Lord Jesus, help me to let go of the guilt and run into your waiting arms. I want to be whole again.
Lord Jesus, help me to let go of the guilt and run into your waiting arms. I want to be whole again.
This type of thing is done every day. You see it in the school yard when teams are chosen for dodgeball. The weakest players are seldom chosen first. Why? The team captain doesn’t want them in the lifeboat. It carries over into adulthood. Recently on Celebrity Apprentice it happened in the final show. You had two team captains, and thus, two “lifeboats.” The first captain chose the player who the other team captain had grown to rely upon the most, which weakened the other captain’s team.
In a family, even small children have a basic understanding of lifeboat theory.
As we grow up, we find ourselves in many lifeboats along the way – popularity in school, competing in the job market, finding a mate. We are validated as a person from how we relate with each other. We are validated by people outside of ourselves. In the lifeboat scenario that I opened with, each one of these people has worth, all of them equal worth. Yet when the exercise is presented to the students, this ideology is rarely, if ever, considered. There are too many in the lifeboat, and someone must be thrown overboard! But of course no one will voluntarily throw himself overboard to save the others because his life is just as important, if not more valuable, as the next person’s.
So, what does this have to do with Oprah?
Let’s look at our relationship with God as a lifeboat. It’s us and Jesus (God in the flesh) in the boat. When Oprah was sitting in church and heard the preacher say that God is a jealous God, her reaction was “What? God is jealous? Of me?? Her place in the lifeboat was in jeopardy. Rather than clear up the misunderstanding, she chose to get out of the lifeboat. Not only did she get out of the lifeboat, she built herself one of her own.
If she had sought understanding, Oprah would have learned that yes, God is a jealous God. He does not want us to put ourselves ahead of Him, because that is his rightful place. But He also does not want us to perish adrift in the ocean. In order to save us He willingly gives up his place in the boat so that we will be able to live. If we had placed our lives ahead of God, we’d still be in jeopardy of losing our place. By freely offering his place in the boat, our relationship with God is secure now, and for eternity.
I’ll be honest – as a Christian I’m a little afraid to deeply explore the ‘God is imaginary’ and ’10 Questions’ links on my own. It’s like voluntarily walking into a dark cave and leaving the light of the world behind you. My fear is that I will get too far from the light and the light will grow too dim, and I won’t be able to find my way out. But at the same time, I feel like God is preparing me for something. My Epiphany word this year is “compassion”. The “theme verse” that I found for compassion is Matthew 9:36 “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
The dictionary definition for “compassion” is “Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it.” The word “rescue” comes to mind. Jesus so much wants to rescue people from the darkness. But if someone is so entrenched in darkness, light is a scary thing for them (The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it – John 1:5). They fear what they do not understand; it is as though they are afraid of the one thing that can save them. They need someone to guide them toward the only source of salvation that they can trust: Jesus Christ. And in order to do that, we have to be willing to go into some dark caves sometimes. Why would someone do that? Why would someone go on a “rescue operation” that is outside of the comfort zone? To relieve the suffering of the one who is helpless.
Something that I have heard various people who don't believe in God say goes something along the line of "Everything I (spiritually) need I can find within myself." That leaves me with a couple of questions. One is, what happens when life gets out of control and they can't fix it? And another is, what happens when they have a question about something greater than what they can find within themselves? Do they spiritually self-destruct, only to retreat into a dark cave, as far as they can, not realizing their state of helplessness?
Jesus is the light of the world, the beacon that will guide them out of the cave. It is up to the "search and rescue team" to guide them to the light.
The author posed some of the tough questions of life. Questions like “If God has the power to heal, why doesn’t he heal amputees?” “If God is good, why do bad things happen in the world?” and the list went on. The point the author made was that Christians can’t give definitive, conclusive answers without sounding like they’re talking in circles, and the only Then there was a link to a YouTube-type film that supported the argument that “prayer = superstition.” definitive, conclusive answer is “God is imaginary.”
The whole thing had me actually questioning what I believe, and why I believe it. What if I had been lied to all this time? What if the things I had attributed to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were all fake? If I were less mature in my faith than where I am now, this whole thought process could have really messed with my head.
You know how sometimes you have someone who has no way of knowing what you’re going through telling you something that makes you think they’ve been reading your private journal, except there’s no way they could have done it? Well, the next morning it happened. Except it came from a stranger, through a blog from a guy named Josh, who had read my previous blog post. He was talking about how adamant non-believers try to question us in order to question ourselves, and that our job as Christians is not to defend our Lord and Savior, He can do that well enough on His own. Our job is to love these confused souls and spread the love of Christ.
Reading that was like splashing cool, refreshing water on my face, although I am still trying to find out how this guy in
Searching for God Knows What
This past week I’ve also been reading
Miller later explains that the God he banished is the “formula” God that we make out of him. The “Do steps one through seven, and you’ll find that your spiritual life is soaring on wings of eagles” type. The problem with this is that if God uses formulas, then the same formula should work for everyone, right? But not every formula self-help book or formula church “program” works the same.
So the “formula God” is out. The God of the Bible, the relational God, the one Miller explores deeper, is the true God of the universe. The Bible is not a “formula” self-help book. It is the story of our perfect creator who wants to be – even longs for – an intimate friendship with imperfect men and women who, it seems, can never get their lives right and keep them right.
I can’t seem to name the emotion that comes to mind when I think that perfect holiness actually wants to have friendship with impure, dirty friends. Parents tell their kids to stay away from the “bad” kids and pray that they befriend and become one of the “good” ones. But when God determined that the time had come to send his perfect Son to the world that we live in, he sent Jesus for the purpose, and with the expectation that he would hang out with the “wrong” crowd.
To me, that sounds like a curious method of parenting. But that statement alone just tried to put God into the step-by-step format that should not exist.