Loves we choose over God

Does God take priority over your life? Do you treasure Him above anything else in your life?

If you’re still considering what you even think of God, then that answer will be an obvious ‘no’. But, if you call yourself a Christian and you do “all the Christianly things” and yet you don’t know the answer to that question, it’s also probably a ‘no’. 

I’ll elaborate on what that priority looks like. What we prioritize in our life are things we ultimately love the most, which will guide us through life. This also applies to what we fear the most in life. 

For instance, let’s say that being successful is the most important thing in your life. Now the idea of what success looks like differs between people. It could be climbing the ranks in a career, living a comfortable life with a happy family, or being a good or respected person. Someone who values this success above all else will also likely seek validation in their work towards that goal. 

Everything in their life will move towards this end goal. What they spend their time, thoughts, money and dreams on will be tied back to fulfilling their success.  

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of these dreams. It’s good to work hard, to be a good parent and to desire to be a respectable human being. In fact, you’ll notice that all of these desires come from God. He created us to have good desires. He gave us good things. But since we live in a world that is run by sin, it tampers with everything. It clenches its gnarly claws in all the good things God gave us. So, we get distracted by those good things and make them ultimate things for us. Things we love and even fear more than God. 

When we start to depend on those good things more than we depend on God, they turn into our loves or idols. We begin to trust that it offers something better than waiting on God’s goodness. It’s better than God.

There’s a difference between being distracted by other things and being driven by them. Think of life as a path, one that stretches to God that leads to life with Him. And then all the other paths, which take myriads of different forms, all of which end in the same place: heading towards a life without God, run solely by sin. We could call this death or hell. There’s no way to follow a path leading towards God and a path leading towards sin. You can either be moving towards God or not. 

“Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.” - Proverbs 4:25-27

Your life may look meticulously similar and run perpendicular to that of someone following God. “Doing all the Christianly things”, it looks almost identical. But if your focus isn’t God at the end, if He isn’t the ultimate love you are choosing, then you’re headed somewhere else. 

Have you let other desires take precedence over God? Do you care about knowing God more, or about pleasing others more? Do you care about living the life you want and being known for what you believe in or do you care about living a life for God?

We don’t follow God perfectly. Sometimes we look back towards sin, we fall down again and again. But if we keep our eyes on our ultimate love: God, we will always be moving forward, no matter how slowly. 

Timothy Keller said in his book Reason for God, “It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.” We may be slowly crawling or even stumbling our way over to God. But so long as He is the object of our affection and our faith, we will move and grow closer to Him.

As a Christian, we will always be growing. But if we want to get off the ground, and stop crawling we need to keep our eyes on Jesus. And He will be faithful, even if He has to carry us through to the end.

But what if you don’t want to crawl to Him? You want to walk steadily to Him, run even. That’s the motivation behind writing these blogs, to ignite a desire to move past the fundamentals of following God and grow deeply in a relationship with Him. 

The trouble with ‘dying to self’

The Bible has dozens of verses around the topic of “dying to yourself” and living for God. What does it really mean? And how can we tangibly do it?

It’s one of those Christian terms that we hope doesn’t come up on Sunday when we bring our new friend to church. Because, well, it’s difficult to explain. Even for ourselves.

In the modern day church, it’s treated as a trait of an ‘extremely devoted Christian’. We miss the Gospel entirely when we hyper-spiritualize a fundamental Christian attribute.

Let’s break it down to the basics. Dying to yourself means you aren’t living for yourself, you’re dead to your old way of life. While you live in your body, your new identity in God has transformed your heart.

In Luke 9:23b Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” When Jesus says, “take up his cross” it’s metaphoric and foreshadows what Jesus goes on to do, sacrificing Himself on the cross for our Salvation. Jesus’ sacrificed all His earthly needs for all of us. And so He calls us to do the same. He calls us to not live for ourselves anymore, but for Him.

