Once two men were talking about spiritual things and they finally came to an open disagreement. They had been friends for many years, but this was an area they had never talked about—not because they hadn’t been aware of the difference between them, but because they had been. It was, as you might guess, a prickly issue. It was a prickly issue because one of the men was very defensive about it, and the other one was aware that he was very defensive. But one day their mutual exercise of walking on eggs came to a halt, surprising both of them.
One of them was a gloomy man and the other quite cheerful, and each of them, had you asked them, would have grounded their respective dispositions in what they believed God required of them. The cheerful one was correct, of course, but he couldn’t really talk about it with his friend. During their college years, and the early years of their marriages, it was possible for both of them to keep to their respective opinions, and these opinions were largely opinions only.
But as the years went by, and the gloominess of the one steadily drove most of his friends away and alienated much of his family, it became increasingly obvious, even to him, that something was wrong. Calling his perspective “realistic” didn’t seem to help.
This gnawing insecurity did not come out, initially, as insecurity, but rather as an accusation. When his cheerful friend had made a passing comment about how wonderful his dinner the previous night had been, the gloomy friend finally erupted. His insecurity was heavily disguised as anger and indignation, but fortunately his friend was wise as well as cheerful, and did not look on the surface of things.
They talked for several hours, and did not appear to be getting anywhere—but the reason they were talking at all is that the gloomy man wanted out, even though he would not admit it openly. Finally, one stray comment, like a random arrow in a great battle, hit him at the joints of his armor.
His friend said, “You know, you have complaints about the whole world, and at the center of those complaints is the conviction that nobody out there obeys the Bible anymore. But Paul says to rejoice all the time. How is your disobedience privileged or different?”