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, “Prayer in the Father’s House,” promises that believers can achieve complete identification with Christ as “holy, innocent children of God” living in a “permanent state of dwelling in the Father’s house,” claiming that maintaining “contact with abiding reality” through holy communion enables believers to recognize that all circumstances “have been chosen specifically for me by God’s providence” with Christ’s life becoming “your vital life” through perfect union.
Here’s what trusting that you can dwell permanently in the Father’s house through identification with Christ actually delivered:
“Are you so identified with Christ that you’re a holy, innocent child dwelling in your Father’s house?” Pastor Chen asked with spiritual intensity. “Remain in contact with abiding reality. All your circumstances have been chosen specifically by God’s providence for your growth. Let Christ’s life become your vital life through perfect union with Him.”
Linda had been struggling through her husband’s sudden departure, bankruptcy from his hidden gambling debts, and caring for her elderly mother with dementia—all while trying to maintain stability for her two teenage children. The promise that achieving identification with Christ would help her recognize these circumstances as chosen by God’s providence and experience permanent dwelling in the Father’s house seemed like the spiritual perspective she desperately needed.
Linda desperately wanted to believe that perfect union with Christ would create the sense of dwelling in God’s house that Chambers described. For months, she spent early morning hours seeking this identification with Christ, trying to maintain contact with what she hoped was abiding reality, attempting to see her overwhelming circumstances as specifically chosen by divine providence for her spiritual growth. She practiced what she called “Father’s house prayer,” seeking the permanent state of holy communion that would transform her perspective on her chaotic life.
Day after day, Linda knelt in her cluttered living room seeking the sense of dwelling in God’s house that identification with Christ was supposed to produce. She tried to pray not just when things went wrong but as a continuous child-like communion with her heavenly Father, waiting for the abiding reality and perfect union that would help her see divine purpose in her suffering. When overwhelmed friends suggested grief counseling, financial planning, or respite care for her mother, she declined, believing that achieving permanent dwelling in the Father’s house was more important than addressing earthly concerns.
But the promised dwelling in the Father’s house was emptiness disguised as spiritual pursuit.
Linda’s desperate attempts to achieve identification with Christ produced no sense of divine dwelling, no contact with abiding reality, no experience of being God’s holy child in His house. Despite months of seeking perfect union and trying to see God’s providence in her circumstances, no Father’s house materialized, no divine presence emerged, no sense of holy communion developed. The silence grew heavier each morning as she knelt seeking a spiritual home that never appeared while her real-world responsibilities demanded immediate attention.
Meanwhile, Linda’s neighbor Patricia approached similar family crises through immediate practical intervention. When Patricia faced her own husband’s abandonment and financial ruin, she sought legal counsel for divorce proceedings, arranged elder care services for her aging parent, and organized family therapy to help her children process the trauma.
Patricia’s stability came through legal advocacy, social services, and professional counseling. Her family rebuilt their lives through sustained practical work rather than waiting for spiritual identification to provide divine perspective.
When Linda finally abandoned her search for the Father’s house and sought similar help, she discovered that family crisis required understanding legal options and accessing social services. The months she’d spent seeking perfect union with Christ had been months her children needed practical support processing their father’s abandonment.
Where was the Father’s house that identification with Christ was supposed to create? Where was the abiding reality and divine providence that should transform overwhelming circumstances into spiritual growth?
The help that actually worked came from legal advocacy and family counseling. The silence where the Father’s house was supposed to be revealed the truth: there was no divine dwelling to be found through identification with Christ, no heavenly Father providing a spiritual home through perfect union.
Only family crisis and financial disaster that required legal understanding and social services, not spiritual identification with an absent Father whose house existed nowhere but in religious imagination.
Reflection Question: When has seeking legal counsel and family therapy been more effective than trying to dwell in the Father’s house through identification with Christ?
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? 