Now, many of you may think that there are a lot of people who live their lives devoted to others, without any semblance of a Christian background or intention. And even further, you could easily argue that in the name of Christianity, living for others has ended in manipulation, hurt and abuse. Much good and much hurt have been born out of our human expression of love. But human love and human intentions can only go so far by itself. It will always be imperfect and messy. 

The argument for Christianity, is that when you live for God you won’t ride the waves of the messiness of human flaws. That is, you're anchored to the inventor of love, who never changes and never wavers. So we are able to take the burden off of pleasing others from a human perspective, and to instead live our life for God. We have the freedom to sacrifice our life, as Jesus gave us the perfect example for us, for a life for Him. 

There isn’t a way to halfway do this. Luke 14:27, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” You either live for Him or not. This isn’t about being a “super Christian”. 

This is hard. It doesn’t come naturally to us. It comes natural to us to live a comfortable life that we enjoy that at least mildly doesn’t bother anyone else. But this is not what God calls for Christians. We are supposed to actively work against that desire and instead shift our focus to what God would want for our lives.

Notice in passage Jesus said to bear our cross “daily”. He understands that we will daily need to die to our own desires. Because we need to remind ourselves nearly constantly who we are living for. But slowly, as we die every day, we will feel less connected with our old self and our new identity in God will become more familiar to us.

When you live for God and you die to your old self, this does not mean that you deny every good thing in your life and let people walk all over you. Whether intentionally or not, in some cases the term has led to a detrimental and distorted view of what God wants for your life. While on earth, Jesus enjoyed the fellowship of his friends and even strangers around Him - but all with good boundaries. He left the crowds to be alone and spend time with God because He needed to reset. He couldn’t be on-demand all the time. His human body had constraints. As do ours. 

And living for God means something different for each of us. God calls us to different missions. He gives us different gifts and abilities. We all have unique situations with our backgrounds, our family, our friends, our work, our cultural environment. Living for God may look very different from one to another. 

The denying of yourself means that you’re putting God ahead of your own needs. What would living for His kingdom instead of your own look like?

In order to figure that out for yourself, you must spend time with Him. You have to prioritize Him, or you’ll naturally start prioritizing other things. It may mean not watching that extra show at night so you can spend some time in prayer with Him. Or it could be that when you feel anxiety shocking through your body, you reach out to Him first instead of doom-scrolling social media to numb yourself. No matter how different it looks for each of us, living for God will directly affect how we orchestrate every aspect of our lives.

Think of it this way. Suppose you are a new parent. Your whole life has changed. Everything you do now is centered around this tiny being that just came into your world. Your job is to protect, love and care for their whole little self. You wouldn’t just say, “that’s great, I’m a parent now” and go on to live your life exactly as you had before with some minor adjustments. Your whole life changes. Your identity changes. Not that your unique self somehow changes, but your mission changes. Your unique self now has a clear goal set ahead of yourself.

As a Christian, our new identity should do the same thing. It should adjust the path you’re on in life. You aren’t thinking about what you can do to make yourself more comfortable, or successful or however you would previously live your life. You are living for God. For His kingdom. That should shape your whole world. 

Understanding the fear of God

When reviewing the Gospel and what it means to have a genuine relationship with God, understanding the importance of our view of Him and how we relate to Him is crucial. I believe that this begins with fearing Him. 

Now, you may fall into the following groups when thinking about what this means: 

1. You don’t know what fearing God means tangibly, although you’ve heard it referenced many times within the church

2. You struggle with this term, and have a negative association with it

3. You have a neutral position, but curious as to a new take on the subject

Great, hopefully I’ll speak to all three positions. 

For the last several years, I’ve been on the search for understanding what exactly the fear of God really means. It was always confusing to me that we should have a fear-like relationship with someone who we’re supposed to feel fully loved by. In a world overwhelmed with all kinds of heinous abuse, the link between fear and love may send shivers down your spine. Why would we want anything to do with such a bipolar-seeming God? 

