Who Is God?

The pluralism of the planet we live on today is greater than any time in history. At the same time, that fact seems to be a contradiction to the growing merging of customs, cultures and convictions. When I was a child the countries and cultures of the world each had their own distinctive characteristics that plainly delineated one from another. Those differences are becoming less and less evident today. The Internet,television and the ease of travel from one side of the world to the other has caused much of global life to blend together in a way that syncretism seems to be the order of the day. Syncretism is the attempted merging of of differing belief systems.

One area where this "coming together" shows up plainly is the way we all perceive God. The word God is a title, not a name. To use the word elicits different meanings to different people. I remember speaking to a group of college students in China one time and mentioning Jesus Christ. They had never even heard His name and asked me who He is. I answered, "He is the Son of God." "Which God?" they replied. I think that was my first awakening to the fact that the word I've used all my life and took for granted that the word was understood by others the way I understood it doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. I remember another time when a young man in India told me he was fasting to his god and as we talked about it, I discovered he was actually fasting and worshiping a "monkey god" that day. Seriously, the man was fasting to a monkey.

So when we say "God," it seems important at times to clarify what we mean by our use of the word. Even among Christians, there is a foggy understanding of the word. Depending on where you grew up in church, chances are that your mind goes to one member of the Godhead while the others are marginalized. For instance, if you grew up in a liturgical church like Presbyterian or Episcopalian, you probably think of the Father. If you grew up in a Baptist or Methodist church, you most likely think of the Son. If your roots are in the Pentecostal or Charismatic world, the emphasis was on the Spirit.

Our God is a Triune God. He exists as three-in-one. Understanding the importance of the Trinity is of more importance than many Christians realize. Why does it matter that our God is triune in nature? It's because that reality sets forth the fact that our God is first and foremost relational. In the eternal realm, the Father, Son and Spirit have always and forever will exist in a circle of intimate love shared among the Trinity. That shared love is the most important truth we can speak about God.

John said, "God is love" (1 John 4:7-8). That is the most important thing that can be said about Him. When we speak of God, we speak of Shared Love. Unless we understand that, our own concept of Him will be skewed at best and completely perverted at worst. To understand the Circle of Love in heaven may be the most important thing we can grasp about Deity.

The God of the Christian is to be known as the One who loves. The very purpose for creation was to expand that circle of agape by bringing humanity into the Group Hug. By the work of the cross, that is exactly what has happened. To speak of God is to speak of Love. Anything we know and say about Him must point to Love. If our conclusions about who God is cannot be embedded in Love, then we have come to faulty conclusions.
Everything about Him must be seen through the lens of love. Love is the source for every action that flows from Him. For Love to act in a way that is unloving would be contrary to His very nature and God does not -- God cannot -- contradict Himself. His Integrity and character will not be impugned by an expression of non-love.

If you think you've seen something in the Bible that portrays God as unloving, I encourage you to realize that the way we know the character of God is by Jesus and only by Jesus. "In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe" (Hebrews 1:1-2). If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus and only Jesus. Look any further and confusion is inevitable. I can't reconcile some of the things I see in the Bible about God, especially in the Old Testament, but I don't have to reconcile them. Jesus came to show me what my Father is like. I suppose that when I get to heaven I can get all the answers about some of those hard passages in the Old Testament if it still matters to me, but I doubt if it will. So in the meantime, I'll just keep looking to Jesus to understand God. That's what the New Testament teaches us to do. Jesus, Himself, said, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father" (John 14:9). So, look no further.

Our God is Love. God may exercise justice but He is Love. God may express wrath, but He is Love. God may possess wisdom, but He is Love. Add anything to the list you know about God, but be sure that you understand those qualities through the lens of Love or you'll miss the mark. Love is the Source of everything that comes from Him. When we understand that, it will reshape our faulty ideas that have contributed to a misunderstanding of God.

Many people talk about their god and describe him as a judge who must be appeased. Let's not fall into that trap. When we talk about our God, let's make sure that whatever we say about Him is fully flavored with the reality of the love He has poured out on all humanity. Who is God? God is love. That is is the DNA of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the message people need to hear and the truth that will reach them when nothing else will.

(For more teaching on this subject, check out my Sunday Preaching video at www.gracewalk.org. I'm currently going through a series called, "Dancing With Deity". This article is a part of what I'm teaching there right now.)

Faith Expressing Love

The preaching of the cross is the proclamation that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Now He has given us the ministry of sharing this wonderful message of reconciliation.

Faith doesn’t cause something to happen to the person who believes. When Jesus said, “It is finished,” He meant it. Faith is the work of the Spirit awakening us to the reality of what Christ has accomplished so that the objective reality of His finished work becomes our subjective experience. We don’t cause Him to do something for us by our faith. He has already done all that can be done at the cross. Faith is the recognition of that reality.

