Esther Bennett explains how a deeper understanding of being a child of God transformed her Christian life
It’s New Year’s Eve 2011.
I am reflecting on the past year and writing in my spiritual journal. For the third, or maybe it’s the fourth, year I write down Romans 15.13 as my longing for the coming year: ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit’. A longing. Never, it seems, a reality.
Fog and fears
‘Joy and peace?’ Signally what my life has lacked. Serious Christian devotion, yes. Perseverance, yes. An outwardly good life, certainly yes! Respected by other Christians? For sure. But who knows the inner struggles of my heart? Who knows that grey fog through which day by day I swim? A fog rising from the fears and anxieties that lie like stagnant water in my heart. I can’t work out this life of mine! Does anyone know how desperately I lay claim to God’s promises? How resentful I am that, however hard I try, God always turns out to be right and I to be wrong? No one else knows.
From the tiniest age I have been a Christian. Brought up in a Christian home, my father was the minister, and for over 25 years I have been married to a minister. With great sincerity I have wanted to live to God’s glory. Credentials surely that could make the Apostle Paul proud, had he wished to boast!
Here I am. A month or two from my 50th birthday. Wondering if there is something more? Or is this simply the struggle God has given me in this life? How can I engage with more reality with other believers? That seems like a New Testament approach! Hope is stirring in my heart. At the age of 50 perhaps a risk or two may be in order. After all, there is not quite so much to lose!
Journey of the heart
A few months later I made a journey (reciting my scriptural knowledge A-Z and Z-A on the way, I jest not!) to see a Christian elder in a church not far away to pose these questions. For the first time I shared the real state of my inner life with someone other than my husband or mother.
Two things stick in my mind from that meeting: the first was a challenge to risk sharing with other Christians. The second was an almost off-hand remark – ‘You don’t understand adoption!’. I fought the first. How can I share what others may not understand? Perhaps I may harm others; maybe they will harm me. My listener was unrelenting – ‘why can’t we just be messy together?’ The second reverberated round my heart: it was shocking to be told that I, a Christian of such long standing, did not understand adoption. Shocking. But it rang true. In God’s mercy some big changes started that day in my life which are still very much ongoing.
Over the last 2½ years I have taken the risk of allowing some others into the inside of my life, sharing my current struggles, learning to admit weakness and my need of the prayers and support of others in the Body of Christ. Believing indeed that this is God’s chosen way of building us up together. In doing this I have had the privilege of others sharing with me in a way that I had never dreamt possible. What a liberation it has been to have come out of hiding.
Daughter of the King
I have been finding out what it means to have God as my Father. Just a little! I discover I am the daughter of a King; greatly loved, and I barely knew it. Years ago as a student I worked on the Royal Household Staff at Balmoral Castle. I remember then it had struck me that I was living, sleeping, under the same roof as the Queen of England and, for all the world, her presence made no difference to me. In effect my relationship with God had been the same: living under the roof of his promises but not engaging with him. The promises were formulas. I didn’t look beyond them to the heart of my heavenly Father who is speaking them to me. I have been amazed to find that he, the almighty God, enjoys me! Ludicrous it still seems even as I write. But ‘he takes great delight in me; in his love he will no longer rebuke me, but rejoices over me with singing’ (Zephaniah 3.17). Day by day, and moment by moment, I can talk directly to one who loves me in such an outrageous way.
One risk led to the next! I was well aware of need and weakness. But I had no day-by-day sense of my sin. In fact, to be brutally honest, I had barely repented of sins for 30 years. They simply weren’t on my radar. Hadn’t God forgiven me in Christ? Issue over. I started to pray God would show me my sin, a prayer which felt as dangerous as falling backwards off a cliff clutching vainly onto the grasses at the top. But dangerous only, it turned out, without the tender hand of my Father. And that I had. I had Jesus too. As I saw, over the months that followed, the bitter, harmful ways my sins impacted others and how incurably determined I was (and am) to walk, orphan-like, detached and independent of God, I experienced grief that drove me to the Saviour. Christ’s love grew as the sight of my sins grew. My bitterness and sorrow encountered his extraordinary healing.
Living out the reality
Inevitably all of this has been played out in the imperfect earthiness of everyday life. Stumbling and faltering I am seeking to live out this reality in my relationships with others. At work, with some of my non-Christian friends I am freer than before to acknowledge how at times I struggle with anxieties or with getting stressed; how I need to know the love of my Father. Sometimes the gospel shines out just because I need it so much. In one time of particular difficulty at work it came as an unusual blessing to be reminded by my far-from-Christian friend: ‘Remember who you are looking to!’ With my Christian friends to a growing extent I am becoming freer to live without pretence, and enjoying fellowship and connection I did not know to be possible.
So I lived happily ever after? No! (Though one day, yes). I can hardly convey how strong the default of my heart is to live independently from God. I see myself sometimes like one of the ragtag orphans in the story of Oliver Twist. I, the daughter of the great king, who should be living in his royal palace, keep finding myself out and about with the pickpockets on the street, and sleeping rough under the bridge. What a deeply erring heart! What passionate love in my Father, enveloping this tired wanderer and leading me to rest.
Risk worth taking
Much of this change the Spirit set in motion following the insightful comments of the elder I spoke to at the beginning. Leaving my isolated hole was a risk worth taking! Sometime later I and two friends were mentored through the Sonship Course which helped me connect with the gospel in a much deeper way. This course was originally devised by the late Jack Miller who set up World Harvest Mission (now called Serge) and has been of real benefit to many Christians who, like me, have known the gospel yet not known it.
For me these insights are treasure I cannot keep to myself. I am now involved – with others – in organising a residential Sonship Week for people in ministry and their spouses: 19–24 April 2015. More information can be found on the website: www.sonshipweekuk.org
Again and again I need to hear the sweet voice of the Saviour: ‘I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you’. May the Spirit of Jesus Christ lead us into our privileges.
