Why So Few Christians Experience the Good Life with God
Many people have followed Jesus for years and still feel as though something important is missing.
They believe the Gospel, know the Bible, attend church, pray, serve, and sincerely want to become more like Jesus. Yet beneath the visible activity, they may live with persistent anxiety, striving, loneliness, resentment, shame, exhaustion, or an unsettling sense of distance from God.
Ask how they are doing, and the answer is often some version of “I’m fine.” Life is functioning well enough. The family is moving forward, the bills are getting paid, and faith remains intact. But the deeper experience Jesus seems to promise—rest, peace, freedom, security, conversational intimacy with God, and a growing capacity to love—often feels elusive.
At Soil & Roots, we call that life the Good Life with God. It is not a life without pain, disappointment, or suffering. It is life with Jesus in which even suffering is gradually brought under His redeeming rule. It is a life increasingly characterized by His delight, nearness, security, peace, joy, generosity, and self-giving love.
Why do so few Christians appear to experience it?
We May Have Reduced the Gospel
Modern Christianity often presents a reduced version of the Gospel.
God is bigger, the Gospel is broader, and human beings, creation, and culture are far more important to Jesus and His grand narrative than we are often taught. Yet in many Christian environments, the Gospel is primarily presented as a solution to guilt and a means of securing our future after death.
The central objective becomes “getting people saved.” We introduce people to Jesus, help them pray a prayer, teach them the basic beliefs of Christianity, and encourage them to become involved in church. These may all represent meaningful beginnings, but they are not the completion of discipleship.
The Gospel Jesus announced was the availability of the Kingdom of God. He invited people into a new kind of life with Him, beginning now. Eternal life was not merely endless existence after death. It was participation in the life of God.
When salvation is reduced to forgiveness and a future destination, discipleship becomes optional enrichment for unusually committed believers. We may become informed and active converts without learning how to live securely, peacefully, and freely with Jesus in the ordinary realities of life.
We Expect the Good Life to Mean a Good Life
Part of the difficulty is that we often confuse the Good Life with a comfortable life.
We assume that if God is good and we are faithful, our marriages should remain healthy, our children should flourish, our bodies should cooperate, our careers should progress, and our prayers should generally be answered in the ways we hope. We may never state this belief openly, but it often sits quietly beneath our relationship with God.
When suffering arrives, the arrangement appears to break down. Illness, betrayal, financial loss, unanswered prayer, disappointment, or grief can leave us wondering whether God is truly good or whether we misunderstood Him entirely.
The Good Life with God does not mean that life unfolds according to our preferences. Jesus never promised that. He promised His presence, His Kingdom, and the possibility of becoming a different kind of human being in the middle of reality as it actually is.
This life may include grief and joy, confusion and trust, suffering and peace. The difference is not the absence of pain but the presence of Jesus within it.
Fear Quietly Shapes Much of Modern Christianity
Many Christian cultures are deeply shaped by fear.
We fear the body, the culture, the future, theological error, political decline, other groups, our own desires, and sometimes God Himself. We are warned that everything is getting worse, society is collapsing, the church is losing influence, and danger is waiting just beyond the edge of whatever boundaries have been established.
Fear is profitable. It sells books, attracts clicks, builds audiences, and keeps people dependent on leaders who promise clarity and protection.
Yet one of the most repeated invitations in Scripture is not to be afraid.
Fear is more than an emotion. It can become a governing idea—an unconscious assumption that shapes how we think, feel, relate, and move through the world. It affects our relationships with God, others, ourselves, and creation and culture.
When fear becomes the atmosphere of faith, the inward journey becomes difficult. We remain guarded, suspicious, and focused on avoiding danger. We may obey God, but we struggle to rest in Him. We may believe He loves us while remaining unsure whether we are truly safe in His care.
The Good Life with God grows where fear is slowly displaced by trust.
We Know About God Without Experiencing Him
Christian instruction is remarkably effective at teaching people what they should believe about God. We learn that He is loving, good, present, trustworthy, merciful, and patient.
Yet our hearts may operate from very different ideas.
We may believe God loves us while feeling that His affection depends on our usefulness. We may affirm His goodness while attempting to control every outcome. We may know He is present while praying as though He is distant. We may believe in grace while carrying the quiet assumption that He remains disappointed in us.
Our heads learn through instruction, but our hearts are formed largely through relationship and experience. That is why more information, though essential, does not automatically produce the life it describes.
The heart often needs to experience what the mind already believes.
We may need to encounter God’s patience through someone who listens without rushing us. We may experience His delight through a friend who enjoys us without needing us to perform. We may begin to trust His goodness through a community that remains present during doubt, failure, grief, and confusion.
The Good Life with God is not merely a collection of beliefs. It is a lived, relational experience of God’s presence and care.
We Are Often Formed for Striving
Many Christians have been formed to work for God rather than live with Him.
We learn to attend, serve, give, study, lead, evangelize, volunteer, and remain productive. These activities may flow from genuine love, but they can also become ways of proving our value, securing approval, avoiding the inner life, or reassuring ourselves that we are faithful.
A culture of striving may call exhaustion commitment. Rest may feel selfish. Saying no may feel disobedient. Weakness may become something to conceal, and people who slow down may be viewed as less serious about Jesus.
