Magic tricks or Good Relationship?

Sometimes I realize that I have believed in a sort of 'magic trick' relationship with God. If I say "In Jesus Name" at the end of every prayer then God will have to listen to me, or do what I say. That sort of thing. This created a lot of paranoia in my mind, because it added up to a belief that God can't be trusted to be good and have integrity - it was my job to keep him in line and make sure he did the right thing. And worse yet, it was up to me to repeatedly convince him to love me.

The Bible gives a better testimony. It's a big relief to learn that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was all his idea in the first place. All this love... he started it. I didn't talk him into it. I didn't come up with it. And he did it because he wanted to do it.

"You didn't choose me, I chose you," assures Jesus.

So I can stop worrying about whether I need to manipulate God. That's a needless effort for two reasons:

1. He's God, he can't be manipulated anyway.

2. He's good, so you don't need to... he always loves well.

There is freedom and peace in God's goodness and integrity and in the choice to love us so well in Jesus, a choice which was made long before I knew anything about it. It's reasonable to entrust ourselves to him wholly and let go of control and fear.

It's a simple point, but I have to re-learn it constantly.

Good News and Fear

I read an account this morning of a guy who became a believer in Jesus when he suddenly realized that for nearly forty years he had been fooling himself into thinking that he was good. He saw in a moment of realization that he wasn't actually good and that he couldn't do anything about it. He remembered what he had heard about Jesus, whom he had previously scoffed at. Only Jesus could make any change in his situation. He believed.

The Gospel is so simple you have to be taught not to believe it.

My two favorite Malcolm Muggeridge quotes:

"We have educated ourselves into imbecility."

and

"The depravity of man is at once the most unpopular of the Christian doctrines and yet the most empirically verifiable."

One of the comments on the conversion account I mentioned above was that a God who threatens people and forces conversion through fear should not be followed. I have found no relief from fear but in the loving invitation of Jesus to be freed from a dependence on myself and the world around me for salvation. As long as my hope lies in anything other than Jesus, all I know is devastating uncertainty. I know better than to trust myself.

My only hope is the payment for sin Jesus made to His Father on my behalf, the ongoing work of recovery from the damage of ruin that the Holy Spirit upholds, and the Home that waits for me.

Without Jesus, my trajectory is fixed on meaningless decay and the desperate dismal fear of helplessness to change anything.

With Jesus, all things are made new and his perfect love casts out all fear.

One of the deepest fears is that, if we really look into it, we'll find that love isn't real. Haven't we seen enough pain to make us doubt that love is possible? We do our best to keep distracted or tangled in intellect. It's too dangerous to look love in the face: what if we find empty sockets and a mocking lifeless skeletal grin? It is frightening. "I'll follow any destructive fancy if I can only protect myself from my deepest fear- the discovery that even God cannot be trusted for his love is a lie!"

I have no magic words, no unstoppable clever turn of phrase. I do believe that the love of God is alive, it's true. The beauty of it will break your heart, the strength of it will carry you to your deathbed, the purity of it will wash away the dark dream of fear. When the morning comes your own face shall shed light enough to lend brilliance to the dew.

Holy

"I walked out into the night and saw a sky that had been wiped clear of its tears, after such a long day. At the edge of the horizon slunk a few strands of ragged cloud, but ringing brightly the bell-stars held their place. Enduring Brilliance. All the storms had been far below them. Hadn't it seemed from against the ground that the smoking clouds had quenched their light? Yet they were untouched. They are promises never reached by decay."

Can you believe that? Isn't it hard to believe that purity exists? That there could be anything that hasn't been turned? That hasn't bent in even the tiniest way to evil and been lost to confusion and perversion?

If it's all been lost then there's nothing to go back to. There's no hope for healing.

But we sing... Holy.

There is One, and only One, who never gave in.

...Holy

There is One, who at all costs, stayed true.

...Holy

All the loss that has crushed and confused our hearts. All the weeping. The volcanic ache that pushes out from beneath your ribcage. The poison that pulses in this world till even beauty becomes banal. Nothing feels natural. Like death, it's all an intrusion.

But it's low clouds. The high holy stars are out of its reach.

...Holy

We've been lost for so long. Everything pure that we've forgotten, there is One who still remembers. The long years that slip through our skeletal grasp, there is One who hasn't grown weary, One whom decay cannot grip.

Let all Israel, those striving, struggling ones, say "his love endures forever."