Jesus has lovingly drawn us back into the divine circle of Agape love that has always existed among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To know and believe that is to live out of the original plan for which we were created. It is to live from the Tree of Life.
To live otherwise is to live from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and to be doomed to a lifestyle governed by the tyranny of judgmentalism in which every thought, word and deed must withstand the scrutiny of a moralism that Adam was told to avoid at all costs. We have been delivered from the death sentence of moral living and have been set free for miraculous living.

Our lives are nothing less than an expression of our Triune God, pouring out His love through us like the water shooting out of a fire hydrant. His goal is to soak everybody with the awareness of His Agape and He intends to do that through you, His favorite instrument to use for such a task.

Changing Stations From AM TO FM

Some people have a negativity being broadcast inside them practically all the time. Sometimes it is a conscious broadcast. At others it is subconscious. This negativity causes them to look at a scenario and immediately see the negative aspects of it.

“Do you want to get well?” Jesus asks them. They don’t even hear the question. Like the crippled man beside the pool of Bethesda, their response is immediately a negative, “why it won’t work for me” type of response.

They are prophets of doom to themselves. “I’ve always been this way. It’s just the way I am. That could never work because . . . My situation is different.” They have a thousand reasons why things won’t change for them. They will say they wish thing could change, but then prosecute their own case by reminding themselves of all the reasons why things never will.

They are masters of imagining potential scenarios and superimposing a negative outcome onto them. Their tendency is to play out a scene in their mind that hasn’t even happened yet. It is borrowing trouble when none even exists at the moment. It is appropriating negative faith that things will turn out in negative way.

This kind of negativity is a sour note that will deeply affect any of us who hear it if we don’t change stations. Here’s how it happens: As the discordant background “music” plays in our minds, it creates a certain mood within us. That mood influences the way we think about things. When you combine the way a person both thinks and feels, together these create a certain paradigm on life – a negative one.

This negative paradigm determines our expectations when we face any situation in life. That expectation is nothing less than a reflection of our faith. Jesus said, “According to your faith, so be it unto you.” It becomes clear, then, that some of us are going through life expressing great faith – negative faith! Then we wonder why things don’t seem to “go our way.” According to your faith be it unto you.

What is the attitude you have toward challenges you experience in your own life? Some years ago I read the story of Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest. Of all the possible people to hold this distinction, Hillary was an unlikely candidate. He had lived a simple life as a beekeeper in Auckland, New Zealand. Deep inside him was an idea that most people would have considered ridiculous. He wanted to climb the mountain.

On May 29, 1953 he accomplished his goal, scaling straight up 29,000 feet to the top. Reaching his goal wasn’t something that came without its challenges. He had tried to climb Mt. Everest a year earlier but had failed to reach the top. His response to that failure is what set him apart from others.

A few weeks after his failed attempt a group in England asked him to speak to their membership. When he walked onto the stage, they greeted him with cheers and thunderous applause. They obviously recognized the value of the attempt he had made, but Hillary didn’t see it that way. He wasn’t content to stop at the place of almost seeing this goal realized.

Walking over to one side of the platform, he pointed to a picture of Mount Everest hanging on the wall. Then he clenched his fist and loudly cried out, “Mount Everest, you beat me the first time, but I’ll beat you next time because you’ve grown all you’re ever going to grow, but I’m still growing!”

Hillary had tapped into a truth that we all need to understand. Where we are today doesn’t have to be the final word on where we will be in the end. God does have a plan for your life and He will fulfill it in you. Do you believe that? Are you still growing in the area of faith or have you resigned yourself to the lie that reaching the mountaintops in life is beyond your potential. Understand that your mountaintop is nothing more or less than fulfilling the plan God has for you.

Why did Israel wander in the wilderness for forty years? It was because of their negative faith. The Bible says, “they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19). Too many people have blamed God, other people, or just their own “bad luck” for not reaching their destiny, when the truth is that the fault lies squarely on their own refusal to believe in God’s basic goodness and in His desire to guide them in fulfilling His will. Are you waiting for God to act? Has it occurred to you that God may be waiting for you?

Have you been short-circuiting your life by appropriating negative outcomes in the situations you face in life? Is there an underlying AM (awful mentality) station playing in the background inside your head all the time? Change stations to FM (faith mentality)!

Faithless thinking doesn’t really exist because there is no such thing as an absolute absence of belief. Put any of us in any situation and we will begin to draw conclusions about our circumstances based on what we see. We will evaluate our situation and mentally predict how things are going to unfold as times progresses. In other words, we will come to believe that we know what our future will hold.

Those beliefs become our faith system. Once it is established, it becomes very hard to think outside the walls of expectation we have built around ourselves. We box ourselves in by our limited thinking, which developed through a human assessment of the details of our lives at a given moment in time. Functioning now from a negative faith, we begin to look for evidence in our circumstances to validate that our initial analysis of the situation was right. “See, I knew it!” we affirm when visible evidence tends to support our negative perspective.

