A Stranger in the House of God

A Stranger in the House of God


When Faith Fails

August 19, 2019

Dale and Nancy had just started dating when someone who
claimed to be speaking on God’s behalf told them that their relationship would
“flow like a river.” They took it as a sign and got married. It didn’t take
long for things to unravel. Dale was controlling and abusive. He went back to some
of the habits of his pre-Christian days. Drugs, pornography, and threats of
violence turned the beautiful promise they had heard into a nightmare. If you
had asked Dale and Nancy why they married so quickly, I’m pretty sure they
would have said that it was a simple act of faith. They believed they were
supposed to be together.

People make decisions like this all the time. Someone hears
a sermon about the unreached masses and quits his job to go into the ministry. An
older couple decides to adopt after their own kids are grown and gone because
they believe it’s what God wants. But faith decisions don’t have to be big.
Sometimes they’re small. We say something to a stranger because we feel the
prompting of the Spirit. We give money to a panhandler we pass on the street.
Sometimes things work out. Sometimes, like Dale and Nancy, the wheels come off,
and we’re left wondering whether we got it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t God’s voice
after all.

Simple or Simplistic Faith?

When I was a new believer, we used to talk a lot about having
a simple “childlike” faith. But looking back on some of the things we did, what
we practiced was not faith but naiveté. Our faith wasn’t simple; it was
simplistic. At times, maybe even childish. One Saturday night a bunch of us
piled into a car and drove down into the city of Detroit. We had no real
destination in mind. We expected to be “led” by the Holy Spirit, stopping to
pray at every intersection before deciding which way to turn. We ended up in a
bad part of town, where we stumbled on a drunken man lying in a doorway. “He
must be the reason God sent us here,” Ron said. Ron, a shifty-eyed prophet with
a receding hairline and a penchant for falling into the folding chairs whenever
the Spirit came upon him, was one of the self-appointed leaders of our little
group. Ron thought we should take the stranger with us, but the man only wanted
a few dollars to buy another drink. Despite his protests, we pulled him to his
feet, bundled him into the car, and drove back to the suburbs.

Our faith wasn’t simple; it was simplistic. At times, maybe even childish.

The next day Ron brought our new friend to church and asked the
pastor to take a special offering. The pastor politely declined. Maybe the
pastor was suspicious. Perhaps he didn’t think it was the best way to help the
man. Whatever the reason, Ron didn’t take the refusal well. He stood up in the church
service, and in a prophetic tone declared, “I was hungry and you gave me
nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a
stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe
me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” Then he and the
stranger walked out, followed by several chagrined church members who offered him
money.

In a day or two, the stranger disappeared. Ron didn’t know
where he had gone. Some hinted that he might not have been a man at all but an
angel that we had entertained “unawares.” But I suspected that the poor fellow
had made his way back to the doorway where we first found him. The whole affair
bothered me. Was it really God who had guided us? Or had we merely gone
downtown on a whim? Was ours a bold act of faith or a naive exercise of ...