Two Kinds of Fear: Reverence & Terror

First, let’s get into what type of fear we’re talking about. Because there’s two kinds: fear as in terror and fear as in awe. The fear of God refers to the latter, a reverent, awe-struck response to something. 

Since God is good and has no evil in Him, His power and wrath are all singularly directed towards sin. And we know that sin directly opposes Him and all He stands for (being love, truth and goodness, to name a few).

Fearing God is responding to Him - both His power and His love. We wouldn’t be able to respond in fear unless there was something to respond to. We see demonstrations of His power all around us through His creation. The life that He breathes through us, the sunset beaming in our gaze, the intricate galaxies we study. There is no lack of His display of power. Psalm 19 demonstrates this beautifully. 

But He isn’t just a form of power that rules over all things. While He is all powerful and He rules over all things, His character doesn’t stop there. Or else we would have no reason for a relationship with Him. Since His very character is built out of love, He made a way possible for us to have a relationship with Him. But that only came to be because He came towards us first. We couldn’t ever have a loving relationship with God if we only knew Him as a non-personal, power-seeking God. We are able to respond to His power in fearful worship because of His great love. 

So, if you have a loving relationship with God, your response to Him is in a reverent fear of Him. You understand His position of power and as you love Him, you’re aligned with Him. You’ve responded to His love and reciprocated that love. While we are far from perfect in our reciprocal love, our lives are centered towards Him. We stand for what He stands for. And since sin opposes Him, He calls us to hate sin.

Is Loving & Fearing God Synonymous?

It seems that loving God and fearing Him are somewhat synonymous here. Think about it. God, the creator of the world and the very author of all love and truth chose to love you specifically. He wants a relationship with you. And He relentlessly pursues you, deeply desiring to give you His love. He wants all of you. Because He knows that He will be the only thing to really fulfill or satisfy you. As a Christian, these truths will leave us in melting, reverent awe. 

When you fear God reverently, since He is God, nothing else supersedes your fear of Him. That means, nothing else in this world, no matter how great, could ever surpass Him. No one is greater, smarter, more loving, more good, more truthful than Him. And we can rest in this knowledge. That since we have a relationship with Him, we don’t have to fear anything else. Because God is sovereign. 

It’s not as easy as “resting in this knowledge”. God knows we are human and live in a fallen world, and we still fear other things quite a lot. But time and time again, He will gently remind us of Himself. And slowly, as our hearts will learn to trust Him more and more. And suddenly things that once sent us in a spiral, will fade into the background.

When we fear other things, they will always let us down. Fearing God leaves us towards peace in the knowledge and assurance of God’s goodness. 

God’s Power & Love

If you don’t have a relationship with Him, His power and opposition to sin evokes a fear of Him in the terror definition. Since you only see Him as a sort of power, you don’t see or respond to His love which He extends to you. Therefore, the only thing you respond to is His power. And if He’s all powerful and not loving to you, how could you possibly fathom having a relationship with Him? Not seeing His invitation is probably due to a lot of things, namely a fear of something else.

What you fear - in a reverent way, is what you worship. To be sure, if you don’t fear God in that way, you’re fearing something else. Whether it be the ‘almighty dollar’, success, approval of others or even yourself. If you desire to fear God in that way to build a relationship with Him, you must discover within yourself what is taking that position in your heart right now.

So, what do you fear more than God?

The reality of seeking God

What does seeking God really look like? That’s a Christian concept I’ve struggled with a lot in the past. Especially when God doesn’t seem to want to be sought - when He’s silent.

If you would have asked me years back what seeking God looked like, I would have been bewildered. I felt I was seeking Him and that He just wasn’t there for me. I thought that He knew the pain I was in and just chose to leave me in it all alone. That was a very dark time for me. 

