This is part of my year-long series exploring human-centered alternatives to the spiritual promises in Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Today’s entry, “The Cross in Prayer,” promises that believers who achieve “complete and absolute identification with the Lord Jesus Christ” through the cross will experience “perfect and complete oneness with God” in prayer, claiming that this identification means “there will be no distinction between his life and yours” and that prayer becomes a demonstration of divine unity rather than a means of getting answers or blessings.
Here’s what trusting that identification with Christ through the cross creates perfect oneness in prayer actually delivered:
“Don’t think of prayer as getting answers,” Pastor Thompson instructed with spiritual authority. “Prayer is perfect oneness with God through identification with Christ. You get through the cross only to get into it. When you reach complete identification with Jesus, there will be no distinction between His life and yours. Your prayer life will be a living monument of His grace.”
Mark had been praying desperately for his teenage daughter who was struggling with severe depression and suicidal ideation. The promise that achieving oneness with Christ through cross-identification would transform his prayer life from seeking answers to experiencing divine unity seemed like the spiritual maturity he needed during this crisis.
Mark desperately wanted to believe that perfect identification with Jesus would create the oneness in prayer that transcended his frantic pleading for his daughter’s healing. Instead of focusing solely on getting his daughter professional mental health treatment, family therapy, or crisis intervention services, he tried to achieve complete identification with Christ’s cross, trusting that perfect oneness in prayer would demonstrate God’s grace rather than seeking specific answers for his daughter’s psychiatric emergency.
For months, Mark avoided pushing for intensive therapy or psychiatric evaluation, believing that seeking concrete answers showed insufficient spiritual identification and that achieving oneness with God through cross-identification was more important than pursuing specific help for his daughter’s mental health crisis. When concerned friends suggested immediate professional intervention or even hospitalization, he declined, convinced that focusing on getting answers rather than achieving prayer oneness showed lack of complete identification with Christ’s suffering.
But the promised perfect oneness through cross-identification was spiritual detachment disguised as divine unity.
Mark’s attempts to achieve oneness with Christ in prayer created additional distance from his daughter’s actual crisis on top of her deteriorating mental health. The perfect identification that was supposed to eliminate distinction between his life and Jesus’ life remained absent while his daughter’s depression worsened and her suicidal ideation intensified. The living monument of grace that cross-identification was supposed to create never materialized when his daughter needed immediate practical intervention most.
Meanwhile, Mark’s neighbor Steve approached his own daughter’s depression crisis with zero expectation that spiritual oneness would address psychiatric emergency. When Steve’s teenager showed similar depression and suicidal thoughts, he immediately sought emergency mental health evaluation, arranged intensive therapy, and focused entirely on evidence-based treatment protocols while building comprehensive crisis support systems.
Steve didn’t try to achieve oneness with Christ through cross-identification but treated teenage depression as requiring immediate professional psychiatric intervention. His help came through crisis counseling, medication evaluation, and gradually building mental health stability through sustained clinical care rather than trusting that prayer identification would demonstrate divine grace through spiritual unity.
When Mark finally sought similar emergency help, he discovered that mental health crises required understanding psychiatric treatment options and immediate professional intervention rather than trusting that cross-identification would create perfect oneness in prayer that transcended seeking specific answers.
Where was the perfect oneness with God that cross-identification was supposed to create in prayer? Where was the elimination of distinction between his life and Jesus’ life that should provide divine unity beyond seeking answers?
The help that actually worked came through accepting the medical reality of teenage depression and focusing on evidence-based psychiatric intervention, not through believing that identification with Christ’s cross would create prayer oneness that demonstrated grace rather than seeking specific healing. The silence where perfect divine unity was supposed to be manifesting revealed the truth: there was no cross-identification that created oneness with God in prayer or spiritual unity that replaced the need for practical crisis intervention.
Only teenage depression and suicidal ideation that required professional psychiatric understanding and emergency mental health services to address effectively before tragedy occurred.
Reflection Question: When has seeking immediate professional mental health intervention been more effective than trusting that cross-identification creates perfect oneness in prayer beyond seeking specific answers?
This story is part of my upcoming book “The Undevoted: Daily Departures from Divine Dependence,” which offers 365 human-centered alternatives to the spiritual certainties in Chambers’ devotional. Each day explores how reason, community, and human resilience can address life’s challenges without requiring divine intervention.
God or Delusion? 