fiber optic god
Posted: December 18th, 2009 | Filed under: God | Tags: faith | 12 Comments »Who is God to you?
We limit our awareness of God’s control by dividing that control among people and circumstances. We credit others with control and pray that God takes it back. God’s sovereignty has become a sentiment. Emotionalism that makes us feel better but still something that we hold out at arms length.
We cannot understand anything written in the scriptures if we don’t understand who God is.
What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. -Romans 1:21-22
Are you faithful to God or to your idea of God?
When was the last time your idea of God was transformed? If we cannot comprehend the reality of eternity, then how can you comprehend the reality of God? How can you be in a position to lock in on an idea if you, at the same time, are aware that He is beyond understanding? We are creatures of habit, seekers of comfort and security. We all reach a point where we are unwilling to change, simply because we’ve gotten good at navigating ‘the way it’s always been.’
He is in control of our circumstances and we reject Him and what He is doing when we are in circumstances that don’t feel good. Our idea is that if God is good, then a perfect union with Him feels good. Jesus was in perfect union with God and He suffered immeasurably. Sparkly masks of peace and happiness are donned while the spirit underneath remains in the dark.
God makes no sense to our natural understanding, yet we still look for Him there. We dismiss ideas that contradict the trinket we’ve put our faith in. If your idea of God is not continually being transformed in to something less and less understandable, then you have latched on to a pacifier.
They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand. -Romans 1:23
Can you stomach God?
God is eternal. Eternity does not only stretch backward, but also forward. Time is something that humans use to make measurements, but we serve a God who is not bound by the rising and setting if the sun. God knows everything, uses everything, is in everything and has everything in His hand. God goes before you and follows behind you.
You are never off His radar and nothing takes you out of your path. Where you are is where you’re supposed to be. Where you are is crucial to who you are becoming. It’s not an accident. There was no big boom from which consequences and evolution ensued. In all of our theories and the beauty of science, we still cannot find any scientific explanation for how initial life began. It was a very specific purpose and set of events set into motion by the only hand that can create and sustain life.
He pays attention to every minute detail. Consider the the power of a single atom and all of the ways in which they come together to form the matter you take for granted. Are you, a unique code written on a strand of DNA, so faithless that you refuse to know your author simply because it makes you smaller than He? Would you prefer a Jesus who bounced on your dashboard?
Has the floor in your life fallen out? Where do you look to find meaning? We trace our steps and look for someone to carry the responsibility. You chose this, she chose that. Stupidity, selfishness, sin and evil. Where is God?
“God may cause our circumstances to suddenly fall apart, which may bring the realization of our unfaithfulness to Him for not recognizing that He ordained the situation.” -Oswald Chambers
Is your faith in a god of easy times and fiber optic blessing? Can you stomach a God who would allow your world to cave in because He had a reason for it? Can you submit to a God who doesn’t explain Himself? Holding God responsible for the happenings around you is your act of worship. You release yourself and others from the position of control and focus your helpless dependance on an eternal force who has set something in motion and will stick around to see it through.
Do you see God through yourself or do you see yourself through God?
He says, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But, how can you not be afraid? He says, ‘Don’t worry.’ But, everything around you tells you to worry. If your own actions or the actions of another have the power to knock God’s purpose off its hinges, then you are worshipping self and/or others. You have rendered the Creator of the Universe incompetent, slow to act and trumped. How often do we do this? We become this frazzled mess while the rest of the world watches us completely contradict the things we say about God when all is well.
‘Our Lord is dethroned more deliberately by Christian workers than by the world. We treat God as if He were a machine designed only to bless us…’ -Oswald Chambers
It takes faith.
We are saved by faith. That’s why our faith is under attack. We are bombarded with a drugstore Jesus. We wobble on the stilts of an answer holder while secretly lost in a fog of confusion. We’re afraid and uncertain which results in us doubting our Christianity.
It takes faith, but faith is dead without action. The action is in the assurance. Assurance makes us behave a certain way. The behavior is not what is typically sought. There are a lot of behaviors in the religious community that can be faked, but this is something you can’t counterfeit. The behavior is the ability to sleep on the stern of a boat when a storm is taking it down (Mark4:35).
‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.’ -Job; Job 13:15 KJV
