience is drawing on underlying forces; it is powerfully positive, though to a natural view it looks like just sitting it out. How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces? And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it. PAUL GOODMAN

The way of the world is peppered with brief enthusiasms, like the grass on that half-inch of topsoil, springing up so wonderfully and without effort, but as quickly withering.

However much we feel the inappropriateness of this kind of thing in a man or woman of faith, we must also admit to its authenticity.

There are times in the long obedience of Christian discipleship when we get tired and fatigue draws our tempers short. At such times to see someone flitting from one sensation, one enthusiasm, to another, quitting on commitments, ducking responsibilities, provokes our anger—and sometimes piques our envy.

For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship.

For if there is not all that much difference

between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there is not much use in making any effort to stick to it.

The anger may not be the most appropriate expression of concern, but it is evidence of concern. Indifference would be inhuman.

Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going.

The way of faith centers and absorbs our lives, and when someone makes the way difficult, throws stumbling blocks in the path of the innocent, creates difficulties for those young in faith and unpracticed in obedience, there is anger: “Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation!”

putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength. There is nothing fatigued or humdrum in Isaiah, nothing flatfooted in Jesus, nothing jejune in Paul. Perseverance is triumphant and alive.

Charles Williams once described as the “passion of patience.”

We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.

He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it.

Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness.

Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.

A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering. If we do not make that decision, we are endangered on every side. A man or woman of faith who fails to acknowledge and deal with suffering becomes, at last, either a cynic or a melancholic or a suicide. Psalm 130 grapples mightily with suffering, sings its way through it, and provides usable experience for those who are committed to traveling the way of faith to God through Jesus Christ.

the psalm gives dignity to our suffering. It does not look on suffering as something slightly embarrassing that must be hushed up and locked in a closet

(where it finally becomes a skeleton) because this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to a real person of faith.

Suffering is set squarely, openly, passionately before God. It is acknowledged and expressed. It is described and lived.

If the psalm did nothing more than that, it would be a prize, for it is difficult to find anyone in our culture who will respect us when we suffer. We live in a time when everyone’s goal is to be perpetually healthy and constantly happy. If any one of us fails to live up to the standards that are advertised as normative, we are labeled as a problem to be solved, and a host of well-intentioned people rush to try out various cures on us. Or we are looked on as an enigma to be unraveled, in which case we are subjected to endless discussions, our lives examined by researchers zealous for the clue that will account for our lack of health or happiness. Ivan Illich, in an interview, said: “You know, there is an American myth that denies suffering and the sense of pain. It acts as if they should not be, and hence it devalues the experience of suffering. But this myth denies our encounter with reality.”1

There is meaning to our lives and there is salvation for our lives, a truth summed up by Forsyth when he said, “Our very pain is a sign of God’s remembrance of us, for it would be much worse if we were left in ghastly isolation.”6

God makes a difference. God acts positively toward his people. God is not indifferent. He is not rejecting. He is not ambivalent or dilatory. He does not act arbitrarily, in fits and starts. He is not stingy, providing only for bare survival.

God seeks the hurt, maimed, wandering and lost. God woos the rebellious and confused. If God were different than he is, not one of us would have a leg to stand on: “If you, GOD, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance? As it turns out, forgiveness is your habit, and that’s why you’re worshiped.” Because of the forgiveness we have a place to stand. We stand in confident awe before God, not in terrorized despair.

The program is given in two words: wait and watch.

Wait and watch add up to hope.

The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and watching—that is, hoping—is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in

his creation and vigorously at work in redemption.

It is imagination put in the harness of faith.

“those who work well in the depths more easily understand the heights, for indeed in their true nature they are one and the same.”8

The “bottom” has a bottom; the heights are boundless. Knowing that, we are helped to go ahead and learn the skills of waiting and watching—hoping!—by which God is given room to work out our salvation and develop our faith while we

fix our attention on his ways of grace and resurrection.

unruly ambition and infantile dependency,

getting too big for our britches and refusing to cut the apron strings.

We are in special and constant need of expert correction.

but difficult to grasp with our emotions, feeling their truth.

The way of faith deals with realities in whatever time and whatever culture.

which cause special problems.

One temptation that has received this treatment in Western civilization, with some special flourishes in America, is ambition.

warning people against abandoning the glorious position of being a person created in the image of God and attempting the foolhardy adventure of trying to be a god on our own.

now our entire culture is Faustian.

The legend of Faustus, useful for so long in pointing out the folly of a god-defying pride, now is practically unrecognizable because the assumptions of our whole society (our educational models, our economic expectations, even our popular religion) are Faustian.

It is additionally difficult to recognize unruly ambition as a sin because it has a kind of superficial relationship to the virtue of aspiration—an impatience with mediocrity and a dissatisfaction with all things created until we are at home

But if we take the energies that make for aspiration and remove God from the picture, replacing him with our own crudely sketched self-portrait, we end up with ugly arrogance.

thinking too little of ourselves.

We are, alternately, rebellious runaways and whining babies. Worse, we have numerous experts, so-called, encouraging us to pursue one or the other of these ways.

Its history showed the importance of having God with you and the danger of trying to use God or carry him around.

The ark was the symbol, not the reality.

For the rich symbolism of the ark was everyday stuff to them. Its extensive and intricate history was common knowledge, much as the story of Jesus is to Christians.

Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position