Worries, riches and pleasures

Many people blithely assume that becoming a Christian makes life simple, when just the reverse is usually the case. The Christian faith has to be maintained in the face of a whole variety of assaults and Jesus announced as much in his famous parable of the Sower. This picture of people's varied responses to the message Jesus preached describes what happens in terms of a crop growing – or not – once the seed has been planted. There are those who do not understand and walk away scratching their heads as to why the message is of any importance to them. Then there are some who greet the message with open-armed joy, only to crumble when those around them make life difficult. And then there are those who see its value and embrace it, yet are so weighed down by what life throws at them that they never really grow; the seed is choked by what the gospel writer Luke calls “worries, riches and pleasures” and what Mark more eloquently spells out as “the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things”.

What they all point out is that there is a whole raft of issues that will come our way and threaten simply to swamp faith or, to use the picture Jesus uses, ensure that it is never able to grow because it is stifled by these other things. I think most people are genuinely surprised that this proves to be the case. The first flush of faith is often quite powerful. Jesus appears so wonderful that they cannot imagine anything that would dim their enthusiasm for him. How can we possibly turn away from him when he has done so much for us? But then these other things crowd in. Life takes an unexpectedly difficult turn and threatens to get even worse – I can think of several people who have taken a battering and then allowed those things to stoke their fears. So, rather than hold on in faith, they let go and give way to their worries. Others are surprised by the power that wealth (or perhaps the desire for it) holds over them, dominating their thinking to the point that Jesus is squeezed out. Still others find that they just long for something else; there is always something more exciting and Jesus just becomes irrelevant.

The group of people that Jesus is speaking to at this point is not the outside world that wants nothing to do with him, but with those who claim to be his disciples. I can think of too many people who, professing faith in Jesus, have slipped away from active faith because life's awkward circumstances have conspired to relax their grip on Jesus, by making him seem more distant, less important, or just unable to help. In every case the person concerned would deny that they were losing their faith; they still believed, but that belief was in fact only half a belief. It was an acknowledgement that God existed, but no longer an active trust. And in the course of time even that bare acknowledgement withered to nothing.

There is no easy solution to these pressures – although perhaps the word 'assaults' was over-dramatic. They are usually far more subtle than outright assault. At the very least we must be aware that they will come our way and that we must ready ourselves for them by building faith in the good times. By doing this we will be able to say when faced with worry that nothing has changed in God's love for us: he is with us nevertheless. Or when tempted to trust in wealth we will realise that there really is nothing greater than the riches of God's grace. And when tempted to build our lives on “other things” we will know already that God is the only secure foundation we can build on both for life and eternity.

Those who stand firm prove the value of doing so, bearing fruit as Jesus said, and “producing a harvest of righteousness and peace.” The irony of giving way to worries and letting go of Christ is that the worries do not cease; they become worse and keep on. The wealth does not provide the answer, any more than the “other things” fill the gap. The only solution is to hold onto faith in the first place and swim against the tide, not just of public opinion, but perhaps also of the way you feel about it, too. But then I guess that is what faith is all about.