Eventually, the Christian life can become another arena in which we must perform.
The Good Life with God begins with receiving rather than achieving. We receive His love before we extend it. We receive our value rather than construct it. We receive His presence rather than manufacture spiritual intensity.
This does not lead to passivity. People who experience themselves as deeply loved often become more available, generous, courageous, and free. They serve without needing service to prove who they are.
We Resist the Inward Journey
The Good Life requires more than learning new ideas. It requires allowing Jesus into the hidden places of the heart.
Many of us remain on the surface because the inward journey feels unnecessary, self-absorbed, or dangerous. We would rather study another book, listen to another sermon, join another program, or make another commitment than explore the fears, wounds, desires, and assumptions beneath our behavior.
Yet our inner lives continue shaping us whether we examine them or not.
We may sincerely believe God is good while carrying resentment about how our lives unfolded. We may believe our value comes from Him while remaining dependent on achievement or approval. We may say we trust Him while organizing life around control.
The inward journey helps these tensions become conscious. We begin to notice the hidden ideas and desires operating beneath our beliefs and invite Jesus into them.
This is not an exercise in self-condemnation. It is an act of trust. We explore the heart because Jesus already knows what is there and has not withdrawn His love.
We Lack the Conditions That Form People Deeply
Most churches provide some of what people need for spiritual formation, but few provide all of it together.
Deep formation generally requires time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction. Most Christian institutions emphasize instruction and may provide community in limited forms, but the remaining elements are often fragmented or absent.
People need time because the heart does not change quickly. They need intentional practices that help truth become embodied. They need consistent community rather than occasional contact. They need trusted intimacy where the actual person can be known without shame or control. They need transformative instruction that speaks to the realities being uncovered.
When these conditions are missing, people may accumulate knowledge while remaining relatively unchanged. They may sincerely want the Good Life but lack access to the kind of relational ecosystem in which it can be cultivated.
The problem is not necessarily a lack of effort. It is often a lack of formation.
We May Not Actually Want the Good Life
There is also a more uncomfortable possibility: part of us may not want the Good Life with God.
We may want peace, but not the surrender of control it requires. We may want intimacy, but not the vulnerability of being known. We may want freedom, but not the loss of identities built around achievement, usefulness, victimhood, or certainty.
The Good Life threatens the systems that help us feel safe.
A person who finds value through productivity may struggle to receive rest. Someone formed around control may experience trust as irresponsibility. A person who relies on approval may find freedom from people-pleasing disorienting because the old pattern once provided belonging.
Jesus does not force us into freedom. He invites us.
Part of spiritual formation is becoming honest about the ways we resist the very life we say we desire. This honesty is not cause for shame. It allows Jesus to meet the actual person rather than the idealized version we present to ourselves and others.
The Good Life Often Looks Strange
People who increasingly experience the Good Life may appear unusual.
They may be less hurried in a culture that celebrates speed. They may be less anxious about status, possessions, influence, or recognition. They may be able to disappoint others without collapsing, rest without guilt, admit weakness without shame, and remain present during discomfort.
They may forgive without pretending harm did not occur. They may hold convictions without contempt. They may give generously without needing to be noticed and serve without attempting to control the outcome.
This kind of life can look inefficient, unimpressive, or even irresponsible to people formed by fear and striving.
Jesus Himself often appeared strange. He was difficult to manipulate, uninterested in conventional status, free from the need to impress, and capable of disappointing crowds without losing His identity. He could rest during a storm, welcome people others avoided, and remain present to suffering without becoming governed by it.
The Good Life is the gradual formation of that kind of person.
The Best Prefix Ever
The Christian story is not primarily about abandonment. It is about restoration.
Jesus reconciles, renews, restores, redeems, repairs, resurrects, and re-creates. These “re” words reveal the movement of His Kingdom. He is not discarding human beings, bodies, creation, relationships, or culture. He is reclaiming and restoring what has been damaged by darkness.
This changes the spiritual journey.
If we assume that everything is destined only for destruction, fear makes sense. Withdrawal makes sense. Our bodies, work, relationships, and cultures become temporary distractions from the supposedly real spiritual world.
But if Jesus is restoring all things, then ordinary life matters. Our healing matters. Relationships matter. Bodies matter. Work, beauty, justice, neighborhoods, creativity, and culture matter. The inward journey matters because Jesus intends to restore the whole human being.
As we become more like Him, these same “re” words begin to characterize us. We increasingly become reconcilers, restorers, renewers, and repairers. We join Him in bringing life into places marked by fragmentation, fear, shame, and death.
The Good Life does not end with personal peace. It overflows into participation in God’s restoring work.
Receiving the Life Jesus Offers
The Good Life with God is not a spiritual achievement reserved for mystics, unusually disciplined people, or those with easy lives.
It is the life Jesus offers His friends.
We enter it gradually as we receive His love, become more honest about our inner lives, release the hidden ideas that keep us afraid, and learn to trust His presence in relationships, practices, suffering, and ordinary moments.
We do not become immune to anxiety, grief, disappointment, or pain. But these forces slowly lose their authority. We become less governed by fear, less dependent on performance, and more available to love.
The Good Life is not life finally going according to plan.
It is life increasingly rooted in the reality that Jesus is here, He is good, we are loved, and His restoration is already underway.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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