It had been more than two years since Roy and I had seen each other. Because he lived in another state, we didn’t get together very often. So we had a lot of catching up to do during a quiet breakfast one morning.
But our lack of communication wasn’t entirely due to geographical distance. There were things we needed to talk out.
Eighteen months earlier Roy had dropped off the face of the earth. A successful Christian businessman, he had been my friend for many years. One day he was fine, I’d been told. The next day he moved out of his home, took an apartment, and virtually disappeared.
For over a year Roy was out of contact with his friends and colleagues. He kept his job and visited his kids, but no one else ever saw him. He didn’t return phone calls. Secretaries and answering machines ran interference for him.
His friends speculated about what had happened to Roy. Had he lost the faith? Had he gone crazy? Roy wasn’t talking.
One night, out of the blue, Roy called me at my home and asked if we could get together. We made plans, and he flew in the next day.
Over breakfast Roy told me his story. For about a year he had been under extremely intense business pressure that required more of him than he had. He had tried to tough it out and be strong for others. “Times were tough,” he told me. “I knew if my struggles were bad, others’ had to be much worse.” A deep depression followed.
Roy had shared his problem with only a few people. “Get some time away,” one told him, “and rekindle with the Lord.” “Do a personal inventory of yourself,” another said. “Chances are, you’ve dropped your walk with God to a lower priority.” A third told him, “God’s rod and staff will comfort you.”
So Roy began spending more time in the Bible and in prayer. Since stress and worry were waking him up at four A.M. anyway, he started using that time for his devotions. But his depression continued; black hopelessness and despair engulfed him.
His depression finally got the best of him. Roy’s emotional pain became so intense that he oiled and loaded his revolver to prepare for the only solution he knew. But before he went ahead with his plan, he decided to move out for a few weeks to try to sort things out with the Lord.
One more shot at prayer. One more chance at an inspiring Bible study. Perhaps he hadn’t really connected with God during the other attempts. Perhaps it would be different this time.
It wasn’t. Roy prayed intently for hours on his knees. He read the Scriptures, poring over them to seek the Lord. And his depression grew.
“You’re still with us,” I said to Roy that morning. “What happened?”
“It was the strangest thing,” he recalled. “As I was deciding to go ahead and end my life, my apartment neighbor knocked on my door to borrow a Phillips screwdriver. I got it for him, and we started talking.
“He wasn’t a Christian, but he seemed interested. Bill let me talk and talk and talk. About my pain and life. About my insane business pressures. About my marriage struggles. About my abusive mother and my absent father. About my acting-out school years. About the brother who had let me down. About my conversion to Christ and how my life started coming around. About my many years of rescuing the world for God, and how the demands on me just kept growing.
“Bill listened and asked questions. He didn’t offer advice. He told me he thought I had a really tough life. That was all. And after a couple of hours of my bending his ear, he asked if I’d like to go out to dinner. We did. And then he told his story.”
Roy looked thoughtful. “It was the funniest thing. Bill didn’t tell me to do anything. He sure wasn’t God. He didn’t say one word about God. And yet for some reason I felt better after talking to him than I did after talking to God. I hate the way that sounds, but it’s true.
“I met some of Bill’s friends. They were like him—people who had struggled, some believers, most not. But everyone seemed to want to listen to each other’s problems. Nobody asked me to take care of them. Nobody asked me for spiritual advice. I could say whatever I felt, and they just accepted me.
“I felt guilty, because I wasn’t around Christians. But I stopped wanting to kill myself. And strangely enough, I started wanting to pray again, which I’d pretty much given up on. Can you believe that? Feeling close to God with a bunch of nonbelievers!
“Anyway, after about a year, I started sensing more … substance, I’d guess you’d call it, inside me. And I knew I needed to get back to my family, my friends, and my life. So I’m home now. Everybody thinks I’m crazy, because I’m not talking much about it. But for some reason, I’m more ready to reenter life.”
Roy leaned forward across the table. “Which leads me to why I wanted to talk to you. Why am I better? Why did hanging around a bunch of ordinary people help me? I believe God is sufficient for my needs. Yet it seems that he wasn’t. So what’s the deal? Is the Bible wrong? Isn’t God enough for my needs?”
Before we call Roy irresponsible, of little faith, or even crazy, let’s look at his dilemma. Many Christians experience the same problem and ask the same questions.
In some ways, this crazymaker is easier to deal with than the false assumption we explored in chapter one (“It’s selfish to have my needs met”). At least the “me and God” syndrome allows us to be in need. The problem is that it presents a biblically incomplete idea of how we get those needs met. Individuals who teach this crazymaker provide only part of the answer. It’s a subbiblical view of how people get help.
