God does his greatest work through people in the church and there are times when those who go to church do the greatest damage when it comes to showing people the heart of God.  Is it God who is dutiful in his approach to our hearts or is it the members of the church and how they understand faith that leads to a dutiful life?  To often the dutiful life grows out of a world of assumptions about life challenges instead of having a healthy curiosity of understanding our own heart or the heart of others.  Missing the heart of a man or woman is quickly lost, when the focus of our problems shift toward an external view of our lives, thus giving rise to a dutiful way of problem solving . The explanation, when you go to church and give a tithe or pray and have faith in God, your life will be one of abundance and hope. If you experience hardship, strife, or crisis, these struggles mean that you are doing something wrong and you have displeased God. The solution, in order to restore a good relationship with God (determined by your struggle going away) you must pray more, attend church more consistently, pray more often, give more money or have more faith. The message of a dutiful life: “if you struggle with life you are lacking in your relationship with God.” There are paths you must go down to understand God does not want us to struggle or suffer.  The understanding about the dutiful life is where we learn to avoid, deny, ignore, or pretend that life isn’t hard, excruciating, or unfair, or to believe that my struggle is up to me to fix.

The dutiful life is disastrous.  A dutiful person may see the pain in others while denying their own wounding.  Will they see the value of someone else struggling, not likely, because they have never known the value of their own suffering.

Jesus quotes Isaiah 62:1-2, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”-Luke 4:18-19  Jesus words reveal an understanding our hearts in so many ways that others have ignored.  Obeying God is about caring for others in the ways Christ cares about us. The struggles we face in life serve a purpose of hope that Christ wants us to embrace.