We need God to do whatever it takes to keep us desperate for him. https://t.co/m3tWRMYeXf
— Desiring God (@desiringGod) September 2, 2016
Follow the link, and you’ll find this:
Why did David’s affliction result in faithfulness and his prosperity result in sin? We all know. David was desperate for God when Saul (acting as a messenger of Satan, it would be fair to say) afflicted him. This experience even resulted in glorious psalms of worship (like Psalms 18, 54, and 57). But when David was not desperate for God, he was more vulnerable to his self-destructive depravity.
Whatever It Takes, Lord
The same is true of us. When are we most prayerful and faithful? When we keenly feel our desperation for God, like we can’t live without him. And we are most vulnerable to sin when we don’t feel that way.
So far as it goes, this is a humdrum, fairly commonplace observation: People appeal to an Invisible Friend living in the sky when things look hopeless and there is no help in sight.
This is the ‘brokenness’ that nitwit fundies are forever rhapsodizing about, and when he calls that a good state to be in the writer goes w-a-a-a-y too far.
There are people who want to make other people’s life harder for no other reason than to be able afterwards to offer them their recipe for alleviating life (for example their Christianity).
Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human, §555
Consider the implications of it. You have a friend — Fred, say — whom you care about deeply. Fred has a career that he likes, a wife that he loves, is content with his life, et cetera, et cetera. Unhappily, Fred is not a pitiful nitwit who believes in talking snakes.
Hadn’t you better (underhandedly would probably be best) screw-up Fred’s life so that, broken, he seeks our Invisible Friend? You know you should!
An awful lot of smiling piety covers no more than subterranean malice, and these pathetic weasels cannot be reasoned-out of their sickness. Stay away.