What Are We Thinking?

How Our View of God Affects Us
by Neil Livingstone

There is just no way I’m going to get this all done!” I was sitting at my desk with my head in both hands, face to face with my calendar and my to-do list. It was 9 a.m. and my day was already a failure. No matter what I did, I felt that I would come up short.

Then I came to myself. Well, actually, you might say my inner self came to visit the outward, busy “me.” We had a little conversation that went like this:

Inner self: “You really should trust God, you know.”
Busy me: “I know,” I said, without conviction.
Inner self: “It’s too bad you don’t believe in the God you tell everyone else about . . .”
Busy me: “What? Are you calling me a hypocrite? (Sigh) I suppose I probably am . . .”
Inner self: “Don’t go confessing so fast; it’s too neat a way to avoid talking through the issue.”
Busy me: “Which is . . .?”
Inner self: “Which is - well, the way you’re running around, I’d think that God was sick and you were trying to fill in for him while he’s away.”
Busy me: “But I’m just being responsible!”
Inner self: “Yeah, I know. Responsible for keeping the fellowship happy and running. Responsible for managing your future by getting all the right grades in all the right classes. Responsible for your own happiness by making sure everyone likes you. You are taking so much responsibility in your life that the casual observer might think that control was actually what you’re after.”
Busy me: “But I don’t forget God! I do love God and try to walk with him.”
Inner self: “But do you believe that he loves you and walks with you? Think about it.”

And so I thought about it. As I actually live my life, what kind of God is it that I am thinking about? While I could describe for you a very good God, my actions show me living under a second-rate image of God. A lot of us do.

For example, I often worry about the future - even dread it. I wouldn’t admit it, but somehow I must be thinking, “What will happen? What if I need help and God doesn’t show up? What if I go home for vacation, but God stays and hangs out here on campus? What if I start talking with my roommates about Jesus, but God forgets to come along and help me say what they need to hear?” This all may sound ridiculous, but when I was staring at my calendar and to-do list, I was thinking and feeling as if I faced the day alone, as if God wouldn’t really be there with me.

While I’m sometimes afraid that God might not show up, sometimes I’m even more afraid that he will. I think that he might truly be there, but maybe not be there for me. Perhaps my overcrowded to-do list was the result of my own mistakes, or pride. I most quickly imagine a God who would stand aloof while I dealt with the mess I made, in order to punish me. It’s hard enough just trying to get my life to come out right by myself, and now I also have to worry about what God might do? Great. What painful ways is he thinking up to straighten me out, teach me a lesson, or at least get across to me how really disappointed he is about much of my life?

Do I do people a favor trying to talk them into a relationship with this kind of god? The god they would see if they really looked at my thoughts and actions would not only be threatening, but also largely absent from life. This god has little interest in my life apart from receiving worship and prayer and knowing the major decisions I should make. And he either doesn’t care enough to tell me what those decisions should be, or he is talking but can’t quite figure out how to get his message through to me.

Who would worship a god like this? Why do I? I say I believe in a loving God who is everywhere around me and only wants the best for me. But I catch myself trying to relate to a hard-nosed and negligent deity. When I look at this in the light, I see that not only is this god-image not as good as God really is, but it is not even as good a picture as anyone could invent if they put their minds to it even for just a few minutes.

Our Desperate Scheming
If you are still reading this, I am assuming that you are with me enough to say that we want to love God, the real one. There is something in us that stirs when real goodness is near. Whether it is the beauty of a song, the sun shining through new spring leaves, the warmth of being with people we love, or knowing the comfort of a sweet Presence even when we are by ourselves; we have all tasted a goodness that made us want to have more of the good things that God offers. Why then do we turn to gods that are not real, ones that we know are not as good as God really is?

