Dating God

Okay, so the title was a cheap way to get all two of your guys’ attention. But Tim Challies has two very helpful blog posts in which he gives us a clearer perspective on what it means to have a relationship with God. Too often times, we see our relationship with God as so different than our human relationships. And Challies rightly corrects this misconception. Here’s an excerpt from one of the posts:

…what if we are missing the point? What if the point of devotions is less about learning about God and more about spending time with God? What if it’s less about Bible study and more about building relational intimacy? What would change about our devotions if instead of trying to learn about God, we focused instead on spending time with God, time spent hearing from him through his Word and speaking to him through prayer? If this is the case it doesn’t much matter what we remember at the end of it because the joy has been in the moment, the value has been in the time spent together. The joy of dating isn’t in the aftermath but in the moment. And I think the same can be true with our devotions.

Then in part two of this series, he gives some helpful, practical tips at how to go about pursuing this relationship with God.

1. We spend time
2. We tell stories
3. We ask questions

Again, click here (part 1) and here (part 2) to read the rest.

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Must-Listen to Sermon Series by Tim Keller on the Nature of Faith

There are a few sermons I listen to which I feel so compelled to have everybody listen to it. But, this one by Tim Keller, titled “The Nature of Faith: Hebrews 11 and 12″ is one of them. In it, he takes fourteen weeks to expound upon the three “layers” of genuine faith: (1) understanding, (2) conviction, and (3) commitment.

To gain a sense of how much I’ve grown and been stretched by this series, I’ve only listened to the first three sermons and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Click here to listen to the free sermon that got me hooked titled, “Noah and the Reasons of Faith; Faith as Understanding” or, once again, click here to download the entire series (which is on sale this February for 30% off its original price!).

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Trusting in the Midst of Doubts

Michael Kelley:

Tim Keller, in The Reason for God, argues why it is profitable to trust in Christ even when you don’t have it all figured out.

This is good news for the doubter, for at one time or another, all of us, even those who call ourselves “Christians,” come to a point in life where we wonder if everything we think we believe is real. According to Keller, our faith can co-exist in the midst of the doubts, so long as we have faith in the right thing:

The faith that changes the life and connects to God is best conveyed by the word “trust.” Imagine you are on a high cliff and you lose your footing and begin to fall. Just beside you as you fall is a branch sticking out of the very edge of the cliff. It is your only hope and it is more than strong enough to support your weight. How can it save you? If your mind is filled with intellectual certainty that the branch can support you, but you don’t actually reach out and grab it, you are lost. If your mind is instead filled with doubts and uncertainty that the branch can hold you, but you reach out and grab it anyway, you will be saved.

Why?

It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.

Let’s not make the terrible mistake of believing in our ability to believe. That is weak branch indeed.

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Our Love Affair with the Law

Michael Kelley:

I have a friend who is fond of saying, “Today’s gospel is tomorrow’s law.” I’ve heard him say it in a variety of contexts.

- When Christians believe that public school is the only appropriate way to be missional with your family.

- When Christians say that home schooling is the only good and proper way to educate your child.

- When the mark of your spirituality becomes whether or not you have adopted a child (or how many).

- When those believers who feel the liberty to consume alcohol turn up their noses at those who refrain.

Do you see it? We have an immense propensity to take the gospel and turn it into law. We love to take good and turn it into chains. Why do we do that?

The reasons are many, but I think a large part is that we love the measuring stick of the law. We love to compare ourselves to others, and to gauge our own spirituality based on performance. We love to take the law of God and make it into a ladder. Up, up, up we climb, and the more people below us the better we feel. For though we might not be close to the top, we’re sure doing better than those people below us.

So much do we love the law that we can form and fashion anything – even those wonderful examples of freedom or grace – into law. Our potential to distort the gifts of God to our own ends is limitless.

How is that the gospel remains the gospel – that those things in which there is liberty remain those things in which there is liberty? How can we be saved from our tendency toward distortion?

Surely not through our own power.

But herein lies again the wonder of the gospel, and here again is where we can be brought to awe because of its far-reaching power. For the gospel is the only answer for those, like me, who distort the gospel. There is grace for us, too. When we preach the gospel to ourselves daily, we will find that God will tear down the rungs of our carefully constructed ladders. And when those ladders are broken into shards and splinters, what will be left towering over the piles of rubble is the wooden beams of the cross.

And we’ll stand there at the base on perfectly level ground.

[HT: Vitamin Z]

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The Need for Personal Conviction of the Truth

Quote from God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt.

Available here at Amazon.com.

… a conviction is nothing if it is not our own. Other things play their part in helping us to understand, but nothing can take its place. Unless each of us wrestles with the truth for ourselves, we will end up with opinions rather than convictions. Pascal warned that “hearsay is so far from being a criterion of belief that you should not belief anything until you have put yourself into the same state as if you had never heard it.” No conviction is truly our own unless we are prepared to hold it even if the rest of the world is against it. Athanasius contra mundum (against the world) is a stance we would not wish for ourselves but a stance that is implied in faith (p. 103).

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