...we.were.made.for.this

Thoughts:

Scattered, random, and incomplete, but thoughts nonetheless:

Joy is inextricably connected to Jesus Christ and right relationship with him…

What culture has increasingly attempted to achieve in recent years is to extricate Christian virtues, attributes and characteristics of God, and model those independently from God. There are atheists committed to love; therefore, they partake in water purification projects. There are humanists committed to justice; therefore, they participate in equal-rights campaigns. There are activists committed to beauty; therefore, they levy for environmentalism. All of these attributes flow out of the character and the image of God, and at best humanity apart from God is displaying shards and pieces of the totality of what God looks like and what true humanity, as image bearers of God, was created to display. Where they fail to achieve happiness or enjoyment is that no single attribute is to be the goal of our lives or the object of our affections. Rather, when God is the object of our affection, and His Glory is the goal of our lives, we are conformed more into the image of His Son, and what inevitably flows from this transformation is the totality of God’s attributes and characteristics shining forth from our lives on display to the world. Summarily, if God is our goal, we increasingly radiate that which is of God—justice, compassion, love, truth, etc. Yet if that which is of God is our goal—that is to say, if we make the aim of our life “to be a loving person, to find the truth, to fight for equal rights, etc”—we ultimately fail, and at our best only achieve an empty reflection of a piece of some dismembered emotion or cause, neither of which will achieve our happiness, because we are not created to worship or love or commit our lives to an emotion or attribute, but to the God from whom these characteristics emanate.

We are not Christians because we seek to be loving people, we are not Christians because we seek to eradicate extreme-poverty, we are not Christians because we believe in equality, or peace, or hope, or love, or justice. We are Christians because we seek God—or rather, He seeks us. Every fiber of our being cries out for a relationship with the God who created us in His image, and we cannot be satisfied until something reconciles us to our Creator and liberates us to live as we were created to live. Christians are not humanitarians. Christians are lovers of God and reflectors of His image. We do not set out to be good people; we set out to Love God and to become more like Him, not by choice, not by effort of the mind or willpower, but by the irresistible Grace and calling of His Holy Spirit. When He calls us by name and rips our heart of stone out of our chest to replace it with a heart of flesh and gives us a new spirit--His spirit, which molds us more into His image—we naturally, we supernaturally, begin to love the things that God loves and care about the things God cares about, as our hearts begin to break for the very things that break the heart of God.

Therefore, our primary goal is not to feed the hungry and clothe the naked to alleviate their suffering in this sin-stained world. Focusing primarily on the alleviating of suffering, the eradication of hunger, or any other such worthy cause is an aim far too limited, far too incomplete, far too meaningless a goal to be undertaken. It makes a worthy task, but a terrible goal. It is a good endeavor, but one that is incomplete. If one is to devote his life to feeding the hungry, he may well feed them his entire life, yet we as Americans know of all people that food does not satisfy the soul—with the largest obesity rate and the highest depression and suicide rate in the world. Filling the stomachs of the emaciated alone will do nothing to change their government, give them education and justice, give them jobs or houses, or impact their children’s lives. Most importantly, it will not satisfy them or give them peace, it will not give them a relationship with their Creator, and a life eternally free from pain and suffering.

Our goal, our joy, our purpose, is a passion to treasure Christ supremely above all things. And as God achieves this purpose in our lives, He is Glorified and we are satisfied—as well as sanctified (made more like Christ—the image of God). Focusing our aim on God and His Glory will give us His heart—which beats constantly for the poor, the oppressed, and the hungry—and which will lead us to not only feed the hungry, but to lead them to Jesus Christ. This passion for the Supremacy of Christ in all things, to all nations, leads us to desire that all humanity experience, see and treasure and the infinite worth of Jesus Christ, so that God’s Glory and Fame might be increased and made much of throughout all the world.

