Grace as a process: why is it hard to understand

Why is the evangelical church so fond of quick fix theology, the "before and after hoax?" I'm sure there are many reasons. Here's one big reason, I think we're already hard-wired from our culture to believe it.

In my childhood, the book I loved best was Great American Fighter Pilots of World War II. And my favorite chapter in the book was about the Marianas Turkey Shoot. In the first couple of years of the war, American fighter pilots had great difficulty because American planes were slower and less maneuverable than the Japanese Zero. They had to figure out tactics (like starting above the Japanese Zeroes and diving down on them) to overcome this. Then in 1944 the American pilots got a new plane, the F6F Hellcat. It was faster, more maneuverable than the Zero, but it was also more heavily armored. So in this battle air combat for the Americans became easy -- they could catch the Japanese planes before the Japanese could catch them, and if a Japanese pilot got lucky and hit a Hellcat, the armor absorbed the damage. That's why I loved that chapter, after all the dangers of the earlier chapters, the Good Guys now had it easy, thanks to technology.

This is the basic Gospel of our time. Technology will make life easy. It has in many ways: microwaves, washers and dryers, computers and Internet. But technology doesn't make life effortless, and it never will.
And God's power, much greater than technology, doesn't make our life effortless either.