The Book's Purpose

• Identify the major reasons so many Christians abandon their faith and drop out of church
• Offer biblically sound and pastorally tested “faith builders” to counter these destructive trends
• Treat with dignity and respect those whose experiences or questions have caused them to stumble

The Book's Message

Among the greatest crises facing the church today is the loss of faith in God and His Word by once-committed Christians. Almost 75 million American adults say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ, but more than 31 million of them no longer attend church. If God Disappears identifies nine faith wreckers and offers corresponding faith builders to help those who are stumbling regain their spiritual balance. Most Christians will have their faith severely tested at some point and this book will help them pass the test.

Faith Wrecker #1: Experiencing Evil and Suffering

No one is immune from pain, suffering, and loss, and no one is immune from asking the ultimate questions such trials raise: Why, God? Why does evil exist? Why do you allow bad things to happen to good people? Why should I believe in you?

When polled about what they would ask God if given the chance, 44 percent of Americans wanted to know why He allows suffering in the world.

Ten years ago I was blasted by a series of crises: emergency surgery for my oldest daughter; unexpected home repairs, and expensive vehicle breakdowns~ all leading to a pile of unpaid bills. I felt crushed emotionally, physically, financially, and spiritually. Why was God allowing~or orchestrating~all of this?

In the years since, I’ve talked with hundreds of people who have also been tripped up by painful experiences. Because of these difficult times, some have consciously rejected God. Others have abandoned the church. Still others have been tempered by the fire, strengthened as a result of their ordeals.

The two core ways people can survive these trials with their faith intact is trusting that God is still there and sharing these sufferings with others. The Father longs for us to realize that even when we can’t see or feel Him, He is always with us. This may be difficult to believe, but it is true nonetheless. Despite what our circumstances convey, God never abandons us, even in the worst circumstances. He wants us to hold on in the hope that we will see Him again.

Seventy percent of the Book of Psalms~seven of every ten psalms~deal with crying out to God for deliverance in some form and/or thanking Him for physical or spiritual salvation. Like our spiritual forefathers, we need to trust God in times of pain and suffering. Their specific examples can serve as templates for us as we face times of trouble.

Sharing our stories and struggles with friends who know God can open channels through which His Spirit can work to encourage us. Crying out to others is almost as important as crying out to God. If you live and suffer in isolation, you won’t develop character, integrity, or leadership skills. We all need intimate and authentic relationships to help us cope with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” and to encourage us to hold on to faith.

Faith Wrecker #2: Living Recklessly As a Rugged Individualist

Life is full of tragic illustrations of what happens to people who don’t know how to submit to others, especially God. The inevitable storms that blow will expose whether we are leaning on God or standing alone like John Wayne. The first posture is characterized by proactive humility and dependence; the latter by reactive self-reliance and isolation.

“Submit” was nowhere in my vocabulary growing up. I was raised in an anti-authority atmosphere. When I was 13 years old, my father told me I didn’t have to obey him anymore; I could do whatever I wanted. (When I became a sold-out follower of Jesus Christ, though, it made him angry.)

Becoming a Christian didn’t mean I instantly understood submission. I learned its transforming power through painful experience. I could show you my scars and tell you about the wounds I’ve inflicted because I didn’t understand, or at times lost sight of, the value of submitting to God and to others I could trust.

Understanding what the Bible teaches about submission is the key to living it out. In a nutshell: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). The broader context of this key verse deals with Christlike humility as the basis for all authentic relationships: within marriage and family, on the job, and in society as a whole.

There are three important truths about submission that need to be understood and kept in balance:

1. Submission is impossible unless we knowingly, deliberately, and decisively reject the American ideal of rugged individualism.

2. Submission from others must be earned. Scripture commands us to submit to one another, but it doesn’t give us the authority to force others to submit to us. Submission, like love and respect, is a choice.

3. Submission doesn’t mean reluctantly taking orders; it means willingly deferring to the strengths and opinions of others, especially duly appointed authority. This starts with God and encompasses every sphere of life.

