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Should religion make you feel good?
Should religion make you feel good? Pastor Don Moldstad explains why it is important, even beneficial, for the Bible to make us uncomfortable. But also the message of peace that follows our discomfort.
Isaiah 30:10-11
Should religion make you feel good? That’s an interesting question. Listen to what Isaiah writes in Chapter 30 verses 10 and 11:
Give us no more visions of what is right!
Tell us pleasant things,
prophesy illusions.
Leave this way,
get off this path,
and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel! (Isaiah 30:10-11)
Isaiah’s words are being spoken by someone sort of facetiously. Let’s think of it this way. Imagine a man that decides to go visit a doctor and the doctor has the difficult news of telling him that he has a terminal illness, which is actually curable if he receives treatment, but the difficulty is now the doctor has to tell him the truth about his condition and his situation. And so he sits the man down.
And the man doesn’t want to listen to this and he decides to leave the doctors office and go instead to another doctor. And before that man does a diagnosis of him he offers him some money and says “Would you please tell me what I’d like to hear: that I’m in good health and everything is fine.”
How silly that would be the one doctor, the first doctor, really wanted to tell him the truth with the hope of healing him and by going to somebody who is going to tell him a false report, and a false diagnosis, he’s going to end up actually harming himself.
Think of that when it comes to spiritual matters. A lot of people don’t like to be shown or told from God’s word in the Bible about their sin. They don’t like to have their sin pointed out and that’s difficult to have to do that too. For a pastor or someone else and yet it’s an essential thing, it’s necessary, it’s spiritually healthy for us to know the truth of our fallen condition.
So that then the pastor or those who bring God’s word to us can come with the wonderful curing message and the medicine of God’s grace and forgiveness in Christ. And so even though it’s difficult for us at times to really hear the truth about sin in ourselves and in the world. It’s an absolutely necessary thing. It’s part of God’s love for us so that he can bring us to the knowledge of our Savior the forgiveness of our sins and by faith in him we have the great remedy of going to heaven someday.
Thanks be to God.