We are drawn by God’s goodness, yet something in us feels that the real God is going to be the death of us. The natural self - the wild self that works for self-satisfaction and self preservation above all - senses danger. One place that I get to observe human nature “in the wild” is in my young children. They are not quite tamed yet, and they are clever and wary and know how to “survive.” For example, when my youngest daughter Colleen was two, she was out playing in the snow with her sisters. They were having a great time, but Colleen’s cheeks and fingers were turning bright red, and she was shivering. I asked her, “Are you cold?” She turned and looked at me, her eyes searching mine, shivering as she stood there before me. Suddenly she said “No.” She was cold, but I do not count what she did as lying. For her the matter was simple: she knew that my question really amounted to “Do you want to go in now?” If she had answered yes, I would have taken her in. Wanting to stay outside and have her fun, she simply and logically answered, “No.” She neither had enough sense to come in out of the cold, nor enough trust in me that I had her best interests at heart. So she looked at me and said what she needed to say in order to preserve what she wanted to preserve.

For Colleen at that moment, I was a threat. My call was the end of fun as she knew it. We often look at God the same way. The closeness of a radically good and loving God will mean that we change so drastically that it will seem like the end of life as we know it. He will not let us freeze in the snow, but instead will call us into abundant life. Our untamed nature does not like the look of that road to life. Words like commitment, discipline and sacrificial love sound costly and dangerous. The God of Jesus Christ calls us to die to that wild self, however, in order to live as we were truly meant to live.

That call attracts us, and it also frightens us.

So we come to God, but we find ways to justify less than total trust in him and loyal love for him. We covertly lower God, excluding him from certain spaces and thinking less of his love for us and his ability to work out that love. After all, if he is around less, and doing less for me, then I’ll have license to fill in the gaps myself. My daughter conveniently managed to forget that I have been comfort and strength and provision for her all her young life, so she could turn away for a while and go on playing. We too have our own self-preservation schemes. We want God, but we also want room to maneuver.

This is exactly what my inner self caught the outward, busy me doing. I was serving God, to be sure. But I was using every scrap of spare mental and emotional energy to figure out how to serve myself also. I had to go to this or that meeting regularly, or the fellowship would begin to crumble and everyone would know it was my fault. I had to lead the Bible study well, so that the people would be impressed with me, and I could know that I was a good leader. I watched my checking account balance dwindle, and schemed of ways to keep it above zero. None of the actual activities that I did was wrong in itself, but there was a hidden, frantic undercurrent to my life. I was saying that I trusted God, and yet I was working hard to keep my life safe from his mismanagement.

If it is hard to find life without God, how much harder is it to hang around God, and yet keep him at bay? If it is hard to find life in our own fields, how much harder is it to enter his rich kingdom, and yet still sneak out to store up provisions, just in case? No wonder the Christian life often seems so exhausting! To maintain some level of control, we choose to have a practical god-image that cannot quite save us. So we really get to save ourselves. But the burden is too much.

Admitting the Truth
There is another way - to follow the real God. Jesus says that if we lose our life we will save it (Mark 8:35). If we die to that frantic, wild self and its grasping for life, we will live in him, in peace. If we admit the truth and surrender to God’s good love for us, if we admit that our strength is not enough and lean on his strong arms, we will find rest for our souls (Matthew 11:28–30). From that rest, we can move out into daily life in his strength.

How can this happen for us? How can we follow the real God? As the Bible says, we need to accept him in our hearts by faith - to really let the real God in. To do this we need to turn away from “idols,” those small god-images we make because they seem easier to deal with but lead us nowhere. The work is to keep our eyes resolutely open and on the true God as we go through our lives.

Remembering the real God is essential, for example, when a friend is in pain. Recently, I was with a friend named Amy. She was weeping because she had fallen in love with someone who was terminally ill. In her trouble and pain she asked, “How can this be happening? Where is God now, anyway?” And I sat there, also wondering where in the world God was in this situation. Why couldn’t he do something like explain the situation, give my friend some peace, or at least give me something soothing to say? Often I am tempted to give in to the apparent absence of God and take matters into my own hands. Many of us do just that: we justify God’s absence or actions, and try to put our friend back together as best we can. (“Maybe you should have been praying more, then God would have been with you . . .” or “Oh, well, you might not be so bad off . . .”) This kind of “help,” however, usually feels lame to both those receiving it and those giving it.

