The Lord requires us to humble ourselves and confide our sinful desires, irrational or exaggerated fears, the soul-shaking doubts, and dark despairing thoughts in trusted members of our community of faith, distrusting the resistance we feel to doing this. Because he has ordained that we receive the Spirit’s help through them.

We all very much need other trusted Christians to help us fight for faith and against unbelief — and most of us know this. The problem is, the truth has a tendency to lose its obviousness to us when we most need to trust it. What we very much need, we often very much want to avoid.

Sinful desires, irrational or exaggerated fears, the discouraging and anxiety-producing pall of doubt, and the blanket-darkness of despair all have great power to distort our perceptions of reality. But when we are experiencing them, they appear and feel very real to us. Sin’s promise can look very alluring, the threats of fear and doubt can feel terrifying, and the temptation to despair can appear compellingly inevitable. When we’re in these states, we really need the help of trusted, wise brothers and sisters to discern what’s real and not real.

But when we’re in these states, that’s often when we least want to expose what’s going on inside. We know Scripture teaches us to “exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). But when our need for this is most acute, we often experience the most acute internal resistance to pursuing it or receiving it.

And so, we must take hold of another truth: trusting in the Lord with all our heart and not leaning on our own understanding (Proverbs 3:5) is not something we merely do on our own; it has a communal dimension. We need our trusted brothers and sisters to help us trust in the Lord, even when we’d rather struggle alone.

Resistance from Within

Why can we feel such resistance to pursuing or receiving the help we really need? Three major contributors are typically pride (e.g. my perception of what’s true is more trustworthy than I believe yours will be), shame (e.g. I don’t want you to see my evil or weakness), and fear (e.g. you may reject me, or I may yield some control to you that I want to keep).

Read More