The “me and God” syndrome says this: Since Christ is enough for me, it’s me and God against the world. With God on my side, I can lick any problem. He’s the pilot, and I’m the co-pilot in the battle of life. If he’s there beside me, I need no one else.
In theological terms, this crazymaker is based on the doctrine of the sufficiency of Christ. Helpful when understood biblically, this tenet is based on passages such as Colossians 2:9–10: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.”
Correctly understood, the sufficiency principle teaches that Christ provides for the believer’s every need—physical, spiritual, and emotional.
The problem arises when we interpret Christ’s sufficiency as Christ alone, not including his resources. We run into problems when we think that prayer and Bible reading are enough to keep us going, when we think that depression, loneliness, or anxiety can be solved by spending time alone with God.
This distorted teaching—“If I have God, I don’t need people”—says that going to people for our spiritual or emotional needs is wrong. To those who ask for help from other people, teachers of this doctrine say:
• You lack faith.
• You have a limited, or small view of God.
• You are trusting in humans instead of the Savior.
• You are dabbling in secular humanism.
• You are in sin.
• You are proud.
And on and on. People who buy into this doctrine give testimonials to conquering depression, compulsive behaviors, and bad marriages because they turned from people and toward God.
God is God, you say, and he can do everything, right? Doesn’t the Bible say God is sufficient? How can anything be wrong with this? How can this be a crazymaker?
God certainly is God, and God can do anything. Jesus declared that “with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26). He rules the universe (Rev. 19:6).
However, although he can, God doesn’t do everything. God doesn’t drive your car to church. He doesn’t water your lawn (unless you live in Seattle). He doesn’t tell your kids that you love them.
God uses all sorts of resources to help us in life. He uses angels as “ministering spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation” (Heb. 1:14 NASB). He uses the witness of creation to draw us to him: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps. 19:1). He used a donkey to talk to Balaam (Num. 22). And he uses people.
In short, God’s love is manifested through many channels, including this one: his creatures loving and helping other of his creatures (1 Peter 4:8–10).
“Me and God” teachers say that God alone is the source of grace, of undeserved love. They say we shouldn’t look to people for grace. Yet the Scriptures say that people are indeed a means of distributing God’s grace to others: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given us” (Rom. 12:6); “But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it” (Eph. 4:7).
If you’re not receiving grace from God’s people, your perception of God is too small. God wants to see love proliferate in his universe. That’s what he is about, and that’s what he wants us to be about.
I was summoned to a psychiatric hospital to interview an emergency case for possible admission. When I arrived at the office, I met a distraught woman in her twenties.
When she was picked up in the middle of the night, Ruth had been walking down a country road, naked, and in a psychotic terror. The authorities called her parents, who called a Christian psychologist, who then called me.
As we talked, Ruth started to calm down. “What were you doing in the woods?” I asked her.
“I was on a spiritual-growth retreat.”
“What kind?”
“To get alone with God for extended periods of time, to journal what I’m learning from him, to grow closer to him.”
“How extended is ‘extended’?”
“A week. I stay alone every day in a cabin with my Bible and my notebook.”
“You don’t talk to anybody?”
“Once a day I have a session with my spiritual leader for an hour or so. We go over what I’m learning. Then I go back to my cabin.”
“When did it get bad for you?”
“I got there on Monday. The first day or two were okay. But by Thursday I wasn’t okay. At first I was just lonely, then I got really scared. By Friday, I thought I was being attacked by horrible beings, and I ran out of the cabin in the middle of the night to get away.”
“What did your spiritual leader say about the bad days before the breakdown?”
Ruth paused for a moment. “He said that I was resisting the Spirit of God,” she said. “He thought a few extra days might help.”
The culprit here is not being alone with God, but that Ruth went into the retreat with an undiagnosed, severe abandonment panic disorder. It surfaced, predictably, as she became more and more isolated. Yet when she told her leader about it, his answer was for her to isolate herself even more.
This approach to spiritual issues is taught widely among Christian circles. It reminds me of the two tongue-in-cheek rules of engineering: (1) If it doesn’t work, use a hammer; (2) if it still doesn’t work, use a bigger hammer. Ruth’s leader was using a bigger hammer on her, with disastrous results.
This is the first problem with the “If I have God, I don’t need people” approach: It denies that God uses people as his fingers.
