Why you should end your affair with unbelief
Every angel God created owes him their allegiance and obedience. The angels that rebelled found themselves outside of God’s kingdom forever. You too owe everything to your Creator…your time, your energy, your focus, your allegiance and your obedience.
Perhaps you say, “Wait a minute. I am an unbeliever. Therefore, I owe God nothing.”
With all due respect, that narrative is false. You owe the Lord absolutely everything.
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Unbelief is essentially your spiritual mistress. And like any mistress, she is untrustworthy and unfaithful. You are not her only lover; not by a long shot. Your mistress gives herself to anyone who will join her in rejecting the Messiah. I addressed this topic in a CP op-ed in 2014 titled, “Would You Forsake Unbelief to Escape Hell?”
Even in the midst of your illicit affair with unbelief, God nevertheless loves you because “God is love” (1 John 4:16). In addition, “God commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30), which means our Creator has given you a direct order.
God commands you to break off your sinful relationship with your mistress of unbelief. Tell her the affair is over. Leave her once and for all. Turn to God in repentance and trust in the sacrifice that Jesus made on your behalf when he died for your sins on the cross. You owe him everything. You owe your mistress nothing.
And besides, your mistress does not care about you in the slightest. She is not even a person. She is simply a perspective that you happen to find alluring. You have been seduced by her mind as you have bought into her enticing definition of personal freedom.
She whispers to you:
“Be your own person. Forget about God and all that mumbo jumbo about sin and the cross and salvation. You deserve to be free of any interference from God. Heaven and Hell are merely make-believe concepts used to control weak people. You, however, are strong, independent and enlightened.”
One lie after the other, and so far, you have taken the bait as evidenced by your persistent unbelief and refusal to accept Jesus as your Savior. Your infatuation with your mistress will disappear once you end the affair.
“But I am not ready to break it off,” you may say. Why not? “Because she lets me call the shots. I get to be the only god in this relationship."
Do you realize that her tantalizing lies come with strings attached? These strings ultimately drag souls into far greater misery than you can even imagine. Affairs never end well, but the consequences of this particular affair take things to a whole other level. Hell is a real place in a different realm and is a deep dark pit of never-ending agony and despair. (Luke 16:19-31)
Remember what happened to those angels who were enticed to follow Lucifer in his rebellion. They chose to bet against God, and they lost big time. Why continue to lust after your mistress when the One who truly loves your soul is willing to forgive your unfaithfulness to him and give you peace and joy today and forever? Did your mistress suffer hours of agony on a cross to pay for your sins? Of course not. A real person suffered and died for your sins so that you can go to Heaven when you die. Christ loves you, but he will not force you to receive his love, forgiveness and salvation.
You get to make the choice. Faith in Jesus, or unbelief? Truth or spiritual lies? Heaven or Hell? No man can serve two masters, just like no man can love both his wife and his mistress.
You should be mad at your spiritual mistress because of how badly she has corrupted your soul. Unbelief is a dark and shady character. I suppose this is one reason you feel drawn to her. You find her seductive words of unbelief exhilarating in some twisted way. But one day she will leave you. And you will be left with nothing.
You would be smart to have the awkward discussion with your mistress immediately and break off that doomed relationship. After all, she doesn’t care about you, but Christ does. You are simply under her spell. Your affair has taken you far from God.
If this sounds ridiculous to you, it is only because your mistress is blinding you from the truth. You tell yourself you love her, but even that is a lie. If you end up in Hell, you will hate what your mistress did to your soul. And yet you will realize that you are fully responsible for your eternal sentence. You will finally come to see that it was never about love; it was always about lust.
Unbelief is rooted in spiritual lust. This intense longing to be the captain of your soul resists submitting yourself to the rightful owner of your soul, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Christian faith, on the other hand, is rooted in God’s love in sending his only Son to be our Savior from sin. (John 3:16) True and lasting freedom can only be found in a loving and faithful relationship with Jesus Christ.
I hope you will decide today to end your affair with unbelief.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:
“A love affair is like a short story - it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by the commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipates in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.”
So be honest. What has unbelief ever done for you? And it only gets worse the longer you stay in that tawdry relationship. Sure it may be humiliating for you to say goodbye to your mistress, but in the words of Oliver Markus: "A horrible end is better than endless horror."
Dan Delzell is the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska.
