But can I suggest this runs deeper? Can I suggest that the heart is desperately wicked, just like the Bible teaches? (Jeremiah 17:9 - The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?) Can I suggest that if we don't begin to see our depraved nature, to the degree that it truly is, that we run the risk of living out our Christian lives just using Jesus by our profession of faith in Him?
I am writing this piece because I realize that my whole life I have been okay with acknowledging with my whole heart and mind that Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord and that I need Him to not go to hell, but I have also always wanted my life to go well, to have my dreams come true and be successful and happy. You may say, well there is nothing wrong with that, but I will tell you that if you frame this in the right perspective, that Jesus gave His life to purchase you from a hell you deserved, and you are holding out on Him in your life, not giving Him your all, so you can have the gain you want here in this world, then I think you will begin to see that you have evil in your heart and mind. As do I, which is why I am writing this! Even after years of trying to be a good Christian, I am still at the place of realizing I have a greedy heart!
And this is by far the hardest piece I have ever written because I will be honest with you, I don't know what plan God has for my life and I am afraid of the suffering that may come. And that is because I have already suffered more than I ever thought I would have to as a Christian and I have come to the sobering reality that I may never have the material things I always thought I would have by this age. And the sobering reality of knowing older people who make less and less money as they get older and eventually have to live off of social security and in low-income nursing homes, which could happen to me. And also because as of the last few years I have seen middle-aged Christians who are ministers in the Gospel (here in America) that I have cared about who got suddenly sick with terminal diseases and died, which could be my fate. All of this has really shaken my faith and it has made me want to run into the world and have the things I see others have that are not suffering.
You see, I wasn't prepared for all of this when I accepted Jesus as my Savior, nor even after my super natural experience at 35. I mean I tried to get ready for persecution by studying about it and getting involved to help Christians over-seas who are suffering so intensely, but I just never was honest with myself that my life my go in the opposite direction than I wanted it to. I always told myself that the times of trouble I was going through as a Christian were temporary and that someday soon, once I was done being tested, I would then live the blessed life! But now, I am starting to see that my understanding of things is flawed, there is no promise that things will be easier in the future, in fact it looks like things will get worse because at least now I have the ability to hold down a job that pays a decent wage, but what if I am not healthy enough later when I am older? What if there is no social security left when I get old? What will I live off of? I am not worrying, (though it may sound like it), but I am being honest that I don't have a guarantee that "prosperity" is coming if I am faithful to God. And this is something I need to see or else I will live deceitfully in a fantasy world, rather than realizing I will have to live, no matter what the circumstances are, by faith that God will be there to help me.
I am beginning to see that for the most part life is a mixture of good and bad happening simultaneously. Of course, there are times when we happily are "on the mountain top" but as the saying goes, "what goes up must come down" because we all know that mountain top experiences often lead to valley experiences. This too has been hard on me as I have been a Christian. And that is because there have been times God has used me to share the Gospel with someone who gets saved and I feel so good about myself and my life and think that now I will enter into a stage where I am used consistently by God in good ways, only to have something terrible happen to me right afterward, that is so bad, it seems to wipe away all of the good feelings I had, and even take me lower than I was before the mountain top high! Because of some of these valley experiences, there have been times I have wanted to quit being a Christian and one time I literally told Jesus "I think you and I need to take a break", (divorce starts with separation), which of course I then repent for because I don't want to be someone who leaves Jesus.
All of this, as I have recently had to look at in a real honest and humbling way, has all been a problem for me because deep down inside I have always wanted the prosperity gospel to be true! I wanted it more than I realized it! After my experience with God at age 35 and the influence from my Pentecostal church and Christian television, I wanted to be the famous evangelist who won tons of souls for Jesus, I wanted to be the well put-together leader who people could trust and learn from and that got the praise and adoration from those who read my books or listened to my sermons. I wanted these things immensely during my years as a Pentecostal Christian and I must confess they have died hard and slow in me as I have over the years renounced and walked away from my Pentecostal ways. Most likely my many tests and trials have been through are so that God could show me how insincere my heart has been in my Christian life. I now see when I look back how I was working on how great a Christian I was, how great my Christian life was, how great my Christian legacy would be here on earth!. Yet in my ignorance of how greedy my heart was, I was saying, I was doing all of this for Jesus! Sure, there was a lot of me that started out wanting to do what was pleasing to God (after my experience at age 35), but most of it got perverted by the worldliness I experienced as a Pentecostal and I have had to fight to get back to the sincere heart of living to please God.
But if I was to be really honest, I can't blame the Pentecostal denomination or Charismania, or Christian television for my greedy heart, because I remember being a 6th grader who accepted Christ enough to stay out of hell but promised Him no loyalty what-so-ever! And then I got invested in the New Age at age 23 and went on to learn and believe how "we are our own gods" and then there is even my greedy heart at age 27 underneath my sinner's prayer, that had me still bargaining with God". You see, I continued to sleep with my boyfriend, not using protection, and would daily ask God to not let me get pregnant and that if He let me get pregnant, He would be forcing me to have an abortion again, which I did not want to do. This amounts to a threat actually and shows how manipulative I was with my new found faith in Christ! I had spent almost a year before getting saved grieving the abortion I had had, and repenting to God for it, and yet, here I was after getting saved, telling God that if He let me get pregnant, I would do it again! That is a hard heart if ever I heard of one!