The life experiences that I have shared have featured the dark side of outcome-based faith, and what it can produce in people’s lives… disappointment, disillusionment, and damaging results (both for life and faith) if the outcome does not happen. But what can an aversion to outcome-based faith produce?

I am fond of the image of a path between two ditches when wrestling with theological truth.¹ This applies best to a situation where there are two competing truths or values that I cannot seem to fully reconcile to determine a correct way to live. In this case, it would be the truth of the dark side of outcome-based faith and the truth that an outcome-based faith is presented and praised by Jesus. While I cannot fully understand how these are to work together to provide a clear, narrow path of obedient discipleship, I can identify ditches on either side of a wider path. And an important feature of the path with two ditches analogy is that we are most in danger of falling into one ditch when we are too focused on avoiding the other ditch.

What is the ditch on the other side that an aversion to outcome-based faith could push me into? I think it would be a ditch of prayerlessness. Since I had been disappointed when expecting God to make a difference in the outcome of what I was facing, I would simply and naturally stop asking God for things. Prayer would become a conversation with God, but not an exchange where I expected Him to respond to my requests for what I needed or desired. I might even see this as a more mature, less self centered, form of prayer.

In Just Asking: Restoring the Soul of Prayer, Stuart McAlpine challenges the idea that mature prayer has somehow moved beyond the beginning stage of asking God for ourselves. Stuart writes, “This book’s purpose is to convince us that prayer is about specific asking, and to the extent that we do not specifically ask, we are not praying.” My aversion to outcome-based prayer could very easily become an aversion to asking for specific outcomes.

I believe that for a lot of Christians, this is characteristic of their prayer life at work,( see Do You Pray?) They do not ask God for the specific things they are trying to accomplish at their work. As Stuart defines it, “Prayerlessness is a failure to ask and keep on asking”. This is a ditch that is off the path of discipleship to Jesus because as Andrew Murray observes, “everywhere our Lord urges and encourages us to offer definite petitions, and to expect definite answers.”

So, where does this leave me? Outcome-based faith…. you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it? Perhaps there is a way to identify some aspects of a healthy practice of outcome-based faith that keeps me on the path between the ditches. I will explore that next week.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.

1. I referenced this in the blog post Heb 11 Expectation and Endurance, which is also wrestling with outcome-based faith. ↩︎