The trap tightens its grip on us as we affirm again and again that “this is just the way things are” and as we appropriate hopelessness that things can ever change. Our faith, negative faith, grows by leaps and bounds. Every day seems to take us further from hope that things will ever change.

I’ve heard people say that we shouldn’t put God in a box. “Let Him out of the box!” they’ll challenge others. Let me tell you something: It’s not God who is in the box. It’s us. God is too big and too powerful to let our puny negative faith box Him in.
Let’s not flatter ourselves by thinking that we are squelching God. “Come out of your box and believe Me and I’ll do “great and mighty things like you can’t imagine,” says our Father of grace. (See Jeremiah 33:3)

Begin to expect things to go your way because God is “for you.” Recognize that God’s grace equals guaranteed success. Approach life with an optimistic expectancy, based on the goodness of God.

God once told Abraham, “I will give you the land as far as you can see.” There is an interesting principle embedded in that statement that raises a question: What can you see? Do you see life never advancing, never expanding? Maybe the only thing that needs to change for you to move boldly into the fulfillment of your potential is a change of focus.

(This blog is an excerpt from my book, Walking In The Will of God. For more information on the book, click this link: http://gracewalkresources.com/item.asp?cID=0&PID=555

If You Think You May Have Married The Wrong Man

“How can something become the right thing when it clearly started out as a wrong thing? Traveling the wrong way on a street can never lead to the right destination, no matter what you do,” Linda said to me during her counseling appointment. She and Tom had been married for six years when her mom died at a relatively young age. The effect of her mother’s death had caused Linda to rethink the things she valued in life. Unlike Tom, she had grown up in a Christian home and had begun to follow Christ at an early age.

Like many youth, when Linda moved away to college she wandered away from the anchoring truths she had learned at home. One of the things she had always been taught was that it would be a serious mistake to date an unbeliever – being “unequally yoked” – that was the biblical phrase her parents had shown her. But by the time she met Tom at a fraternity party, rules from back home about whom to date and not date were the last thing on her mind. Tom was fun to be with. He seemed to value her and make her feel good about herself. He told her often how beautiful she was. He made her laugh. Little by little, she found herself falling in love with him.

As their relationship became more and more serious, she had wondered at times about Tom’s spiritual life but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. It’s not like she had been the model Christian in front of him, so what right did she have to ask Tom about his spiritual life. That’s the kind of logic that had led her.

Finally, Tom proposed to her and she accepted. Her mother had asked her about Tom’s relationship to Christ and Linda had told her that he was a Christian, although the truth was that she didn’t know what his thoughts were about all that. They soon married and through the years it had never been an issue – until now. Her mother’s death had changed something in Linda and now both hers and Tom’s spiritual lives mattered to her for the first time.

She and Tom had talked about life after death when her mother died. For the first time she asked him about his own spiritual history and his view on the matter of faith in Christ. He told her that he had never given it much thought and that, while he respected her view and even her renewed interest in spiritual things, it wasn’t something that particularly interested him. He said that he was happy with his life the way it was.

In one of our early counseling sessions together, Linda said that she believed Tom thought her renewed interest in spiritual matters would subside as she adjusted to her mother’s death. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead the desire to live out the faith of her childhood only intensified as the days passed.

She began to read her Bible every day. She found a growing hunger to read books written by Christian authors and began to be involved a newly formed Bible study she had been invited by a friend to attend. She even had gone to a Christian Women’s Retreat one weekend with another friend from a local church congregation in the area.

Tom didn’t oppose any of this and, while Linda was thankful for that fact, it wasn’t enough. Her problem was that he didn’t particularly support it either. His attitude seemed to be a “live-and-let-live” perspective on the matter. She wanted more than that from him.

“I know I should be thankful that Tom isn’t against my growing faith,” she said, “but I want him to share it with me and I don’t know how that can possibly happen since he’s not even a Christian and seems to have no interest in all this. I can’t help but think about the fact that, although Tom and I have always loved each other, I might have been wrong to marry him. The Bible does say not to be unequally yoked with an unbeliever and that’s exactly what I did when I married Tom knowing deep down that he probably wasn’t a Christian.”

Linda’s frustration about her husband is far more common among Christian women than many realize. It’s one thing to be married to a man who is a Christian but not as enthusiastic about his faith as a wife might like, but what about when you come to realize that you’re married to somebody who doesn’t even share the basic core values of your faith? If the foundation of your life is Jesus Christ and a relationship with Him isn’t even on the radar of your husband’s personal interest, is there any way that God can bless your relationship? The Bible plainly says that light can’t have communion with darkness, so how can God do something that would seem to be in contrast the that very fact?

