Reject Every False Spirituality
by Donavon L Riley
God does not call us to polish our souls for display. He calls us to drop our self-made armor and face Him as we are, raw and ragged. We’re drawn to counterfeit faiths, where spirituality is neat, without rough edges—where we remain the rulers of our own desires, seeking a kind of peace that never disturbs. But God’s voice breaks through those illusions, like a hunter’s horn echoing through the woods. He doesn’t ask us to sit comfortably or to gather blessings like trophies. Instead, He bids us seek Him with a hunger that forgets itself. God is not there to coddle our desires, but to shatter them, until all we want is Him.
We stand at the edge of our suffering like a cliff, looking down, thinking we’re alone in this wild and desolate place. But Christ is there, waiting. He doesn’t reach to pull us back into safety; He draws us forward, deeper. He doesn’t offer some soft, sweet balm to ease our pain; He offers Himself. And here’s the paradox: it’s in that ache, in the raw, unyielding space of our suffering, that He is closest. The world says to flee from pain, to find quick comforts, to soothe ourselves with anything that will keep us numb. But God calls us into the wilderness of it, where His presence is fierce, where it strips us to the bone. Christ isn’t a path to escape; He is the fire that meets us in the ashes, burning away what keeps us from Him.
God asks us to know Him in our desolation, to meet Him not as a lifeline but as a companion on the cross. Real victory, He teaches, isn’t in finding a way out; it’s in staying with Him there, nailed to the cross, tasting the bitterness with Him. This isn’t some “happy ending,” some sanitized faith. This is a faith that faces the darkness unblinking, that walks straight into pain knowing that God Himself walks beside us, bearing our suffering and our sin. He calls us to die with Him so that we might rise in a way the world cannot understand, a way that binds us to Him more fiercely than any comfort ever could.
St. Anthony the Great said we should hold our sins before us like a mirror, not to be consumed by guilt, but to see the One who took that weight on Himself. This isn’t about perfection, about shaping ourselves into something “worthy.” It’s about seeing our own failures, our pride, our grasping for control—and through that, seeing Christ. It’s about meeting God not on the polished altars of our self-made temples, but on the barren hill of Golgotha, where love itself broke and bled. We’re called to reject every false spirituality, to turn away from the easy answers, to reject even the comforts we crave, and to turn back to the One who loved us enough to bear it all. This is the wild, untamed wisdom of God: a love that consumes, that cleanses, and that calls us to Life in the midst of death.