So does this make God some esoteric egotistical maniac suffering from a low self-esteem problem? Were God fashioned in our image this would surely be the case. Rather, when a Being who is infinitely great, and infinitely good, and infinitely loving exists, the greatest gift He can bestow upon His creation is Himself. Therefore, our aim is to share the gospel, to share the goodness of Christ with all humanity, for the Glory of God. The outworking of this aim is the salvation of all peoples as His beauty and grace calls and compels them into perfect relationship with their Creator as He places a new heart, and His Spirit within them, sanctifying them and making them more like His Son, His Image, which is the ultimate joy, the ultimate purpose, the all-satisfying meaning and gift of our lives. Through their redemption, they then begin to love and act in mercy, compassion, justice, and truth received from the Spirit of Christ in them. This cycle continues as their passion for the Glory of God overflows and compels them to share the gospel with others, who in turn, receive new hearts and new Spirits, and begin to love and act in all the ways of God.

This is the gospel. This is good news to all people. It is in treasuring Christ above all things, it is in laying down our lives—in the example of our Merciful Saviour—that we truly live, that we experience joy and live life to the fullest extent, life, more abundantly—and more importantly, eternally.

This image-bearing—along with all of creation—is the art of a romantic lover pouring out His love and crying out to be loved in return. Our desire for justice is to draw us to the One who is truly Just. Our quest for truth is to lead us to the Absolute Truth. Our love of beauty is to send us in search of the Creator of all that is good. There is no objective for justice apart from God, there is no basis for truth outside of the Truth. When we feel strongly “this is wrong,” or “that is unjust,” it is the outworking of our image-bearing of God. God is the fulfillment of the totality of all of our desires for justice and peace and truth and love and life. All of life is a declaration of the sovereignty and majesty of God, and of our need for Him. The heavens declare the Glory of God. We who corrupt justice, who suppress the truth, who act in anger and hate, try to stand above God and judge Him as being unjust, untrue, and unloving? The very concept of justice, truth, or love does not exist apart from God.

If what we believe to be unjust does not come from God, it is not truly just. If what we believe to be loving does not come from God, it is not true love. If what we believe to be truth does not come from God, it is not absolute. Rather, the ways in which our perceptions of truth, love, and justice conflict with God, reveal to us our misconceptions construed from the culturally constructed influences we are bombarded with from birth.

I've been accused of having blind faith. I have no blind faith. I believe in God. I live with God, I enjoy God, I experience God, I love God.

Everyone has a cannon, everyone has a belief system. Your “bible” may be the compiled writings of musicians and rock stars and the conjecture of philosophers and scientists who preach that this God is archaic and unreal and nonexistent. Your pastors and priests may be cultural icons and talking heads that spew forth conjecture presenting God as unloving and unjust and the world is meaningless, flawed, and hopeless. You may blindly accept their teachings based not on experience but upon logic and familiarity. Your experiences and your vision and your life declare the love and the majesty and the Glory of God. Please do not convince yourself that by believing in the wisdom of a 2lb hunk of pinkish flesh called the human brain that you do not have blind faith. Blind faith closes its eyes to the beauty of the Cross, the Glory of the Christ, and the weight and severity of our depravity and sin and the world’s condition. Our entire education system has been indoctrinated by the preaching and teaching of B. F. Skinner, Freud, Kinsey, and Maslow. We are the cultural experiments of a belief system, and we are trained to have absolute faith in it. The result of this faith system is disgruntled America. So acknowledge your belief system, acknowledge your authorities. Your thoughts are not your thoughts, they are the socially conditioned beliefs spoon-fed from the lying, depraved mouths of talk show hosts, musicians, and old men living in their mothers’ basements ranting about the Mean Nasty God™ who does not exist.

Christ came to break through this culturally ascribed value system that is going nowhere to offer us the True Way of Life. All of our being resonates with His message of hope and resurrection and redemption because our hearts cry out for eternity, our souls cry out for justice, and our being cries out for relationship with our Creator. We all know we were created for more than a working week, wasted weekends and death at sixty. We all know there is something deeply flawed in the suffering of humanity, the injustice of the oppressed, and the maddening emptiness of a self-centered life.

This knowledge is the grace of God drawing us to Himself.

We can suppress the truth in our foolishness, drown it in our addictions, and hide it with empty conjecture and philosophizing, or we can embrace the Savior, fulfill our deepest longings and live life to the fullest extent in right relationship with our Creator, in service to others and in opposition to ourselves.

I choose-or rather, am chosen--to accept grace.