Yet God constantly uses people. We see people meeting other people’s needs all the way through Scripture. God looked at Eden and declared that it was not good that Adam had no human companion (Gen. 2:18). The Preacher says, “Two are better than one. … If one falls down, his friend can help him up” (Eccl. 4:9–10). And all the references to “one another” in the New Testament passages about the church (i.e., Rom. 12:10; 13:8; 14:13; 1 Cor. 12:25; 16:20; Gal. 5:13; Eph. 4:25, 32) point to this same idea: God meets our needs with people.1
Both-and, not either-or. Are you uncomfortable with the idea that God uses people? Does it make you feel that God never does anything directly through his Person or his Word—that he merely tosses people our way to represent him?
This is hardly the case. God isn’t limited to people, but is highly and personally involved with us. He uses people for some things, and himself directly for others.
At a seminar on this topic, a studious fellow asked the question, “So what percentage of our needs are met by God and what percentage by people?”
We answered, “One hundred percent by both.” As we’ll see, it’s actually God’s hand behind it all.
Eyes and hands. God designed us to need each other in humility, so that we could relate to him as creatures to Creator. When we think we do not need what other Christians offer us emotionally and spiritually, the body of Christ stops functioning as it should: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” (1 Cor. 12:21). Needing each other’s gifts, support, wisdom, and love is the biblical pattern for maturity.
There are four fundamental spiritual and emotional arenas in which God meets people where they are lacking: growth, comfort, wisdom, and repair.
1. Growth. Most Christians we know want to grow spiritually. Once the Father has drawn us to salvation in Christ, our hearts yearn to mature and become more of what we were intended to be—image bearers of him (Gen. 1:27).
One way this happens is through each other. As parts of Christ’s body, the church (Eph. 1:22–23), we help grow each other up. None of us is complete. We have our crises and conflicts at different times and about different things. This way, when one is in need, he or she is helped. Paul explains it like this:
Speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Eph. 4:15–16, emphasis mine)
“Builds itself up in love.” Using the resources provided by God, we are to play a crucial part in each other’s spiritual growth. Life in Christ is life in the body of Christ, his church.
Over the years I have belonged to several churches in which this principle is alive. The members helped each other when their babies were born, and they helped each other bury their dead. When anyone was in physical, financial, or emotional need, he called his spiritual family. Each part did its work, and the church grew in depth and breadth over the years.
2. Comfort. This is a basic spiritual and emotional need. We need someone to ease our pain, someone to soothe us when we’re distressed.
One of the Hebrew words for comfort, naham, is rooted in the idea “to breathe deeply.”2
To understand this, look how a mother calms a frightened infant. She holds him to her breast, next to her heart. The baby can hear his mother’s heartbeat and deep, regular breathing. In a little while, his panic subsides, and he responds to the even, smooth functions of his mother. Comfort restores a sense of safety and order to us.
Comfort can come from God alone: “May your unfailing love be my comfort” (Ps. 119:76); “For the Lord comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones” (Isa. 49:13). The Holy Spirit comforts: The early church was built up and continued “in the comfort of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 9:31 NASB).
Roy’s friend told the truth when he quoted Psalm 23: “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Yet he didn’t go the next step and ask, “Can I help?”
People are intimately involved in God’s comforting process. When Jacob thought his favorite son Joseph had died, “all his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. ‘No,’ he said, ‘in mourning will I go down to the grave to my son’” (Gen. 37:35). This important passage shows the healing power of the comfort of humans. Jacob refused the solace of his children because he knew it would promote the grieving process. Rather than resolve his grief, he wanted to somehow stay connected to his dead son.
“Trust God,” advise some Christians to friends who experience loss. Yet these Christians are only condemning their friends to a lifetime of unresolved grief.
“People comfort” isn’t just for those who have lost someone. When church members have sinned, then been disciplined for it, we should not leave them alone (“For his own good,” we say to ourselves). Instead, “you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (2 Cor. 2:7). We should offer solace even if he deserved to suffer.
Paul had great joy and comfort in Philemon’s love (Philem. 7). And when Paul was depressed, “God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus” (2 Cor. 7:6). Job called his preachy friends “miserable comforters” (Job 16:2), who in the end were replaced by other friends and family, who “comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the Lord had brought upon him” (Job 42:11).
“People comfort” apparently comes in two kinds: good and miserable. It’s helpful to study the comfort Job’s friends offered him, so that you can duck when you see it coming.
If you go only to God for comfort, you may be limiting God’s help. If we can’t use his fingers, we’re tying his hands.
3. Wisdom. In seminary we discussed endlessly what doctrinal camps we supported. Calvinism, Arminianism, pretrib, posttrib—we argued and analyzed for hours.
During one heated disagreement, one fellow made the mistake of asserting that he was no camp follower of anyone. He was, he said, a biblicist.
