• Be careful of the silent expectation that the life of faith ought to be, really, a life of sight (“for we walk by faith, not by sight” – 2 Cor 5:7). The demand that everything be as certain as gravity will only insure you never take any bold action on behalf of Christ and his Bride. It places the premium on personal safety and security, not obedience and action. The former is about you, the latter about God.
• Augustine wrestled with this in his mid-30s as he began to turn toward God. “I wanted to be as certain about things I could not see as I am certain that seven and three are ten… I desired other things to be as certain as this truth, whether physical objects which were not immediately accessible to my senses, or spiritual matters which I knew no way of thinking about except in physical terms.” He pauses and adds, “by believing, I could have been healed.” Later he expands this slightly: “While [my soul] could not have been healed except by believing, it was refusing to be healed for fear of believing what is false” [VI.v (7)].
• These are the two poles: fear and faith. The life of fear — or control or worry or anxiety — is always organized around what we perceive to be good, or at least safe, for ourselves. Even the claim that we are not sure “what God would have us do” may be a false front that protects us from the real matter, namely a fear of failure or hardship or humiliation. This is what we feel in Nicodemus’s questions in John 3. He’s a man with things to lose. He wants to be completely, absolutely sure. Jesus refuses to give him that, and provides instead the certainty of the love of God and freedom from the fear of condemnation (Jn 3:16-17).
• Is this enough for you: certainty of the love of God and freedom from condemnation? Or are there other provisos you’re hoping to negotiate, in addition to having been made a new creation in Christ with the promise, from his own lips, of life eternal? Perhaps he owes you something more than these promises made to his disciples on the night before he died? Be careful of the unspoken demands you are placing on your relationship with God. “Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb 11:6).
• So do that. Seek him and act on faith. You may soon find that your life is messy, or even painful, perhaps traumatic. Yet this, too, was promised to the disciples. The real question is: does the trajectory of your life honor him and reflect trust in him?