It’s a legitimate question that deserves an answer. If you find yourself married to an unbeliever and you let your mind come to rest on the spiritual differences you see between the two of you and on how there is such a spiritual gulf that you can’t seem to bridge, it will certainly lead to a place of apprehension and fear about any possibility for having a strong Christian marriage. Let your thoughts stay on that road and meditate on it long enough and it’s possible to even reach the place where you wonder if you even should be married to your husband. So, before we move on to an answer, let me go ahead and tell you plainly. If you’ve been thinking this way, you’re going to have to change the way you think. Appropriating negative faith about your husband, his spiritual condition, and your future together isn’t going to help the matter.

The key to moving through this kind of situation is to change your focus. Putting your attention on what you may believe to be spiritual deficits in your husband isn’t going to take you to a good place in any way. Focusing on whether you made a right decision or a wrong decision then doesn’t offer an ounce of help now. While nobody would wisely suggest that the best scenario is for a believer and unbeliever to marry each other, there’s no benefit in going back now and reliving the past. We’re not talking about premarital advice here. We’re talking about a marriage that has already happened. The relevant question isn’t what should you have done. The question is, what do you do now? So stay focused on the right question.

Our Father has identified Himself by the name, “I AM,” not “I WAS.” In other words, He is a present tense God who will work in your situation right now, regardless of what has happened in your past. So the first thing for you to do is stop living in the past by focusing on what you should or shouldn’t have done. It’s done now and it is what it is, so don’t torment yourself by living back there. So the first thing to do if you think you may have married the wrong person is stop living in the past and stop focusing on that question at all. It will lead nowhere good.

The next thing to do if you think you married the wrong man is to put your eyes on your Sovereign God. Set aside biblical questions about believers and unbelievers marrying each other. What does that have to do with you now? Again, it’s done and you can’t go back in time and do things differently even if you wanted to. What value is there in wallowing in doubts about decisions already made? There is none, so don’t do it.
Instead, focus on your Father and who He is to you.

When you’ve stopped obsessing on the rightness or wrongness of your decision to marry your husband, you’ll be able to focus on the reality of who your Father is and how He figures into this whole situation. When your faith moves you in that direction you’re going to find the mental relief you need about all this.

Sometimes in life we have to come back to foundational truths to stand on in order to find a sense of security. In this case of whether or not you married the right person, here’s an eternal truth that will give you a strong foundation if you choose to stand upon it: Your Heavenly Father has always been and will always be in control of your life. Nothing you’ve ever done nor ever will do is outside His supervision or beyond what He allows you to do.

That may sound simple but it is actually very profound and can bring peace to you if you’ll embrace this truth. Your Father, who loves you more than He loves His own life, has always had control over everything you’ve done and that includes the decision you made to marry your husband. He could have stopped it and He didn’t, so you can trust that He will work it out now in a way that is for your highest good and His greatest glory.

How could God take a wrong thing and turn it into a right thing? The same question could be asked about the cross of Jesus Christ. Was it a right thing for evil men to crucify Jesus? Not at all, but our God stands above all decisions made by humans and has the ability to redeem them for His glory. He took the wrong thing they did at the cross that day and transformed it into the best thing that humanity will ever know or experience for all eternity. So if He could take something as evil as men crucifying His own Son and turn that around into something good, do you really think that the fact you married an unbeliever is going to tie His hands behind His back so that He can’t work in your marriage to accomplish something good?

Remember, I’m not writing now about the wisdom or biblical teaching concerning whether or not one following Jesus is to marry an unbeliever. I’m writing for the person who already has entered that marriage and I’m seeking to help that person. The best help I can offer you is to stop analyzing the whole thing, stop worrying about whether you’ve crippled any chance of a blessed marriage, stop thinking negative things about your future and put your hope in the One who loves you more than anybody ever has or ever will.

The Bible says that One has written out the diary and filled in the calendar for your lifetime before you lived a single second of them. Setting aside the question of whether He decreed it or simply wrote what He saw in advance, the fact remains that nothing in your life ever catches Him by surprise. He knew it all before any of it happened and that certainly would include whom you married. So, if your Father knew in advance and He has permitted it, you can be sure that He isn’t biting his fingernails right now and worrying about the dismal future you’ve set in motion and that He can do nothing about. He has everything under control. He always has, so you don’t have to live with fears and doubts about the past, present or your future.

You can safely assume that you are with the man your Father wants you to be with in life. You can know that He loves your husband and is working in His life right now, whether you can see it or not. You can trust that God’s Spirit is more interested in your husband’s spiritual fulfillment that even you could be and that He certainly isn’t going to give up on him.

The bottom line is that you can relax and know that your life and marriage aren’t moving forward in a helter-skelter sort of way. The Divine Architect of your life has everything under control and He will see that it all comes together according to his plan and His schedule.