We roundly and relentlessly hooted him down for being presumptuous and arrogant. He said, in effect, “All the Bible scholars of the last two millennia are irrelevant. I understand the Word without their help.”
We are to become mature in understanding the Bible. We’re to aspire to handle the Word of truth correctly (2 Tim. 2:15). But we need the help of others to comprehend the Word.
Remember the Ethiopian eunuch’s response to the apostle Philip, who had seen him reading Isaiah and who had asked the eunuch if he understood what he was reading? “How can I,” the eunuch replied, “unless someone explains it to me?” (Acts 8:31). What if Philip had said, “Well, you need to lean on God to understand these words. See ya.”
The point is simply that we all need wisdom—skill in living—whether it be in understanding Scripture, comprehending marriage, or figuring out depression. And people are some of God’s best resources in gaining this skill.
You’ll hear the crazymakers, “Don’t listen to people for your answers—get them directly from God.” But do you see the implied contradiction? “Don’t listen to what I’m saying, because I’m human.”
So humbly consult “specialists” in whatever areas you need wisdom, whether it’s about career, finances, anxiety disorders, or the will of God. Let God speak through those who have walked with him—and learn from them.
4. Repair. We all are broken in some way, both sinful and sinned against. Because none of us has escaped the results of sin, we suffer spiritual and emotional damage. We won’t let others love us. We can’t say no. We don’t know how to connect with people. We’re unable to be firm in our convictions. We need help to be disciplined, to accept our weaknesses, to stand against those who would abuse us. The broken, damaged, immature parts of our character need to be fixed.
As we said in chapter 5, the work of recovery is the work of sanctification. God is redeeming those lost parts of our souls that are injured. He is bringing those parts into the light of his grace and truth.
And doing this repair, many wrongly believe, is God himself, by himself, unaided by anyone or anything. All we really need, they insist, is to do what the Bible says.
Yet the Bible says over and over again that we should find people to help us return to spiritual and emotional health. The root meaning of the Hebrew word hazaq, “repair,” is “to squeeze or bind.” Among other things, it means “to help strengthen the hands and arms.” The picture is of strong hands supporting weak ones.
In her old age a friend of mine was weak and frail, unable even to hold her fork to eat. At mealtimes I’d sometimes place my hand around hers, guiding the fork to her mouth. This hazaq brought us closer together.
It was this characteristic in the patriarch Job that Eliphaz saw and commended: “Think how you have instructed many, how you have strengthened feeble hands. Your words have supported those who stumbled; you have strengthened faltering knees” (Job 4:3–4). He was glad Job had hazaq (although Eliphaz neglected to give his friend any hazaq in return). Jonathan “hazaqed” David in a crisis: He “helped him find strength in God” (1 Sam. 23:16). It was through Jonathan that David received God’s love.
The Bible doesn’t dictate how God will meet a specific need—directly or through people. Yet we cannot assume a loving act of God over a loving act of people. God sent Titus to Paul (2 Cor. 7:6). God so loved the world that he sent his Son. Allow God to touch you through whatever or whomever he desires.
It was a difficult session for Carol. Her father had recently died after a lengthy illness. His death had been expected. What hadn’t been expected was what she’d begun to discover about her relationship with him.
For a long time Carol had told me stories about the kind of man her father was. In all of them her father was loving, caring, strong, and protective. She had evaluated the men in her life by one standard—her father. There was only one problem: Carol’s dad had left her and her mother when she was two, connecting with Carol only sporadically throughout her life.
So Carol had created in her head a perfect father. She’d embellished who he really was to protect herself from the pain and loss of not having had a father at home. Only after his physical death was she able to accept the death of the relationship several decades before. She began seeing her father for the real person he was—a troubled, self-absorbed man who really hadn’t made time for her. She had a deep loss to work through—the loss of a man who had never been.
Carol never had a dad to connect with—one who held her, played with her, and took her on walks. Having no picture of a real dad, she fabricated an unrealistic one and compared every man she dated with this ideal dad.
The fact that Carol had a dad, somewhere, was not enough to save her from deep feelings of abandonment and loss. She needed a father in her house, a father in the flesh, a father incarnate. This only mirrors the need that God sensed within humans: In addition to the fact of God in our lives, we need God in the flesh, God incarnate—the Christ.
The crazymaker that says, “If you have God, you don’t need people,” distances us from the man Jesus. It minimizes the Incarnation, a fundamental Christian doctrine.
A fleshy religion. Most religions detail how to reach God. You perform certain rituals, you remain faithful to commands, you live the best life you can, or you recognize the god that you are.