Faith Wrecker #3: Making Your Own Rules, Whatever the Cost

It’s impossible to live without rules. Visit a major intersection in any growing city and the traffic will graphically illustrate the necessity of rules to make things work. God gives us rules to protect and help us. That doesn’t mean we always choose to accept and follow them. Most of us are pretty good at making up our own rules despite the truth and regardless of the consequences.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were champion rule-makers. In Matthew 15 and Mark 7, we find them surrounding Jesus at lunchtime. His followers had broken one of their petty rules about ceremonial hand washing. Their focus was on looking good externally and condemning everyone who didn’t adhere to their customs and man-made rules.

Jesus used this incident to point out how the Pharisees had twisted God’s command 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Over the years they had made up many rules to circumvent the letter and spirit of God’s law. And as the book of James would later point out, whenever we choose our will over God’s, we’re breaking the whole law.

As sinful humans we can be self-inclined and God-averse. We are apt to choose our will and our way instead of God’s. We can live day-to-day as if He doesn’t exist. Dostoevsky once wrote, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Rabbi Harold Kushner suspects that the great writer meant:

Often it’s during times of physical, emotional, spiritual, and social stress that we’re most tempted to turn from God’s laws and live by our own. But when we do, we inevitably find ourselves further from God than when we started. The prophet Elijah did this when he ran away to the desert in fear of his life. God didn’t destroy the prophet for giving in to discouragement and despair. Instead, He took care of Elijah’s needs: Physically, by providing essential food and rest. Emotionally, by making His presence known. Spiritually, by offering the prophet a chance to serve Him again. Socially, by reminding Elijah he wasn’t alone. Jehovah still had 7,000 followers Jezebel hadn’t managed to kill.

God promises to care for us just as He cared for Elijah. We should wait on Him and not resort to making our own rules, no matter what happens. It takes courage to wait, but the outcome is worth it.

We should always keep “rules” in perspective, however. The Divine Lawgiver is far greater than any of His laws. If we focus too much on the rules, we’ll miss God’s heart.

Faith Wrecker #4: Believing That Anger is Justified When My Vision of God Is Clouded

Our world is full of anger and hate: hate songs and movies; flaming e-mails and blog postings; good old-fashioned hate letters, both private and public. I’ve been involved with the media for years, and I’ve learned that no matter how angry someone is at me, we’re not that far from becoming good friends. First, because that person is emotionally engaged in our relationship. There’s passion! And, second, because the essence of Christianity is reconciliation. Once a matter is settled, the other person and I are bonded.

The same principles apply to our relationship with God. He isn’t defensive or threatened when we get angry at Him. He’s passionate about being reconciled to us, even when we don’t want anything to do with Him. He isn’t threatened when we blurt out our innermost feelings. But sometimes we’re not angry with God; we’re actually angry at a caricature of Him. And if we change our minds, choosing instead to let go of our angry ways and accept God’s love and grace, we can see God clearly again.

The lights go on when we realize the anger we feel may not be based on what’s actually real. We all have internal arguments with projections we’ve created of God or someone else. These projections affect our perceptions of the real person and complicate our relationship.

To harbor unrelenting anger is to deny God. Grace, however, is encountering Him as He truly is. Experiencing His grace enables us to love others as much as we love ourselves and in the same way Jesus loves us. This agape love is what proves to the world that we are His disciples (John 13:35).

In the Upper Room Discourse (John 13–17), Jesus explains how the fruit of love is meant to be a phenomenal display of God’s glory in the world. The fruit of love is obeying Jesus just as He obeyed His Father to the point of laying down His life for us. This is the fruit of sacrifice. Everything good the church has done in the past two thousand years has grown out of our Christlike love for one another. Conversely, everything evil done in His name has been the fruit of rejecting what Jesus taught us about love and grace. Love divorced from grace isn’t love at all.

When we realize how much God loves us, that realization should give us the energy we need to love others sacrificially. Whom are you choosing to love? In a world that’s often raging mad, God’s love infused with grace is the one thing that really matters for time and eternity.

Faith Wrecker #5: Neglecting My Time with God and Failing to See Him in My Life

Consistently neglecting time with God may lead to not being able to connect with Him at all. Have there been times in the past when you have lost connection with the Lord? When was the last time you felt God’s tangible presence? What sparked the experience?

If it’s been a long time since such a divine encounter, you may have experienced a lot of pain. You may find it difficult to believe what the Bible says about God’s promises to care for us and not abandon us, even if we ignore Him.

