God Doesn’t Do Control.

Faith, God, Love, Redemption 0

What does the power of the cross mean for us? Or for those who suffer? It means the same Christ crucified on Good Friday now fills the universe with his cruciform love. He does not passively and powerlessly witness the abuse of his children or the oppression of the poor and ‘do nothing.’ Rather, enters the suffering, experiences the anguish, lives the sorrow for all, with all, for all the time. The Christlike God drinks our cup of suffering. The Lamb slain bore it all, right down to the foundations of the cosmos. Secondary causes nailed him to the Tree of affliction. And what did Christ do? In love, he consented to co-suffer with us in solidarity.

In that sense, I say God is in charge, but he is not in control, because he doesn’t do control. Sometimes I wish he did, but as I scan history and humanity, I don’t see him controlling. Sometimes he seems and feels absent, distant and silent, weak or maybe even dead. Did God simply die and abandon us all to go to ‘hell in a hand basket’?

No! Rather than control and coerce, God-in-Christ cares and consents to suffer with and for us. We don’t concede to the false image of a ‘lame duck’ dad who sits by silently, watching his kids getting beaten by the bully. Instead, we look to the true image of the cruciform — Christ himself — the One who heard our groans and came down to suffer and die with us in order to overcome affliction, defeat death and raise us up to live and reign with him.

— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God, p. 133

Even Our Kids

Faith, God, Letting Go 0

By becoming a Christian, we say we are giving our lives to Christ. If that’s true — if we’ve given our lives to Christ — we’ve given it all. Everything.

And if that’s true, it includes — and boy, is this tough to say as a dad — it includes our very children. They’re his.

No one can take anything, or anyone, from His grip. They can take from ours, but not His.

So watch them sleep, and thank God for them, and know that they’re on loan. He loves them even more than you do. And whatever happens, He’s got the big picture; we don’t.

— Brant Hansen, Unoffendable, p. 121

Following Jesus

Faith, God 0

There is a part of Jesus we can’t know by reading books about him, can’t know by listening to sermons on him. There is a part of him we can’t know by going to Church, to Bible college, to seminary. There is a part of him we can only know by following him. The way Peter followed him. And James. And John. And the rest of the original Twelve.

— Tim Timmons, Simply Enough!, p. 226

The Eternally Consenting Bridegroom

Faith, Forgiveness, God, Universalism 0

Because God, by nature, is the eternally consenting Bridegroom, there are two things he cannot and will not do:

He will not ever make you marry his Son, because an irresistible grace would violate your consent. Your part will always and forever be by consent.

His consent will never end, because a violent ultimatum would violate your consent. Divine love will always and forever be by consent. Emphasis on forever. “His mercy endures forever” (Psalm 136). “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness” (Jer. 31:3).

I don’t believe the divine courtship involves wearing you down with his love until you give up. It’s simply that he’ll always love you, with a love that even outlasts and overcomes death (Song of Solomon 8). The Bible at least hints (Rev. 21-22) that the prodigal Father will wait for you, invite you and keep the doors open for you until you’re ready to come home. He’ll wait for you forever.”

— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God, p. 126-127.

Faithful Questioning

Faith, God 0

Questions, then, are not a sign of a lack of faith. Questions are what help us to preserve a sense of the bigness of God. In questioning our ideas about God, however traditionally grounded they may be, we are actually showing a great deal of reverence for God because in doing so we implicitly confess that God is bigger than our ideas about God. God cannot be contained in graven images, whether those are made of wood or ideas. There is a sacredness to asking questions, because the act of questioning is rooted in the deeper conviction that we are only human and all of our knowledge of God is always partial, provisional, and perspectival. This doesn’t mean that we can’t know anything about God. It just means that our knowledge is never full or complete, it is always open to revision, and it is always coming from a certain angle.

— Heath Bradley, Flames of Love, p. 7-8

Theology of Happiness

Faith, God, Joy 0

I’m convinced that the main obstacle to happiness is lack of faith. People are unhappy because they don’t believe in happiness. They believe in same-old-same-old. To undertake my experiment in joy, I had to change beliefs. From a stick-in-the-mud theology of sadness I had to switch to a theology of happiness.

For years I believed it was a good thing to be sad. Sadness was compassionate, pragmatic, often the most realistic response to life’s complexities. What a surprise to discover that a lingering, low-grade melancholy was actually my last line of defense against the love of God. Moodiness was how I got back at God for everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. Atheists get back at God by not believing in Him, but that option was closed to me. I couldn’t help believing in God; the evidence was too compelling. I knew the world was filled with wonders, that life was precious beyond words, that I was surrounded by signs and messages of the power and love of my Creator. In view of all this, how could I justify clinging to my self-centered moodiness?

The answer was simple: Believe in sadness. Believe that a certain degree of melancholy is inevitable in this world. Believe that joy is brief and unsustainable, the rare exception rather than the rule. A capricious blessing, not a commandment.

Are you unhappy today? Ask yourself what you believe. What is your excuse for believing you cannot live this day in joy? No one can be happy without believing that happiness is good, right, appropriate, and allowed. If we believe joy is in short supply and must be carefully rationed, we will not rejoice. The lavish abundance of God’s kingdom isn’t obvious to the naked eye; it can be enjoyed only by those who believe, with a faith intense enough to lead to action.

— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 53-54.

Story First

Faith, Story, Writing 0

So it was a theological as well as a literary enterprise for me, but as a storyteller I had to make the story come first. I sat down and typed out “It was a dark and stormy night.” The theology is down deep. It’s not there unless you look for it. And that’s where I think it should be in stories. It should not hang below your skirt like a slip.

— Madeleine L’Engle, quoted in Madeleine L’Engle, Herself, compiled by Carole F. Chase