In Christianity, however, we don’t reach for God. We don’t find the pathway to God. He reached for us, he made a path for us: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). God saw that we were in deep trouble and would never be able to reconnect with him in his holiness. So he did the work for us: Christ paid for our sins on the cross.
In the Christian faith, God actually became man. That’s what incarnation means. God became carne, flesh, for us.
By becoming a man, God baptized and affirmed our humanness. He made it acceptable to be just folks. We don’t have to water down or transcend our humanity to be spiritual. To the contrary, to become spiritual, we must become more human.
By becoming a man, God showed that he understands our sufferings. He’s been there. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
He became more thoroughly human than any of us can imagine: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). The miracle of biblical Christianity is that the God-man wrapped himself in our sin until he paid for it. He took our sin upon himself and endured the punishment we deserved. Thus by a marvelous exchange he made it possible for us to receive his righteousness and be reconciled to God.
So if the flesh and bones and blood—and sin—of being human is apparently important enough to God that he became a man, then being human must not be all that bad. Furthermore, we can learn about love from the various ways the God-man loved people. He taught them. He healed them. He put his hands on them. He wept with them. He visited them in their homes. He even asked three of them to support him in his pain in Gethsemane: “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me” (Matt. 26:38).
This is how he met needs when he was on earth—with direct, hands-on compassion and love. The incarnation of Christ points out the absurdity of thinking you don’t need people. When he was a man, God himself needed people.
This is what makes the sufficiency teachings insufficient. Proponents of this crazymaker teach a Christ who is definitely divine but scarcely human—contrary to the biblical teaching that Christ was fully God and fully man. They therefore limit the resources of Christ to God’s direct intervention. They teach an insufficient Christ, not the Christ of the Bible.
The Gnostic split. At the root of sufficiency teaching is Gnosticism, an ancient philosophy that held that knowledge of spiritual things is essential. Matter—the opposite of spirit—is therefore evil. In other words, flesh is bad and spirit is good. The goal of a Gnostic, then, was to become less fleshly and more spiritual.
It was only logical that Gnostics treated their bodies, which were matter, harshly. Self-mutilation, deprivation, and isolation were commonly practiced by them, all to help Gnostics separate their flesh from their spirit. Their view of Christ? A purely spiritual Christ, not one tainted by humanity.
With the opening words of his first letter, John explodes this heresy:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.
The apostle’s point was that the Christ was also a man named Jesus, who lived, breathed, touched us, and died for us. In the same way he loved us, we are to love others. The spiritual Christian is very, very human.
For this reason, the phrase “body of Christ” is critically important. In passages like Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and Ephesians 4 we read that the church operates as Jesus’ body would if he were physically still on earth. We are to love each other, bear each other’s burdens, and support each other. We are his fingers.
Learning about God. We learn about God’s character from our human relationships. That’s why the Bible says that “anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). People who are disconnected and estranged from each other have a more difficult time knowing and being close to God.
We see this continually in clinical practice, especially among Christians who can’t sense any closeness to God after years of functional Gnosticism and sufficiency teachings. Only after they’ve worked on connecting to healthy people do they gradually begin sensing God more. They learn the spiritual truths only when the physical ones are in place.
Babies and spouses. It’s almost impossible for “just me and God” teachers to live as they teach. If I am loved only directly by God, then for me to comfort others or help them grow would be to cause them to sin. I’d be teaching them to become dependent on people, instead of relying on God. Such a parent would have to stand over a crying infant’s crib and tell her to be comforted by God—then walk away. Such a husband wouldn’t kiss or hold his wife—he’d tell her that Christ loved her, and that’s enough. The teaching breaks down in actual life.
In fact, the only way this system works is to stay away from people and simply point them to God. Yet that’s exactly what James steers us away from:
Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? (James 2:15–16)
If they live what they believe, “just me and God” believers wish people well. Hoping God will take care of any unfortunates, they avoid helping them, in order that the needy will trust Christ even more. But that belief is a dead faith, James declares (2:17), and it needs to be buried.
The actual tragedy in Roy’s life, as he explained it to me during that long breakfast, was not his childhood sufferings (which were enormous) or his breakdown (which was traumatic). The tragedy was that there was no Christian for Roy to connect with. God had to bring an unbeliever to him. No doubt this circumstance was partly due to his resistance to Christians around him. Yet from what he told me, most Christians simply weren’t available to be God’s fingers. Instead they pointed the finger.
God made us to need him and each other. We need God. We need his Word. We need each other.
In his second letter, the apostle John wrote, “I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). Complete your own joy. Come face to face with others who love you.