Journey Through the Wall

The Journey of Faith

We often talk about our Christian life as a journey or a walk. Journeys involve movement, action, stops and starts, detours, delays, and trips into the unknown.

Genesis 12:1–3 ESV

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

God called Abraham to leave his comfortable life in Ur at the age of 75 to embark on a long, slow journey that required patience and trust. God didn’t tell Abraham where he was going; instead, God said to go out, trusting that God would get him to the right destination.

God called the Israelites to leave Egypt and embark on a 40-year journey of personal transformation in the desert.

God called Jeremiah to 40-50 years of difficult work, standing firm for God’s values in the midst of a rebellious people.

Jesus called the twelve disciples to a journey that would change their lives forever. Judas, however, grew disillusioned and got stuck along the way. He couldn’t understand why Jesus wasn’t either working with the religious leaders or overthrowing them to increase the power of his ministry. Jesus’ plan offended Judas. The result was that Judas gave up on Jesus altogether.

In our own journeys, we can get stuck too. Believers who seemed so strong have fallen away from their faith because they failed to see the larger picture of God’s transforming work by bringing them to their wall.

The Wall

What is the Wall? It is the point we reach in the journey when we stop moving forward. It is our crisis of faith. Each of us will experience such a crisis at one point or another, though it will look different for each of us.

To understand this better, we should look at the various stages we go through in our journey. There are basically six general stages we can all relate to.

Stage 1: Life-Changing Awareness of God

This stage, whether in childhood or adulthood, is the beginning of our journey with Christ as we become aware of his reality. We realize our need for mercy and begin our relationship with him.

Stage 2: Discipleship

This stage is characterized by learning about God and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. We become part of a Christian community and begin to get rooted in the disciplines of the faith.

Stage 3: The Active Life

This is described as the “doing” stage. We get involved, actively working for God, serving him and his people. We take responsibility by bringing our unique talents and gifts to serve Christ and others.

Stage 4: The Wall and Journey Inward

Notice that the Wall and the Journey Inward are closely related. The Wall compels us into the journey inward. In some cases, the journey inward eventually leads us to the wall. Most importantly, remember it is God who brings us to the Wall.

Stage 5: The Journey Outward

Having passed through the crisis of faith and the intense inner journey necessary to go through the Wall, we begin once again to move outward to “do” for God. We may do some of the same active external things we did before (like providing leadership, serving others), but the difference is that now we give out of a new, grounded center of ourselves in God. We have rediscovered God’s profound, deep, accepting love for us. A deep, inner stillness now begins to characterize our work for God.

Stage 6: Transformed into Love

God continually sends events, circumstances, people, and even books into our lives to keep us moving forward on our journeys.

Philippians 1:6 ESV

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

God is determined to complete the work he completed in us, whether we like it or not! His goal is that we be made perfect in love, that Christ’s love become our love both toward God and others.

1 John 4:18 ESV

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

By this stage, the perfect love of God has driven out all fear, and the whole of our spiritual lives is finally about surrender and obedience to God’s perfect will.

The Wall

The thing to remember about Walls is that they are an inevitable part of our Christian journey. For most of us, the wall appears through a crisis that turns our world upside-down. It comes, perhaps, through a divorce, a job loss, the death of a close friend or family member, a cancer diagnosis, a disillusioning church experience, a betrayal or a shattered or unfulfilled dream. It could be a wayward child. It could just be a an undefined dryness or loss of joy in our relationship with God.

When we hit the wall, we find ourselves questioning ourselves, God, and the church. We discover for the first time that our faith doesn’t appear to “work.” We have more questions than answers. The very foundation of our faith feels as though it is on the line. We don’t know where God is, what he is doing, where he is going, how he is getting us there, or when this will be over.

Who in here knows what I am talking about? Our first reaction is to ask God to make it go away. We want a miracle to fix it all for us. As nice as that would be, God doesn’t want us to avoid the wall; he wants us to go through the wall. So he allows us to suffer until the pain of staying where we are is unbearable and we are forced to move forward.