For some reason in these situations we tend to believe our own senses and the world’s propaganda (all this mess must somehow be God’s fault), rather than what we know from God himself. God is with those who suffer, and has been since the day they were conceived. He has never failed for a second to supervise their lives, more watchful than the most loving father you can imagine. His very own Spirit has never ceased whispering the truth in their ears. And in Jesus, he is not only suffering along with your friends, he has suffered for your friends and is offering them his leadership through this valley of shadow. My friend was not alone. Your friends are not alone.

You aren’t alone, either. Isn’t God also watching over your life, too? Hasn’t he promised to let you share in Jesus’ life and work? Isn’t he present with you by the Spirit, so that you can participate with him in bringing wholeness to your small part of this broken world? Think about it: has he brought you all this way, only to leave you to cope on your own? Hardly.

Now, living in these truths does not make the dark valley become a sunny mountain-top, but it does light a way through the valley. Rather than assume that God is not at work, we can ask “God, where are you in this?” in a new and life-giving way. We can look for clues to the care that God is already giving. The goal is to get with the flow, to participate in what God is already doing. Your part may or may not be big. Sometimes, you may find that it is your job to shut up and just sit with your friend, being a tangible reminder of the God who is holding them while they suffer. (This is mostly what I did with my friend, Amy, who had chosen to love a dying friend and thereby allow pain into her life.)

This kind of presence is very different from the presence of a friend who is trying awkwardly to “bring God into a situation” in ways that aren’t sensitive, and it is so much more helpful. For the reality is that God is already there. The Bible says that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). To wake up to his presence, to know his awesome yet gentle hand is guiding every situation, to respect and conform to that presence, that is the key to wisdom. We can act in a way that is truly effective and appropriate - that is, wise - when we deal with the great reality that the real God is near.

And yet this view of God is uncomfortable. If he is ever-present and concerned for our friends, he is that way for us, too. Our natural selves won’t like that, since we are bent on keeping the private parts of our universe safe from God. And yet we must endure that discomfort and walk through it, for God is our only “comfort” in the old sense—our encouragement and strength for life. We must let God help us, even with the problems that we wish he would ignore (“Are you cold?”). Our natural selves can whine if they will, but we must step into relationship with the real God if we are ever to become our real selves.

What makes us shrink away from the true God is our mistaken belief that he is hemming in our souls, wanting to make our lives smaller, thinner and more boring. Like Eve with the lying serpent in the Garden of Eden, we fear that God will withhold the best from us to keep us down. Adam and Eve reached out and tried to grab for themselves the good that they thought God was unwilling to give them. Like parent, like child: we cannot quite bring ourselves to believe that God wants to, and is able to, do good to us.

When we open our eyes to the true God, we can see that he is not a distant tyrant, but rather the rest for our souls. We may feel that he is taking away our natural habitat acre by acre, but we find instead that he is calling us to live in him. And in him is the good and wide space in which we were meant to live and grow. We are tempted to think that the Christian life is “some for me, some for God.” So we try to keep as much as possible in the “me” pile. We can look, however, and find that we don’t have to fear when he says, “I want all of you,” because it is the postscript to “I have given you all of Me.”

That is the real God, the one that we see in Jesus. He is truly for us, giving up his whole life for us. He is truly with us, uniting God and humanity in himself forever. He is truly able, for the Spirit brings us the good news that he is risen and is here for us. Our job is just to listen and believe.

So after thinking a while, I came back to myself.

Me: “Okay. I think I’ve got it. My real job is not to save my life myself, but to really believe God is on my side.”
Inner self: “Right. But don’t get neurotic and try to work up a ton of faith and constantly check on how much you are ‘believing,’ or you’ll be exhausted again soon.”
Me: “I think I’ve been there before. . . .”
Inner self: “Yup. Remember, the critical factor isn’t you at all; keep your focus on the God who loves you and is strong for you.”
Me: “All right. Let’s go then!”

Now consider, What Are You Thinking?

Neil Livingstone, InterVarsity® staff

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this article for educational purposes provided this permission notice, and the copyright notice below are preserved on all copies. Not to be reprinted in any other publication without permission. © 1999 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. All rights reserved. This article first appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of Student Leadership Journal®.

Comments

Be the first one to add a comment.

To post a comment, please login or register

What Are We Thinking?

God's Word

Urbana Stories

35 days until

December 27-31, 2009