Victor Chininin Buele

Deep inside every believer, just like it is inside of everyone who does not yet know Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, lies a strong temptation. We want all the glory and none of the suffering.

Satan knew this just might be the way to get to the man Jesus and get him to sin and fall from the mission to save sinners. Go to Matthew 4 and Luke 4. What did Satan try to do? He tried to persuade the man Jesus that it was better to eat than to know God in the middle of flesh-weakening hunger. He tried to get the man Jesus to look at a fraction of the kingdoms of the world and their glory and believe the lie that worshiping Satan would give all of that (and what clearly couldn’t be seen) to him without any suffering. He tried to get the man Jesus to recklessly put God to the test. The temptations clearly whispered something that is really tempting for all of us: The glory is yours, free from pain and sacrifice.

We want to win.

And that’s where things start going wrong. We can have great and marvelous reasons for wanting to win. We will want to fulfill the Great Commission. We will want to hear the Lord say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” We might be driven by wanting to alleviate human suffering and pain, confusion and deceit. We may desire to see every person free in Christ.

But soon enough we realize our inadequacy. I would say weakness, but there are plenty of people who have specialized in turning the word weakness into an euphemism for sin, mostly to cover it up or diminish its weight. We are inadequate. We can’t do it.

That’s the moment when our holiness is tested. Will we trust in the Holy Spirit to empower us to fulfill our calling, or will we see our hope in someone else, someone seemingly victorious, successful, wise?

I don’t write as someone without intimate knowledge of this temptation. Chuck DeGroat in one of his books put words to something I always knew to be true: since I thought I knew, or more accurately perhaps, as I was persuaded by Pastor X that I would never be as good as Pastor X, then Pastor X became my victor. And I could devote my life to serving and imitating Pastor X, empowering him to fulfill his calling, which he could do seemingly so effectively. And I saw others who did the same. They could never preach the gospel, in their opinion, so they would want to bring people to the man for him to preach to them. They loved to see him change little things here and their in their dead church, and that emboldened us to support him all the more. To be more loyal. Even to the point of destroying others so that his valuable ministry would continue uninterrupted.

It is a great tragedy that a person would be killed in the so-called Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. But a greater tragedy is that those who profess to be Christians fail when faced with this temptation. Instead of losing and having to rely in the Lord, instead of actually fighting the darkness in our own lives and spheres of influence, instead of doing something ourselves, it is easier to watch someone else do something and appropriate what we see as their victory.

I get it that college campuses are difficult places. How many students are you relationally connected to? What have you told them about the hope you have that far transcends any modern or recycled ideology?

It’s easier to like somebody on YouTube than to do the hard work of martyrdom: giving testimony of the hope we did not buy or merit but received freely through the life, death and resurrection of the now ascended Jesus.