So when Ed Boasso was the guest speaker at our church a couple weeks ago he was mentioning that in the last two years or so he found himself falling in love all over again with Christ Jesus. He was experiencing Jesus again through reading of Scripture and through fellowship and though praise and prayer. It made him both giggle and cry. I really liked that idea, that it’s ok for us to allow ourselves to be vulnerable emotionally. That we can experience Christ and reach a point of true authentic intimacy with Him, engaging Him in our heart and mind and relating to Him in our own way as the Holy Spirit leads us.
I think the challenge for us as Christians in spreading the Gospel to others is that there is an initial intellectual pursuit of God people have towards religion that can be a major hurdle to overcome in order to get them to experience Christ in a more personal intimate way. For example, I had a recent conversation with a client of mine. After a legal consultation about her court case the topic of conversation turned to religion. She was a non-Christian and proceeded to state, among other things, that she didn’t think the Bible was “fair” to everyone such as women. She believed in God but didn’t necessarily think any one particular religion completely articulated God as a higher power. This is a common occurrence, where people see the various religions in the world, such as Muslim, Buddhism, Christianity, and then conclude based upon their observations that they’re all talking about the same divine entity just in different aspects.
My response to her was that we have to be careful when we attempt to describe just who God is based upon the limitations of our human perceptions. It wouldn’t be a very awesome and powerful God if He’s reduced down to our worldly observations. In that sense God is unknowable to us as mere humans.
This is what I mean about how our minds create barriers in our attempts to draw closer to God. Non-Christians want the Bible to match up with what they see in the world according to what modern science and societal values have evolved into. They want the theology to make logical sense to them. They don’t see the Bible as a means to an ends of experiencing God but rather the end itself. They don’t see how God wants them to draw closer to Him through the Bible, not merely draw closer to the Bible. God wants us to draw closer to him through the fellowship, through praise and prayer.
I know that there are those in our congregation who initially struggled with the intellectual pursuit of Christ but eventually experienced incredible breakthroughs. Their initial intellectual understanding of God through Scripture was merely a gateway that opened up to a greater sense of God’s love for them. To see how they have been transformed and now have a genuine love and understanding of the Lord is a beautiful thing. That’s gotta come from God. amen to that.
From Pastor Mark’s Heart
February 23, 2014