A Deflector of God

You know what I love about new Christians? They have a zeal about them. They question everything and they’re extreme in their beliefs and actions. Our pastor has a saying:

Step out in zeal and faith and weigh the evidence in the aftermath.

New Christians don’t consider the temperature of the water, whether they’ll catch cold, or how much their clothes cost – they just jump. There is no weighing of evidence.

I have the privilege of knowing one of these new Christians and he’s teaching me a lot. One of the things he’s teaching me is that . . .

I have become too ingrained in Christian culture and have forgotten what it’s like to be a “seeker of God.”

Instead, I’ve become a deflector of God. I deflect everything into a two big categories:

• I need more faith. Don’t think so hard, just have faith.
• I need to trust God more. Bad things happen, God still sits on the throne.

In addition to those categories, I also have another filter which avoids all thinking which could sit in the realm of “Tree of Knowledge” on the grounds that God wants us to dwell in the Tree of Life. He wants us to be about things that aren’t just head knowledge, but things that will give us and others life.

You know what this does to me? It has caused me to cease seeking after God and looking for answers, thinking about the character and personality of God, and made me a lemming Christian.

Oh, you don’t understand that? Well, I don’t either. But that’s okay, God’s ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). Just trust God. Just have more faith. It’s okay, God’s ways are higher than our ways. It’s okay. Really, it’s okay.

puke

I’m going to cite this as one example of me being broken.

Also along the lines of being a deflector, I think for the past four months or so I’ve been so focused on receiving things from God to share with others that I’ve neglected to receive anything from God for myself.

I’ve been using God to help me help others transform their lives. I no longer read the Bible to see how I should live my life, but how it can help others and how I can effectively communicate those things.

Now that I’ve realized all this, what am I going to do?

1. I’m going to start asking more questions.
2. I’m going to start looking for answers to said questions.

There’s at least one more thing I want to add to this list, but I think it may warrant another post. Anyway, I guess you could consider this a New Year’s resolution considering it’s January 1st, but I’ve never been one to make NYR’s, so I’m not going to call it that.

Let’s call it a God-resolution which should be happening constantly.