Prelude to today's posts and why I love Dan Allender.

"I WISH THINGS WERE SIMPLE. I wish that difficult problems could all be easily resolved through sincere determination to obey God, regular time in His word, and fervent prayer.

In a sense, they can. The heart that is single-minded in its commitment to follow Christ will learn to unself-consciously love, to be so consumed with the wonder of God and promoting joy in others that personal concerns retreat to a well-deserved lower priority.

But our hearts are deceitful.

A simple decision to surrender everything to Jesus may start a good process, but there are a host of hard, ugly things to deal with that we prefer to overlook as we keep on surrendering.

We sometimes manage to persuade ourselves that God is as pleased as we are with our developing maturity, while in fact His Spirit is gently pushing open doors into the darker regions of our hearts that we pretend don’t exist.

Christians who have the courage to follow the Spirit into the unfriendly parts of their souls have a harder time pretending that the maturing process is coming along nicely. They face the fact that living in a fallen world sometimes exposes people to experiences that no bearer of God’s image was ever meant to endure and that our reactions to those experiences are deeply stained with our own fallenness.

When people—through absolutely no fault of their own—are subjected to terrible crimes against God and against their souls… powerful forces are set in motion within them that make it especially frightening to give themselves to others. Exhorting them to “just trust God” tends to generate frustration and provoke angry questions about the reality of Christian truth.

One of the great needs in the church today is to replace a model for simplistic sanctification with an understanding of the gospel that is both simple and penetrating, reaching with power into the realities of sinful, damaged souls.

That shift requires pioneer work in thinking hard about tough problems that we don’t like to talk about. Problems that, because they do not yield easily to our current ideas about victory in Christ, tend to be ignored.

If that pioneering effort is to be biblical, it must insist that the image of God is central to developing a solid view of personality; that our sinfulness, not how we’ve been sinned against, is our biggest problem; that forgiveness, not wholeness, is our greatest need; that repentance, not insight, is the dynamic in all real change."

- Dr. Dan Allender