This blog could easily be a book on its own, but I’ll attempt to summarize. I’ll start with two things that usually keeps us away from seeking Him, because that’s really what we get hung up on. 

1. We seek a version of God we’re comfortable with. In this, we aren’t really seeking Him. We’re seeking an idea of Him. We don’t let God be Himself. We believe at our core that we must know better than Him. We may even believe He is God, but it doesn’t stop us from believing that He must not know everything.

   Of course, it doesn’t feel that way. And even the insinuation may sound insulting to you. You believe that God is a God of justice and love. Doesn’t He say that in the Bible? The problem is that we set our own definition for what it means to be a good God. And the moment God doesn’t comply with our version, we distrust Him. But who are we to define what it means to be ‘just’ or ‘loving? 

   When we decide what it means to be good, disastrous things happen. Which is why many in the past have done heinous things in the name of God. Their ideas of God were distorted by their own worldview.

   We tend to conclude then that if God doesn’t fit within our worldview or our definition of good, then He must not be those things. This really leaves no room for Him to be God and leaves us with an inflated view of our own self. Have we ever stopped to consider that we may not know more than God, who created us, what good is? This is so much easier said than done.

   Giving up our own knowledge to trust in His is something only grace can do within us. We say we want Him, but I think we really want Him on our own terms. 
   

1. This brings me to my second point, we seek out God while still trying to stay in control. We say we want to seek God, but we want to seek a part of Him. The idea of giving Him complete control of our lives is too difficult to part with.

   This happens when we don’t trust God with our whole lives and we fear something else more. I’ll get to that in later blogs. We don’t view Him as very powerful. We believe that He’s not ‘God’ enough to manage our whole lives. 

   But He asks us to give Him our whole lives for a reason. And as long as we hold onto our own control over our life, we’ll continue the same argument with God and stay stagnant in our faith. And we’ll grow apart from God.

   To be completely transformed by Him, we have to let Him do it. Which is only possible when we let go of our control over our life. And really, it’s the idea of control. Because whether we admit it or not, God does have control over our life.

   Instead we “seek Him” only to demand that He reveal Himself in the way we choose in the time we want it in. But, God isn’t to be beckoned whenever we want Him. He’s God. He created the entire universe. And now a piece of His clay is screaming at Him to dance for us so we can “see that He’s really real”? It sounds silly, and yet we do this in practice more than we may wish to admit. 
   

We’ve covered what primarily keeps us from seeking God, while appearing like we are. But now, how do we actually do it? Seeking God means acknowledging His Holiness and in that knowledge, we’re compelled to get to know who He says that He is. To seek God we must seek who He says He is, not who we want Him to be. 

I grew up in an environment where “experiencing God” was heavily emphasized. It took precedence over getting to know who God was. Experiencing Him was associated with butterflies in the stomach and dancing in worship. It wasn’t until much later I realized that experiencing God is knowing and loving His character. It’s not about an experience but a relationship. And in any relationship, it’s not about the highs you get from the butterfly stage. It’s in the millions of moments that build up over time, deepening and maturing the relationship. 

Back in some dark days, I would have felt that all was lost because I didn’t experience God in that way anymore. I thought I was seeking Him, but I was seeking a version of Him that I had convinced myself of. 

Now, you can certainly have a butterfly moment with God. But I’ve come to realize the sweetest moments are in the quiet, mundane. Where I see His character as I study the Bible or learn from others in a godly community. I can trust who He says He is, not my unstable version that changes over time.

Instead of seeking the small, weak god that we’ve created in our heads, we have the opportunity to seek God in His fullest, truest self. When we seek Him for who He says He is, then we are able to be transformed by Him. And slowly, He will lift the veil and allow us to begin to see and experience the beauty of knowing Him. 

What does it mean to be Christian?

Some of you reading this would consider yourself a Christian, and others decidedly not. And for probably really good reasons. So, what does it mean to be a Christian?

