The Cost of Holiness

"Coddled people will not be good listeners when their world collapses. They will be numb with confusion and rage at the God who wasn't supposed to allow this. 'If this is the way God is, why didn't you tell us?'"

John Piper, Spectacular Sins

There was a time during my sophomore year of college that I came to realize that I was extremely unhappy. It was a slow realization, and along with it, a realization that I was angry. Angry at a God who wasn't supposed to allow me to be unhappy. My primitive understanding of God was that if I followed all the rules and, for the most part, was a generally good person, He would bless me and keep my life happy. Things were supposed to be easier with Him on my side. 

No one bothered to explain that Jesus had a penchant for mixing up words like first and last, greatest and least, life and death, easy and hard. Nor that the point of life was not so much to go my own way with "Him on my side" so much as to pursue holiness and sanctification at all costs. Oh, and that there would be costs. 

I remember vividly sitting at the end of a table of about five women around 7 in the morning (which, in college time, is an absolutely ungodly hour) at our weekly Bible study meeting, starting to share for the first time how extremely unhappy I was. I remember saying, pleading with them, "I thought God wanted me to be happy, right?" Our leader started to shake her head and I felt the room begin to spin. She started in on something about the difference between happiness and joy and I felt like I'd been socked in the stomach. I'm not sure if I said it aloud, but all that I could think was, someone should have told me! All these years, I thought the idea was that living with Christ made life easier, as if He were some sort of talisman to ward off evil. That there could be any purpose of God in my unhappiness was utterly beyond my understanding.

It took me another year to understand that no, God's priority was not my happiness but rather my holiness, and that oddly enough, holiness often comes at a price of pain. As our pastor Matt Chandler says, you don't just drift into holiness. It has taken another four years to start to deal with the idea that:

Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. --Prov 13:24

and that:

For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. --Hebrews 12:6

or that:

For they [earthly fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. --Hebrews 12:10

though the first part of this verse has always been self-evident:

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. --Hebrews 12:11

I imagine that I have only begun to understand, at age 24, the way in which God uses suffering and pain in the pursuit of holiness, or what discipleship and sanctification can truly cost. I give thanks, though, for the lessons on pain God has seen fit to ordain in my life, that I may not be one of the "coddled people" Piper speaks of, dismayed at the value God puts on holiness.