“We have to face the truth about
ourselves and our human situation before we can embrace the truth of God.”
— Matthew Jacoby
IN AN all-or-nothing life, and it so often is, even
when we don’t want it to be, we may discover that God wants the whole of our devotion – not just our Sunday best.
The all-or-nothing dichotomy presented herein is
this: we must face the fullness and harshness of our inner and outer realities
before we can have a functional and purposeful relationship with God.
Yes, that’s right, though we may not be Pharisees
by definition, legalists of conditional love with rules dominating over
relationship, so many of us have not sufficiently sown into our relationship
with God because we still haven’t sought the deeper truths in our own lives.
Transcending Religion is Contingent on Receiving the Truth
We won’t get the fundamentals of our relationship
with God until we realise just how dire our situation is bereft of the cross
and resurrection.
The detail will be missed.
The truth is we have never known ourselves until we
grapple with our full reality, without fear or shrinking. This is very hard
thing for most of us to do – to plumb down to the depths of our childhoods and
see our parents and guardians, at least in some respects, for the villains they
were.
All parents are sinners. All parents have wronged
their children.
And when we become parents ourselves, then we
understand – parenting is fraught with failure. (Lord, have mercy.)
We must be able to receive truth as it is –
unadorned without the niceties of flattery – if we are to transcend a worthless
religion, which believes upon the name of Christ, but cannot ever convert that
into a personal and pulsating relationship with the living Lord – the Holy
Spirit. We must be able to not only receive any truth, but we must be capable
of receiving all truth that applies to our lives – including the general truths
of revelation (the non-familial truths).
We cannot receive the abundant life that Jesus died
for until we willingly submit ourselves to this commitment: the truth must
reign over our hearts and minds – like nothing else is important.
***
We won’t get the fundamentals of our relationship
with God until we realise just how dire our situation is bereft of the cross
and resurrection. Until such a time, our faith in God will just be religion.
God wants much more of us than our religion. He
seeks a relationship. And we need it!
We cannot give ourselves to God relationally until
we accept our human situation, which is our brokenness, and all the truth of it.
We know God more fully when we can accept and
embrace reality.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
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