In my experience it seems people have real problems believing God’s promises. Consciously or unconsciously, we question whether He keeps His Word. This is a core faith issue. If we treat it lightly, we risk damaging our souls. The Bible is full of accounts of real men and women who genuinely struggled with this question.

In order to understand and apply God’s promises, we need to see how they fit into His grand scheme. Some of His promises will be fulfilled only in the future, but many apply to us the moment we become His children, no matter how long ago they were made.

We can count on God’s promises to meet our every need. For our part we must ask for His provision, trust Him, and wait. I can do the first part, and I can usually manage the second. But the waiting~ that’s the difficult part. If I’m not careful, the waiting can grind up my faith, yet persistence, endurance, and waiting are spiritual facts of life.

“Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you,” Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:7. Other verses affirm that any promises we can claim in Jesus’ name~those made to us as God’s children~are guaranteed and will be fulfilled in God’s time and for God’s glory. We just have to wait.

Waiting doesn’t come naturally to most of us. To wait for God’s daily provisions, and for Christ’s return, we need supernatural help from the Holy Spirit. If we quench the Spirit, tune Him out of our lives, or think the Lord will never come back, we won’t have the power needed to continue waiting. And if we stop waiting, we run the risk of calling God a liar.

Faith Wrecker #6: Studying About God Without Heart Devotion

The intense questioning of faith is a two-edged sword; it can either draw us closer to God or make us more aware of how hard it can be to find Him. One factor that has a powerful bearing on which way the process cuts is the father-child relationship.

Former atheist Dr. Paul C. Vitz studied the biographies of some leading atheists from the last three centuries for his provocative book, Faith of the Fatherless. He showed that virtually all of them had an absent, distant, or abusive father very early in childhood~often before 18 months of age. Far from being a purely intellectual decision, atheism is often an emotional reaction.

Religious education is no guarantee of solid faith either. Famous agnostics and atheists like Ernst Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauss, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche pursued theological studies but lost the faith of their fathers. Higher education doesn’t necessarily strengthen faith. Divorced from a passion for God Himself, it can actually destroy faith.

Christian psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Larry Crabb relates his own experience in graduate school. “I told myself not to believe anything that would require me to dump my intellect. Several psychology professors told me that I could not be a good psychologist and still believe in nonsensical Christianity. So for a year or two I became a self-chosen agnostic. I wanted to start from scratch to see what was true … Being an orthodox Christian means allowing the truth of Christianity to be absorbed into one’s soul, which changes one’s approach to life. I began moving toward God, wanting to relate to Him, not just to do what I was told.”

Even the best education doesn’t have all the answers; so, what do we do with dilemmas we can’t resolve? In the natural world not understanding how things work inevitably leads to seeking more truth, not to rejecting what we already know. The same is true in the spiritual realm. As finite beings, we can’t fully understand the essence of God or His ways, but we can keep seeking.

I don’t know your story. Perhaps you’ve wrestled with unanswerable questions and lost your faith as a result. But you shouldn’t throw away everything you’ve learned about God. You may eventually find the answers you seek by walking back toward Him instead of away from Him.

Faith Wrecker #7: Experiencing the Most Crushing Circumstances in Life

Why me? That’s the question we all ask when we face crushing circumstances and God doesn’t intervene on our behalf. The answer we come up with will either move us closer to God or further away from Him.

When bad things happen, our first instinct is to blame God. Rather than waiting for Him to reveal Himself to us in new ways through the trial, we often demand that He resolve it right away. And when He doesn’t, our image of Him shrinks because we suspect He’s just as limited as we are. We might even consider bagging Christianity altogether. Ironically, that might be exactly what God wants us to do.

I’m convinced that God wants us to discard our man-made, finite concepts of who He is. We can begin to form a right view of God’s greatness, goodness, and glory only after we first remove our small, misshapen ideas. He is far greater than any and every action, thought, or representation created by the human mind. He is bigger than any and every situation we face, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.

The Bible is very clear that God’s preparation and training program for ALL His children includes hardships and trials. This is a very unpopular and countercultural message, but we might as well face reality.

