Beyond outcomes

There’s an idea that I just can’t see to get away from lately: we need to move away from an outcomes-based faith.

We all tend to hope for certain outcomes in our lives - that job, that marriage, that kind of family, a beautiful home, good health, financial security, and so on…

And there’s nothing wrong with this either. Desiring good things, or wanting a life that’s comfortable and free from pain is a totally natural human thing.

But it’s just that in our faith spaces, I think we need to be careful to name this for what it is - it’s really just hoping for good things.

Let’s not make it spiritual by calling it a blessing, or the favour of God, or suggest it’s all God’s plan!  

And when we pray for those things we long for, let’s not talk about ‘having enough faith’ to make those prayers work…

Until it doesn’t…

I suppose that an outcomes-focused faith is what a lot of us learn from a young age.

Maybe it’s not always explicitly taught (though it can be), but it often still gets implied - it’s there in the lines of worship songs we listen to, how we talk about our faith, and even how we learn to pray.

God loves you, and wants to bless you.

God is all powerful, and even faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.

So ask God to help you and trust Him for what you need.

And often this kind of simple, formulaic faith can work well for a time too - but only until it doesn’t.

Because what happens when life suddenly throws a curved ball, or doesn’t work out exactly the way that you want it to anymore?

What does unanswered prayer or lingering suffering say about you? About God? About how He feels towards you? Or about the quality or effectiveness of your faith? 

Why it matters

Both time and experience have taught me that any faith which focuses on outcomes - the gifts rather than the giver - is always shakey ground to be standing on.

Whether it happens at a corporate level, through churches that fail to care for individuals because they prioritise size over spiritual growth, or at a personal level, through an over-focus on praying for something we want, over serving others - it can easily cause us to become ‘stuck’ or to veer off course.

But it can be especially problematic when we transfer these ideas onto others too. We hope, we pray, we trust, and we proclaim Bible promises over a situation - but then what happens when nothing changes?

Too often the temptation is either to quietly sweep those questions under the carpet, or to attempt to explain things away with over-simplified cliches.

‘You didn’t get an answer? You obviously didn’t have enough faith.’

‘God didn’t heal you? Perhaps it’s because of a secret sin in your life.’

‘You trusted God for something, and He didn’t come through? I guess it just wasn’t His will.’

I’m paraphrasing a bit, but these things get said to people who are struggling all the time - and it can be incredibly shaming, hurtful, and ultimately damaging to their faith.

I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with people who have been offered these ‘answers’ in response to miscarriage losses or infertility, for example.

But when a couple can’t have a child, or lose their baby too soon, is shrugging and saying, ‘Huh, maybe God didn’t want that for you’ really the best solace we can offer? Or is there actually a far bigger story going on?

Have we become so outcomes-focused, that we have reduced a life of faith into a ‘life betterment’ programme for enhancing our personal health, wealth and happiness, instead a grand narrative for understanding the world and how we fit into it all?

Selective reading

The grand narrative

I know that the Bible has plenty to say about God’s love and goodness and desire to bless his people, and it’s not my intention to undermine any of it - but how we read the Bible really matters.

It’s so easy to get into selective reading and taking individual Bible-verses out of context and use them as little more than convenient soundbites to spiritualise our own desires, or to justify our views.

But the truth is that the Bible also has plenty to say about suffering too (though weirdly, we aren’t quite so quick to pull these ones out as memory verses, or to claim them as promises for our own lives!)

And when take the promises of God that were intended for a specific person or people group, and written in a specific situation and time - and then claim them as promises over our own situations too - we risk losing any wider context or nuance of meaning in the text at all.

Jeremiah 29:11 may well say that ‘God has plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you hope and a future’ - but when read in context of the rest of the passage around it, it’s very clear that this promise was directed at a people group who were living in exile at the time. What’s more, it was actually given in the context of them being encouraged to stay in that place of hardship - but to trust in God’s goodness, even as they did.

It’s certainly not the promise for guaranteed trouble-free living for all believers that many people assume it to be when they quote this verse today!

My point is this: We can’t just take random verses and use them to fit our situations now. We need to read and draw meaning from the Bible by looking at it in totality.

What does Scripture say about this subject when I look at the narrative whole? What does the arc of scripture have to teach us about God and about the world - from Genesis to Revelations? And what bearing does this have on my life - and the circumstances I face today?

The story I find, is one about a paradise gone wrong, and a God who is continually at work in this world to heal and redeem and make all things new again - but the narrative isn’t yet complete.

We are reading from the perspective of being protagonists in the middle of the story. We have already been told the ending, so we are not without hope for the future - but we still live in the messy middle part.

A different way

The further in life I get, the more convinced I become that a successful life of faith has very little to do with always getting the outcomes that we want in life at all.

The idea that faith is a route to a life of health, wealth and personal happiness is simply not a Biblical view. It’s probably a weird mix of western capitalism, consumerism, and the American Dream.

If Jesus was anywhere near as focused on outcomes as we tend to be, then He probably would have started his ministry before the age of 30 and made it last longer than three years. He surely also would have healed more people, performed more miracles, taught in more places, and generally ‘got more done’.

The way that Jesus lived His life is probably the greatest evidence we have that when we become fixated on these kinds of outcomes - which are just poor human measurements of faith - we are really missing the point.

What’s more, Jesus actually tells his disciples that they will have troubles in this world (John 16:33). He doesn’t promise to remove them, or overcome them, or suggest that faith is a way to bypass all their pain. Neither does He suggest that having faith will provide a solution to all their problems either.

Instead He simply assures them that He will be with them as they face life’s troubles, and reminds them that He offers them his peace through it all.

So perhaps if there’s any outcome we can be sure of in a life of faith at all, it’s simply this: the gift of God’s presence, and so whatever life might throw at us, we have the promise of his ‘withness’ even through our suffering.

And I do wonder how different today’s church would look if it actually embraced a theology of suffering in this kind of way.

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