Thoughts From Spending a Night on the Trampoline

What if God doesn't care about YOU? *gasp* What if He loves the world but He only loves you to the degree that you incorporate yourself into His plan for the universe at large? A scary notion it is true but one I think you would be hard put to prove wrong. I've been thinking alot about God recently, making my way along that endless ray of beauty, attempting to insure that the God I place my trust in is actually the God which exists and is not a god I created for myself to suit my fancy and my worldview. It is this journey which makes me ask questions like I posed at the beginning.

So during my meditations of God I've realized something. This something is simply phrased not so simply applied. It is this:

That forgiveness of God is not so hard to get but unless you have Godliness being forgiven isn’t worth much. We often talk about the gospel and about God's grace but only in respect to their forgiving power; never in respect to their ability to change the very nature of who we are and how we act. I have never heard a preacher say, "accept the gospel so that you can stop hating your parents and stop being peer pressured and stop displeasing the God who creates Hurricanes." What we here is "accept the gospel so that you can be forgiven for hating your parents, for being peer pressured and for displeasing God."

The problem is not in one statement being false is that in separating them and only talking about one side of the gospel we remove the supports and our theology begins to crumble when applied to real life. If the only purpose for the Jesus coming to earth is to forgive us of our sins then I have no need to do anything else but sit passively and be forgiven. When the "impregnable" forces of selfish desire, passion and pride assail my soul why should I not let them carry me along in a rush of good feeling? I have no reason to resist and even if I wanted to resist I couldn't because all I've ever been taught is that the blood of Christ forgives me of sins. Herein lies the problem and herein is a primary reason for our weakness as churches, families and individuals. We don’t understand that godliness which is the being the character of God is so very essential. For some silly reason we think the only think important in life is to be happy. For secular people we see this in all the selfish means people use to acquire self worth and happiness. Christians, are also focused on being happy so they talk about being forgiven. They say, “we have to suffer through this life, obeying all sorts of rules but it will be ok because when we die we are going to heaven” Christians wonder why people call them hypocrites.

Well I was telling God all this yesterday. Basically God said, "yeah you can do that if you want, I will forgive you when you come back to me BUT if you continue to live in sin I will not help you as you walk through life. If you(Caleb) believe that you can do your life better on your own, then you run it as you like and the blood of my son will wash away your sins on judgment day." The point is that we have a backwards view of life in general. If we can step back for a moment and step out of a worldview which tells us, “the purpose of your existence is your own happiness” and see that what our purpose ought to be is, “to see the kingdom of God fulfilled” then we will be able to make sense out of Jesus’ which before made no sense.

I look at history, watch the news, observe the modern theories of worldly philosophers and feel like I’m eating raw tofu wrapped in slugs. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to here a well respected, doctors and professors proclaiming evolution which at its core means, that one drop of my own fat must be dearer to me then the accumulated lives of tens of thousands of my fellow primates.

Life without God is just not worth living. If you don't live for God you have to ignore things to be happy or be depressed because their is absolutely nothing you can do about the child who dies every two minutes because of starvation or about the millions of people around the world who live their lives in slums, garbage dumps and communes without any hope of being freed from their unofficial slavery. So maybe it is easy to be forgiven of our sins. Perhaps its true that we can get away with an awful lot without anyone ever finding out but doesn’t it all seem like such a waste when you compare the greatest life ever lived by any non Christian, compare that life to the idea of spending a life in service to a God who can point his finger and send constellations into the sky. Would we rather serve ourselves assuming everything we did went right or would it be better for us to sacrifice our lives and serve a God of power and might, who makes the earth shake and the mountains tremble, waters the earth and grants the stars their light.