Excerpt
In my wrestling with prayer, I found myself wrestling with God. Who was on the other end of this prayer line? Most of the time it seemed like I was praying to some nebulous void. There was no one identifiable.
Then I seemed to get the old message, “Sell all, give to the poor, and come and follow me…and you will have treasures in heaven.”
“But I have already done that, years ago,” I responded a bit impatiently.
“Think about it,” God came back.
So I thought about it.
It seemed to me that God wanted me to set aside all my preconceived notions of who God was and start out fresh. So I began my listening (prayerful) routing. I found myself setting aside all my coveted theological training, my Biblical knowledge, all the great sermons I had heard and preached, all my expectations of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. I just sat there and listened to that still small voice inside of me. I was at ground zero. I became like a little child in kindergarten, wide-eyed and wondering.
It was a very humbling posture. Being a nobody was a real struggle for my ego. How could I give up all this valuable learning and knowledge and degrees that had cost me so dearly and for which I had worked so hard? How could I speak with authority in my church? How could I teach Biblically oriented subjects? How could I preach from the “Word of God?” I found myself in quite a dilemma. My whole style of preaching and teaching was about to change.
Who or what s to be my source of authority?
I have given up the idea of trying to make God either my boss or my servant. I am more inclined to try to adjust my life so that I might live in harmony with that spiritual presence we call “God.” I have discovered that my prayer life will follow pretty much the way I perceive God. If I perceive God to be wrathful, I will pray for God to avenge me and punish my enemies. If I perceive God to be one who does what I pray for, then I make God my servant and I am the boss.
On the other hand, if I perceive God to be loving and kind, my prayers will follow along those lines.
I can’t help but wonder just how much prayer is trying to manipulate God. If I praise God, god will bless me. If I am good, God will reward me. If I give to others, God will give to me. All this seems to be to be an effort on my part to do a little number on god so I can get some goodies; a good name, a pat on the head, praise, blessings, and even heaven. All this makes God like my Santa Claus. But what if I fail? Will God withhold all this good stuff? Part of it? Will god punish me? Make a brick to fall on my head? Send me to eternal, everlasting hell?
There are those who say, “But this is what Jesus came for…to take away our sins!”
Really? If I were a Jew, steeped in Jewish tradition, maybe. They believed in blood-offerings for sins. Some probably still do. But Christians don’t believe that. And Jews don’t believe in Jesus, so they don’t believe he died for their sins. But for those poor Jews who, in Jesus’ time, didn’t have the price of a dove or any such animal to have sacrificed for their sins, they were the lost sheep of Israel. They could not have their sins forgiven and be reconciled to God. We could possible construe that Jesus became their offering for their sins. But in this day and age, when that no longer seems necessary, we no longer need to say that Jesus died for our sins. We are not poor, lost Jews.
Perhaps, over the centuries, we have assigned to Jesus all the attributes we wanted a Savior to have and to God all the attributes we wanted God to have. We continue to do that even today. If we want Jesus to save us from our sins, we attribute to him that quality; if we ant someone to love us when everyone else has failed to do that, we Jesus loves us. The same for God, if we want god to be a man, woman, kind , loving, hones, wise, fair, jealous, vengeful, wrathful or even benign, that will be God for us. In time, what we assign to Jesus and God becomes factual, sacred and divine, and we will defend our sacred beliefs to the death.
…The more I have learned about God, the more contradictions I have run into. Some would say this and others would say that. Who were we to believe? Such inconsistencies did not satisfy my insatiable appetite to know and serve God. As I discarded some unacceptable concepts, I still found myself with other people’s definitions or concepts. This made me wonder where those notions came from. Some were straight out of the Bible, to be sure. But even these seemed to be someone else’s ideas about who God was. What can anyone really know about God? What has God ever said to anyone? How has God revealed himself and to whom? Are those who claim divine revelations telling the truth, engaging in illusions, trying to impress someone, or could they be mistaken?
Jesus is considered to be the enfleshment of God. He is the Word of God in the flesh. But how can we know what Jesus was really like? There seem to be many documented things that he did, but when the editors, translators and writers with vested interests got through with these accounts, what can we know for sure about Jesus?
…For that matter, what can we know for sure about God?
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