Can’t You Just Help Me?

Several times now, I have been out in creation with unbelievers, speaking to them of eternal matters, and, passing by a dying branch at the base of a tree, I have picked it up and said, “This is your life apart from Christ.”

Speaking about their souls, Jesus’s illustration is irresistible. The conversation goes something like this:

Jesus gives us this illustration. He looks you in the eye and says that he is the tree (to augment the illustration slightly), and you are the branch. Look up and see the branches above us, beautiful leaves waving, healthy in their vibrant greens, bearing evidence of life.

And then there is this branch. Dry. Leafless. Withered. Why?

Because it is detached from the source of its life. Cut off from the one it was made to have communion with. And so, it lies here, detached from its purpose and severed from the only thing that can make it flourish.

Jesus claims to be man’s source. He claims to be the Tree to whom you belong. In relationship with him, you have life. Apart from him, he teaches, you spend life withering.

I usually pause to let the claim have its proper space. I ask what they think of such an assertion. I give them an opportunity to respond. I have often expected indifference or offense, but I have consistently been met with quiet consideration or outright acknowledgment that such an illustration made sense to them. Or at least they would like to hear more. So I go on to wonder aloud with them.

What is it like to be a branch fallen from the tree that is, as Jesus says, withering? Don’t you know? Need we ask? The restlessness, the fatal dryness, the looming death. The reaching out to anything and everything for life — except for the tree standing beside and over us. Him we do not want. Him we can do without. We can make it our own way.

The adverb is different, but the end is the same — restless withering, drunken withering, religious, secular, or thoughtless withering. Some overdose on pleasure. Others get high on their own morality. Still others distract themselves from death’s shadow creeping over them with fantasy football and rounds of golf. But for all that, withering.

But Jesus himself asserts that he is the Tree. He is the one we were made for; in him alone can we find the life that haunts us in still and sober moments. Be grafted to him through repentance and faith, be attached to him by the Spirit of the living God, have his words live in you, direct you, amaze you, and dead things will come to life.

And what will it be on that day, I am compelled to continue, for those dry and fruitless branches who refused life in him? They will be gathered and thrown into the fire and burned as useless things.

But Jesus came that you might have otherwise. He told us his mission was to bring life — life abundantly. Imagine the branch grafted to the tree, suddenly infused with life and purpose and the vital sap of God’s own Spirit. We are as branches; the Father, Son, and Spirit are the source of everlasting life. With him, we flourish though all may seem to go poorly. Without him, only sapped wood remains. Would you like to know more about this Jesus?

Now, I tell you this to highlight one of many places where the Bible addresses the interiority of man and its solution: God. I want you to see how dangerous the alternative answers found in modern therapeutic culture are to our souls and our churches. It is a scourge, especially to this inward age, not because a therapeutic culture takes distresses of the heart seriously, but because it too often sends branches reaching out for anything but the Tree.

Ingrown Toenails

The problem comes not from a focus on the inner man. Anyone who says the Bible has little to say about internal battles, demons, depressions, anxieties, doubts, and the despairs of human life should not air his ignorance. The Scriptures abound with stories of the faithful brought into all the perplexities and pains of life in a fallen world. The Psalms, as one profound example, give us the poetic psychology of man across a whole landscape of trials, triumphs, and every state of heart in between. The Bible lays the heart bare better than any other book written by men or angels.

But for all of that, the Bible is a book about God, not man. It tells the wondrous story of God’s Son come to seek and save the lost. About the tree that bent down to the dry branches, was felled for them, and was raised that they might have new life attached to him. The problem is not exploring the self as such but getting lost there instead of escaping to search for God. The branches spend so much time mislaid, looking at themselves, bemoaning their dryness, that they cannot hear the tree calling them to abide in him.

David Wells diagnosed the ingrown toenail of obsessive introspection decades ago. “Modernity obliges us to psychologize life, to look to the states and vagaries of the self for the reality that was once external. For the most part, evangelicals have failed to see that this shift from the objective to the subjective, this new fascination with the self, is invariably inimical to biblical and historical faith” (No Place for Truth, 142).

Why is it contrary to faith? “The sort of Christian faith that is conceived in the womb of the self is quite different from the historic Christian faith,” Wells continues.

Where the self circumscribes the significance of the Christian faith, good and evil are reduced to a sense of well-being or its absence, God’s place in the world is reduced to the domain of private consciousness, his external acts of redemption are trimmed to fit the experience of personal salvation, his providence in the world diminishes to whatever is necessary to ensure one’s having a good day, his Word becomes intuition, and conviction fades into evanescent opinion. Theology becomes therapy, and all the telltale symptoms of the therapeutic model of faith begin to surface. (183)

This is the danger of allowing therapeutic culture to set the terms in the church. The era of self, even in its religious forms, exchanges the emphasis on God, his glory, his kingdom, his judgment, for an emphasis on us and our felt needs. God as God is forgotten; men commiserate among themselves. We sprinkle water on the detached branch for relief instead of reattaching to the Tree.

Lose Yourself

All this is not to say we should be indifferent about our happiness. We can — and must — be intentional about our joy, for we can do no other. Besides, the Tree offers us a happiness unattainable by any other means. He designs for his joy to be in us, so that our joy is full (John 15:11). But hear the crucial insight: This is joy not apart from the Tree but in God himself. We do not have to ignore our inner flourishing to dutifully follow religion; we do not need to resolve to spend our lives eating liver because of some supposed nutritional value; we do not need to choose between gladness now and gladness then. Come draw the exhilarating sap from the very life and joy of God himself. “Your joys are too small and weak,” says he. “Come and enjoy mine.”

So we do not go to our local churches demanding, “Can’t you just help me!” We do not show up to get the Rubik’s Cube of our hearts solved that we might go back to life with a tiny god. The health of the inner man depends on communion with a majestic Christ in Christian community.

Healthy churches do bring wellness and help to our souls. But the self is best understood and brought to maturity as part of a larger body, a God-centered community that sings, prays, fasts, witnesses, and waits for the return of Christ. Self-help becomes an oxymoron because we pursue God corporately, as the church. Self is best helped when we refuse to get lost in the inner labyrinth but instead get lost in wonder at a great God, a dying and resurrected Savior, a coming and eternal glory. Self can only thrive attached to the Tree and its many branches.