God Cogs: Sweating it out

Great emails yesterday. I do appreciate your ideas so much, and one particular person’s thoughts have been rattling around in my head since.

“Why would I choose to die?” she wrote. “Why would Jesus make following Him so hard?”

GREAT questions.

I’m not sure I can be completely coherent, because I’ve only thought about this for one day, but let’s give it a whirl, shall we?

I don’t think Jesus intended for it to be hard. It is hard, that I will agree with, but the real problem is that the WORLD is not what Jesus intended it to be. There was a plan in place, originally, that did not include all the crap that goes on – the selfishness, the violence, the competition – you know, all the stuff that makes for good TV.

Resisting the flow of the culture (i.e. dying to desires) is like swimming upstream or trying to master the Wipeout course (Weds 8/7c on ABC). Dying to what I impulsively or logically think is right makes space for God’s thoughts and God’s ideas to fill me up. The new, eventually, becomes the norm.

Ah, but here’s the rub. The CHURCH is also influenced by this wave, and so she has gotten a little off course. In many places, she has forgotten the central message of Grace, opting instead for a behavior modification program. YES, my behavior changed when I became a Christian, but the difference was the result of a heart change that occurred when I encountered Grace. I could never follow a code of conduct, but I can love someone in order to realize the peace that Jesus dreamt of. Out of love for Him, I am learning to love others.

I know lots of folks who grew up going to church but are no longer interested. I most often hear phrases like, “It really works for my parents, but it’s just not for me.” Or sometimes I hear, “The church is too concerned with things that I don’t think God is overly upset about.”

In many ways, I agree. But again, God intended something different for the church than she is. He longs for it to be a place where you really tell the truth about what you think and feel – a place of safety. Too often, well meaning parents dressed their children for church and told them it was a place to “behave” out of reverence for God. Never did you speak of what was really going on inside you, because church was like a place where you were on your best behavior. Some of us got so good at modifying our behavior that we survived adolescence at church, but we became so weary and so tired of it in adulthood, that we no longer can muster the energy to sit in a pew. Funny, but none of our resistance is really about whether God is real or not – it’s mostly about finding a real way to connect with Him.

Remember that Jesus gravitated toward bad behavior. He longed to redeem not just the circumstances, but the person that was drowning in them.

Choosing to die, then, is more about opening space up inside me than opting for a martyr complex. Sometimes people say that they became a Christian because of the promise of heaven. Ok, I think heaven will be cool, but I embraced Jesus because I wanted real life – life that starts here and now. Dying to ideas and behaviors that are contrary to His ideal simply makes room for real life.