Keeping victory straight

I’ve argued that the Christian life is a life lived in the victory of the gospel, and that we need to understand life in Christ as the victory of Christ overcoming the sin in our hearts by the power of his Holy Spirit.  At the same time, I noted that we have to be careful in using this language, because we have a tendency to cast the word “victory” in worldly terms and fill it with worldly expectations, and that’s just not on; this isn’t our victory for our purposes, it’s God’s victory for his purposes, and he has shared it with us not for our glory but for his own. As such, his victory is not about us getting what we want, or making us look good, or keeping us from hard times, or things going the way we think they should—no matter how much we want it to be.

That’s the mistake all those folks made who were prophesying that John McCain would win back in November, because they were sure they knew what God’s victory had to look like. Some of them, their faith was shaken when they turned up wrong, because they had more faith in their own ideas about how things had to be than in God.  For my part, I agree with them that Sen. McCain would have been a better president than Barack Obama, but that’s not the victory God intended, and not the victory toward which he was working; and we don’t get our victory, we get God’s.

Which means that if we make the mistake of identifying our own preferred causes with God’s—if we think that God’s glory requires that we get rich or that our church have more people, if we forget that America is not the kingdom of God to which we pledge our highest allegiance, if we start to believe that God’s victory has to mean the fulfillment of our own worldly ambitions—we’re going to get those kinds of unwanted surprises, because we’re going to build up expectations that have nothing at all to do with what God’s actually on about. God may be intending to do what we want him to do, but then again, he may not—and even if he is, it might not come the way we expect, or look the way we think it will look. He does not promise to fulfill our expectations, he promises to glorify his name, and what glorifies him in our lives isn’t always what we think of as glorious.  Sometimes it even means our suffering.

(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)