Stubborn Hearts: Biting the Hand That Feeds Us

You know the drill. Small child asks for eggs for breakfast, scrambled, with cheese. You happily prepare just that for the child. Said child sits for a bit looking at the eggs, then gets down from the table. You ask the child to sit down and eat, and the child sits down, not at the table, but on the floor. The child begins to whine, refuses to get up. “I don’t want to sit there. I don’t like scrambled eggs with cheese.”

You are baffled. You not only didn’t start this battle of the wills, you want no part in it. You just wanted to make a good breakfast. But the child is intent on doing the wrong thing, not because it’s fun, not because it tastes good, but because it’s wrong. We’re not talking about a hardened teenager but a little child. Where in the world does this kind of nonsense come from? From us.

One of the problems with our typical misunderstanding of God’s law, that He is testing our loyalty to Him, that He wants to rob us of pleasure, is that it casts a blasphemous shadow on His character. He’s not a stingy narcissist. He is a loving Father. His law is good, good for us, the very pathway to joy. This backward view of the law, however, also misses the pure folly of our own sinful inclinations.

We sin not merely because we lack the self-control to say “no” to whatever pleasure is put before us, but because we’d rather do the wrong thing. Like the child slouched on the floor refusing to eat breakfast, we are empty, and not having any fun. We stubbornly cling to our disobedience as if it were a table laden with delicious delicacies. We trade beauty for ashes.

This reality is captured most poignantly by Augustine in his Confessions. There he waxes eloquent about a time he and his peers raided a man’s pear orchard, loading up on the stolen fruit. The punchline comes when Augustine confesses that he didn’t even like pears.

The good news is that our Father is bigger than our folly. Yes, we are called to acknowledge our sin. We are called to sorrow over our sin. But just as much as He delights to give us His wise law, He delights to give us His good grace for our rebellion against it, when we repent. The good news is not only that He forgives us when we repent, but that He blesses us with the very repentance we need. He makes it all better.

Our childish rebellion may be one reason why we can only enter into the kingdom as children (Matt. 18:3). We have to acknowledge our own inability to fix ourselves, our absolute dependence on Him. We have to hold up our little child arms, asking Him to take us up into His arms. And so He delights to do.

May the Spirit indwelling us lead us to put aside our senseless rebellion. May He teach us to trust our heavenly Father. And may the Holy Spirit continue to show us more each day how to rest in our elder brother.