Leaving Beyond – Grounded In Scripture

Written by: April J. Buchanan

You sit with your Bible and you are incredibly faithful to this daily discipline. You are faithful to pray every day. You sing “worship” songs. You think on the Lord throughout the day. You look for Him in everything and in everyone. You maintain a positive mindset as your doctrine demands you must. You only see “the gold in people.” You seek peace at all costs. You long for His voice to whisper to you.

You are open and ready to hear. You are all in! You press in, seeking His presence, a touch, a feeling, an impression. You want Him to know you are committed, and you believe He will meet you there in a whisper, a touch, a sign. Perhaps through a gum wrapper, a road sign, a sticker on the back of a car, an owl in a tree. You don’t care what people think. This is the cost to get what you desire and if it means you must look a little crazy then so be it because soon they will be the ones that miss out because they weren’t willing to do what it takes to get what they wanted from God. You long so deeply for an experience of Him that you open yourself to all manner of possibilities, failing to understand that He has warned you not to seek Him in these ways.

This is not the faith that brings peace, assurance, joy, hope, and confidence. Confidence rooted in who He is, what He has said in His Word, and what He is accomplishing through His providence. No whisper in the heart and no sign in creation can compare to the certainty of what God has already spoken.

Dear one, you are seeking Him where He has warned you not to and failing to know Him where He has promised to be found. He is not known through subjective impressions, emotional highs, omens, or mystical practices, but through the more sure word of God.

We do not worship to create an atmosphere that invites His presence, as though He were distant and waiting for us to summon Him. God is not stirred by lighting, music, or emotional fervor. He is ever present, sovereign, and actively sustaining all things by the word of His power.

Nor do we fill our prayers with music shaped by dangerous movements with aberrant and heretical teachings. Language designed to move the emotions while quietly reshaping our theology. These influences create very real experiences, and because they feel powerful, many equate them with God. Yet they often lead the heart away from Him, cultivating expectations He has never promised and desires He has explicitly forbidden.

You seek, yet remain dissatisfied unless you receive what He has not promised. You ask and seek amiss. And when you do have these experiences, you attach God’s name to them and begin to expect that He must give you that feeling again. Your expectations do not honor God or reveal a faith to be admired or mimicked but one that dishonors God and ought to be warned against. Your heart grows dependent upon the experience rather than anchored to the truth.

But the experience was never from Him.

You are deceived, and your expectations, though spiritualized, are entirely unbiblical.

Dear one, He may be found. He may be known. And who He is, what He has said, what He has promised, and what He is doing are far better than the fleeting highs you chase and wrongly attribute to Him.

Truth is beautiful.

When dissatisfied hearts, wandering thoughts, and misplaced expectations rise against it, His Word still stands, immovable, sufficient, and sure. And when we repent and return to that sure Word, we discover a joy, comfort, peace, and assurance that cannot be taken away.

Truth is better. He is better.

Even when we feel nothing, the truth produces a settled peace and a steady joy beyond comprehension, because He is enough, and faith rests not in sensations, but in Him.

Yet you rob yourself when you seek what He has forbidden while neglecting what He has freely given. You show yourself dissatisfied with His Word and uneasy with the kind of faith that trusts Him in His sovereignty, that believes He is providentially working all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. You want a faith that you can control the outcome. You want a god that is impotent and in need of you. You want a god that is working all things together for good as you desire good and according to what you seek him to speak to your heart in agreement with your will.

The God of scripture, faith according to scripture, His sovereign work, His Word, is not enough for you.

You demand more.

You baptize your expectations and sanctify your desires, calling them faith that pleases God, yet such “faith” stands in opposition to Him. It does not trust Him. It is not satisfied with Him, with His Word, or with the work of His Spirit. It demands more than God has chosen to give.

Those last three words are entirely offensive to you. “Chosen to give.” In your theology nothing is settled. It is negotiable. God can be manipulated. He is not truly sovereign.

That is not faith that pleases God.

The teaching you willingly sit under reveals the expectations of your heart. For if you were truly submitted to the authority of Scripture, you would be forced to admit that what you believe about God, along with your desires and expectations, does not reflect who He is, but who you want Him to be.

Your prayers, your worship, and even your expressions of faithfulness are not governed by Scripture, but by your desires, and by teachers eager to satisfy them. In this way, faith, worship, prayer, and obedience are subtly transformed into instruments for obtaining what your heart already craves.

You do not see that you are among those who cannot endure sound doctrine, but according to your own desires have accumulated teachers for yourselves who tell you what you want to hear. You have faith, you worship, you pray, yet all of it is being shaped by doctrine that satisfies the itch rather than humbles the heart beneath the authority of truth.

And what does this produce?

Not repentance.
Not humility.
Not reverence before God.

It produces a deeper hunger for what is contrary to sound doctrine. A growing appetite for experiences, for affirmations, for words God has not spoken.

But the longer the appetite is fed, the duller the ear becomes to truth. Until eventually, it is no longer false teaching that troubles you.

It is sound doctrine.

Return, then, to the Word that stands forever. Submit your desires to it rather than bending it to your desires. For faith that pleases God is not the faith that demands more, but the faith that is satisfied with what He has spoken, trusts His sovereign will and asks accordingly.

Grace and peace, y’all.
Soli Deo Gloria