What this means is that, according to Luther, a spiritual life that is all brightness and light, joy and peace is not really Christian at all. Those who claim spiritual authority wholly on the grounds of such blissful experiences must be disregarded. Apparent spiritual health turns out to be its opposite, because the criterion of a genuinely Christian spirituality is the experience of spiritual suffering. This is what it means to be marked with the sign of the Son of Man, that is, the cross.
I wish that someone had shared this message with me as an adolescent. But instead, without ever being explicitly taught it at home or in my church, I absorbed another vision of the Christian spiritual life, one common in conservative American Protestant circles.
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