It is also an unfortunate fact that hitting a wall is not a one-time event in our lives. It appears to be something we return to as part of our ongoing relationship with God.

We see this in the life of Abraham. He waited at the wall for 25 years for the birth of his first child with Sarah. Some years later God led Abraham to another wall—the sacrifice of that long-awaited son, Isaac, on the altar.

The great heroes of the Bible: Moses, David, Elijah, the apostles, among others. Each appears to have gone through the wall numerous times. Why do you think that happened to them? Why does it happen to us?

Maybe it’s because we are human, and we get lazy. We so easily fall into bad habits. We are like a garden that, left unattended, grows weeds. Those weeds have to be taken out at the root, which requires digging deep. That’s why God brings us to the wall. The wall forces us to face the worst parts of ourselves.

And it’s at the wall that we have to make a choice. Do we blame God and turn away? Do we sit and stagnate, wallowing in our pain? Or do we choose to find a way through the wall to victory on the other side? That’s what the Bible heroes did.

When we make it through the wall, we no longer have a need to be well-known or successful, but to do God’s will.

Growing Through the Wall

As painful as the Wall is, it is a necessary part of our growth. Before the wall, we were comfortable with our ability to do the work we were doing; we felt so confident, not realizing just how immature we still were.

In our first discussion on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, we noted the signs of being emotionally unhealthy. Things like being ruled by our emotions rather than the truth of God’s word, picking scriptures out of context to justify our fleshly responses to situations, and using Christian-looking activity to hide from dealing with our own personal issues.

The thing about the Wall is that it forces us to deal with those things we would rather avoid. When we hit the Wall, our emotions are screaming that we have been betrayed by God and that everything is hopeless. All the worst parts of ourselves rise to the surface.

But because we Christians often do not understand God’s purpose in bringing us to the Wall, we tend to get stuck. We continue to act like everything is ok. Rather than relying on our faith to help us through, we use our faith to hide from the pain—claiming the victory, making sure everyone knows that our faith is strong in spite of the situation.

The problem with that is that emotionally healthy faith ADMITS that I am bewildered, that I don’t know what God is doing right now. It admits that I am hurting and angry. It admits that I feel forsaken.

It is when we reach the point of spiritual bankruptcy that we truly can fall on God’s power to sustain us. We come into a deeper communion with Him. That’s when God can communicate to us his true sweetness and love. He wants us to know his peace and rest. He wants to free us from unhealthy attachments and idolatries of the world. He wants an intimate, passionate love relationship with us.

In a previous discussion, I shared that we don’t want to run from our emotions. It is important to pay attention to our feelings in order to know God. But while it is good to acknowledge our feelings, it is wrong to be ruled by them or make them into idols. As Pentecostals, we can easily fall into the trap of mistaking emotionalism for a move of the Holy Spirit. All my life, I have known folks who genuinely love God but who did whatever came into their head because they were convinced God told them to do it.

That’s why we need to hit walls from time to time.

We need to be purged of our pride, our sense of spiritual superiority, our tendencies to turn to the latest spiritual fad rather than the word of God and to care more about God’s blessings than God himself.

As we go through the wall, we deal with our temper and impatience, our need for earthly things to validate us and to compare our spirituality to others. We are brought face-to-face with our urge to run from things that are hard in pursuit of perpetual comfort.

In all of this, we have to remember that the wall is not just some trial or challenge. We will always face some sort of struggle. Most are irritating, but manageable. The Wall will take you to the end of yourself. It will tear you apart. And God allows it so that he can put you back together and make you better.

So, maybe you are in your journey through the wall right now. You want to know how long is this going to take? The answer is, as long as it takes. Maybe days, weeks, years, decades. It’s not a waste. It’s not pointless. God is using it to help you learn what it truly means to trust him and completely submit to him.

As you make your way through the wall, you will find yourself no longer caring about what others think—only what God thinks. You won’t need to prove yourself, because you will have discovered who you are in Christ.

James 1:2–4 ESV

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Let’s pray.