Posts tagged with ‘God’
Attention.
I was sitting in a theater the other day wondering why I love to go to movies so much. I suppose there’s a lot of reasons… how it looks… how it sounds… the art… really the whole experience.
But then I thought… I love how my ADD self is forced to dive into this other world. I’m not distracted. I’m focused. My attention is dialed into this world that the filmmaker created- for better or for worse.
Then I thought… it’s crazy how we (humans) can only focus on one thing like that at a time.
Then I thought… if God is the ultimate and biggest… His ATTENTION is limitless. His ATTENTION is the greatest it could be.
Then I thought… GOD is watching my life unfold like I watch a movie. DIALED. TUNED IN.
Of course there are obvious differences… God’s probably not getting surprised by the thrilling conclusion of my life… haha… but there are similarties… a scary amount of them if you ask me… maybe He’s falling asleep watching most of our lives…
Then I read this book:
http://amillionmiles.com/
(you should read it)
He’s watching the play by play of my life like I may watch a movie?
Maybe we should all be writing better stories with our lives. As if our lives had a point.
cheers,
j
rob bell | resurrection
so awesome.
The Problem with Theology
I love theology. I love talking about stuff… what this passage means, what this greek word means, how this passage effects Calvinism or Arminianism or Open Theism or (insert your systematic theology here). I love it. I don’t know why, I just do. Theology can be and is an important part of my faith… and can and should be of yours too. Theology can lead us to a greater & bigger understanding about who God is. It can open our eyes to see things about God we never thought about. It can deepen our faith. It can even help us interact with people. But… there’s a problem with theology…
Theology is the study of God. Obviously nothing wrong with that… that’s what we should be about! studying… reading… learning… The problem with theology is that it can allow a sense of arrival to float into your faith. It turns from “the study of” to the “knowing of”.
It can get you to this place where you think: “I’ve got this part of God figured out.” or even better… “I know exactly how God saves people.” Where you STOP studying since you’ve arrived at a conclusion about a certain thing.
I don’t really know what you believe. I don’t know how you think God works in this world or how God is redeeming His people or if you even think God is redeeming people or people are redeeming themselves. :) But I do know that I don’t want to follow a God that I can figure out.
I don’t want to learn and read and talk so much that I get to a place where I begin to think that I KNOW HOW IT WORKS.
I’m not saying there isn’t truth… things that are true no matter what I think. I’m not saying we can’t study enough that we get a pretty darn good idea how something works. I’m just saying that I don’t have it all figured out and I bet you don’t either. I’m just saying that John Calvin, or John Wesley, or Jonathan Edwards, or Mark Driscoll, or John Piper, or Rob Bell don’t have it all figured out.
So I say, let’s keep STUDYING… let’s keep READING… let’s keep LEARNING… let’s keep TALKING… but let’s stop sounding like we have every thing figured out about how the God who exists outside of time and space works.
And maybe let’s think about what it tells people about OUR GOD when we come off like we’ve got HIM all figured out…
…or we bash people who have a different set of systematically educated hypothesis. :)
In response to myself… haha… I LOVE this. :)
I’ve always wondered why people who believe in total depravity say things to their kids like “good job” when they catch a baseball. Shouldn’t they say something like you caught the ball, but you still deserve to go to hell?
I’ve never really trusted people who believed we were totally depraved, for obvious reasons. How can their view of the world be trusted? They are totally depraved, after all.
A pastor friend told me recently, though, that the term total depravity doesn’t mean you aren’t a good person, or aren’t capable of doing good, but that you aren’t capable of redeeming yourself. You are totally depraved, he said, at being able to access God.
That made more sense to me, to be honest. And besides, I’ve met plenty of people who don’t even know God who are good people. And I mean really, really good. I mean they love and care about people, they are moral, they are charitable, so the whole idea there is nothing good in them doesn’t seem to jive with reality.
Sometimes I wonder if God has an enemy and that enemy is trying to get us to not like people, because if we don’t like them, they won’t listen to anything we say. And sometimes I wonder if the idea of total depravity has been skewed to get us to not like people.
Christianity is not about religion- it’s about faith, about being held, about being forgiven. It’s about finding joy and finding home.