The story of Joseph in the book of Genesis illustrates how God can use difficult circumstances to shape, mold, and refine our character. It shows how He can bring future good out of my present pain. Reading the account through an informed New Testament perspective, I find nine life-changing truths that we can all embrace:

1. In this life I will be mistreated by others.
2. Even if I am not yet reconciled with those who have hurt me, I can experience release from bitterness by trusting in God’s plan.
3. I can be sure that God has a good purpose when He allows me to experience difficult circumstances.
4. God isn’t the one to blame.
5. God wants to test my character and cultivate my trust in Him so I’ll be able to walk alongside and encourage others.
6. To be reconciled with those who have hurt me, I often must take the risk of revealing my heart~both my pain and my love.
7. To be reconciled, I often must invite those people to draw close to me and speak freely with me.
8. Reconciliation isn’t always possible, but my responsibility is to do as much as possible to live at peace with others.
9. If someone has something against me, even if I’ve done nothing wrong, I need to go to him or her and do all that I can to be reconciled.

Until we get to the end of the story, it’s not always possible to see how anything positive can come from the losses, grief, and pain in life. But even in crushing circumstances, we can choose to trust God and believe He’s working behind the scenes for His glory and our good.

Faith Wrecker #8: Giving Myself Permission to Do as I Please, Pusing Reality (and God) Out of Sight

At times we all like to think that there are no consequences to breaking some rules or that we can beat the odds and get away with doing so. It’s so tempting to push aside common sense in favor of the latest thrill. But reality has a way of slapping us in the face for ignoring what we know to be true.

When we sweep sin under the rug or tuck it into a corner out of sight from God and others, we magnify the stranglehold of spiritual oppression and intensify the consequences of our sins. But no matter how bad things get, no matter how stubborn and sinful we become, God always extends His grace and mercy to us when we “fess up.” Our heavenly Father shows us mercy because He remembers we are but dust and that His Son has paid the penalty for our sins~including our feeble attempts to make reality conform to our desires. This doesn’t mean, however, that we’ll never have to face sin’s consequences. The more undercover we try to keep our wrongs, the more they deaden our hearts. And the longer we ignore reality~and God~the more pain we will experience. The story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 illustrates the desire of God to welcome us home and lavish His love on His disobedient children. The father’s behavior was scandalous by the Jewish standards of his day. What provoked such a gracious response?

This parable shows that even when we don’t believe in God, He believes in us. He can’t wait for the day we stop denying reality and allow Him to write a vibrant new script for our lives. Reconciliation does not happen, though, without the rebellious child owning up to his or her sin. Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Luke 15:21

Does God allow us to write a vibrant new script for our futures regardless of our past sins? Yes. Even after painful experiences like divorce? Yes again. No matter how much we’ve pushed reality aside or how long we’ve done our own thing, God doesn’t give up on us. He’s still waiting to welcome us home.

Faith Wrecker #9: Being Wounded in or by the Church

Local churches should be safe places for people, spiritual homes. But often they are the settings for some of the harshest onslaughts against personal faith. When someone has been deeply hurt inside the church, it can be incredibly hard for him or her to love God, let alone return to the fellowship of believers.

Most of us have had a bad church experience. Approximately 31 million professed Christians have stopped going to church, perhaps because of painful incidents. They choose to avoid other Christians despite saying their relationship to Christ is important.

It’s no wonder some bestselling authors have decried the sins of the church. Dorothy Sayers called them God’s third great humiliation, after the Incarnation and the Cross. Thankfully, these sins have nothing to do with Jesus Christ, who never abused His power. The problem isn’t God; it is flawed leaders and members who wound others. It is sinful human beings who thwart true spirituality for selfish purposes or their own sociopolitical agendas.

The renowned British statesman William Wilberforce, who led the fight against slavery two centuries ago, warned people not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The church’s greatest need is a new generation of prophets who wholeheartedly embrace faith, joy, and love; who experience God’s healing power; and who demonstrate the reality of Christlikeness. You and I may not want to believe God has called us to be prophets to the twenty-first-century church, but He has. This is a passionate, powerful, and grace-filled challenge from the One who has promised to pour His Spirit into us, and through us, upon others.

Have you experienced God’s healing power? Are you willing to believe that God wants to speak in and through you? I sincerely hope so. My prayer for you when you begin to embark on this dangerous new journey is that God would fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith.