God Does Not Give Up On Us.

I want talk about Eugene Peterson’s comment from Yesterday’s blog:

“Biblical faith, however, has always insisted that there are not special aptitudes for a life with God — no required level of intelligence or degree of mortality, no particular spiritual experience…..”  (Run with the Horses by Eugene Peterson pages 134-135)

In all of my time as a pastor there has been this one theme within the human soul: “not being good enough.”  Not being “worthy enough” to teach Sunday School, or to serve communion, or read in worship; or articulate enough to pray out loud.

Somewhere in our long history, of Christianity, there has been a fostering of human being as inadequate.  

Somehow people have grown to believe that one has to be holy, and/or divinely ordained, in order to share their simple ordinary gifts in the worship service or in Christian education.  

Some — most — of this confusion comes from an ancient question:    

27 ‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth? (1Kings 8)

When you ask a little child “where does God live?”  Most often you will get the answer: “In my heart.”  Or sometimes: “God lives everywhere.”

If we all could get back to that child-like mentality, of God living as close to each of us as our hearts, I don’t think there would be so much doubt about our ability to be good.  That is, to be good enough for God to live in our very own being.

If we could have that child-like-faith, just maybe we would realize that the old saying — God doesn’t make junk — is true with us as well.

Even in the Old Testament, with all of its talk of God’s wrath and God’s Judgement, we are told that God doesn’t give up on any individual.

That God is persistently faithful and merciful.

Then in the New Testament we are given living proof of God’s faithful promise of presence.  The promise came in the most celebrated moment in the history of the world.  The birth of God in the baby Jesus’s skin (which I will write about during December).

But for now, I would invite you to reconsider God’s gracious possibility in your very own, seemly messed up, personality. 

You see, God does not give up on us.  We actually give up on ourselves.

God is much more tolerant and forgiving then we imperfect beings will ever be.

“Biblical faith, however, has always insisted that there are not special aptitudes for a life with God — no required level of intelligence or degree of mortality, no particular spiritual experience…..”  (Run with the Horses by Eugene Peterson pages 134-135)