Well, it’s both a loaded and simple question. Being a Christian doesn’t start with you, it starts with God. Simply: being a Christian is a response to God’s love. This specific blog won’t go into proving His existence, rather I’ll touch on what a relationship with Him would look like.

The Trinity

God is infinite, meaning He has always been. And He’s not alone, He’s a Triune: God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. They have been in a loving communion for - well, forever. As we see in a handful of human examples, their love only grows over time. After an eternity, it’s hard to even fathom the magnitude of their love. In fact, we couldn’t if we tried.

All three persons are One God. He is the author of all love and all goodness. He is completely holy and righteous. And He doesn’t need us humans to give Him glory or give Him His title of God. He simply is. The Trinity continually glorifies each other, with no need for our worship to add to God’s glory. It’s difficult to picture, but the scene is striking to say the least. 

And yet, God’s love is so great, He wanted others to join in on His love. But it’s a kind of love we aren’t used to. It’s unconditional. To access it, we must accept His love. Wait, you say. Isn’t that a condition? Well, the same way you wouldn’t give someone a present and say “there’s just one condition. You must open it.”. There’s an implication that in order to accept the gift, they must receive it. In order to accept His love, we must love Him. I’ll write more about what this love looks like in later blogs.

For those of you who want to hear one of the best explanations of the Trinity, read Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves - it may just change your life like it did mine. For anyone who knows me well, you’ve already been hounded to read this book. Nice to meet you, you’re officially in my inner circle. :) 

Creation & Sin

God wanted others to join in on His holiness and love. So He created us. He gave us a beautiful world to live in where we can gaze at His creation all around us at any time. When God created the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, He asked them to do something. Simply: don’t eat from a specific tree. Most of you know how this story ends, not well. They disobey God and with that disobedience, sin is introduced into the once perfectly created world.

The introduction of sin now raises a chasm between us and God. Nothing but complete goodness can come into community with God. We all have the freedom of choice in our lives to choose: sin or God. Life with perfect community with Him or death with sin’s temperamental joys. With sin, the world is distorted. Sins’ claws have been digging into the world ever since then, now so intertwined with all of humanity. 

Because God is perfect, He hates sin. Because sin separates us from Him. It only destroys and deceives. So, not one ounce of sin is allowed in God’s presence. And since the world is now utterly tainted with sin, we would have no way to be back in communion with God. There’s no good deed that will make us pure again. And we’d all be headed straight for punishment for that sin if God didn’t give up on us. 

Salvation

But He didn’t. He wanted to give us a way back into His community. The only way that He could was by sending His own Son, Jesus to take on our punishment for us. So He sent His Son to earth to live a perfect life that we couldn’t possibly live and redeem what Adam and Eve had destroyed. And He took on the guilt and shame of our sin and made it His own. Taking on the punishment as though He had committed those sins. Since He bore our sins, God had to turn His back on Him. And abandon Him completely. All of this, to give us salvation from our sins. So that we could accept this gift and no longer live in sin but live for Him.

What is a Christian? Someone who chooses God above anything else. One who accepts His gift of salvation. When Jesus left earth, He left us His Holy Spirit. Who alone allows us to have a relationship with God. Choosing Him is just the beginning. When you’re a Christian, you’re a daughter or son of God. We’re allowed to tap into the bottomless well of His lovingkindness, which is everlasting. If we would only seek Him. If we would only open our eyes to see His goodness right in front of us.

This may seem very table stakes to many of you. The truth is, we don’t remind ourselves enough of the basics of the gospel. And it’s showing in our relationship with God and our identity in Him. We forget who we are because we forget who God is and what He has done for us. The gospel should transform our day-to-day life. It should compel us to desire and seek Him more than anything else in our life.

The reality is, we still struggle. And we maybe don’t know if God is even worth discovering. But let’s break it down together and learn what it means to be a Christian. There’s so many questions. What does it even mean to seek Him? 

I’ll get to that next week.