Square 1.001?

I’m almost done with Matthew, and I might have a couple thoughts about all these questions I’ve been pondering.

What I’m seeing so far is God’s desire for purity, overshadowed with His burning love for us. Something I’m starting to realize is that God knows who we are, He knows how darkened the world is and so He knows the weaknesses in our hearts. How could He expect us never to fall? We are already fallen. But I see Him asking us for pure motives (I wrote an entry about that, actually, but I haven’t posted it yet). He wants to free us from our duplistic [I know that's not a word, but shouldn't it be?] bondage to please both Him and humankind.

The other thing I’m beginning to understand more and more about God is that although He desires us to show our love for Him by way of our obedience to Him, our Father doesn’t issue commands because He’s on a power trip. He kindly tells us what we should and should not involve ourselves in because He knows the consequences to us and to the souls around us.

I’ll give some examples because I’m trying to speak the truth, and:

WHOEVER SPEAKS THE TRUTH GIVES HONEST EVIDENCE… PROVERBS 12: 17A

PART 1
This verse sounded really harsh to me for a long time, but I see it differently now.

YOU ARE THE SALT OF THE EARTH, BUT IF SALT HAS LOST ITS TASTE, HOW SHALL ITS SALTINESS BE RESTORED? IT IS NO LONGER GOOD FOR ANYTHING EXCEPT TO BE THROWN OUT AND TRAMPLED UNDER PEOPLE’S FEET.
MATTHEW 5:13

By harsh, I mean that Christ appeared to be addressing the crowd with disdain or disgust, saying “Ok, people, get it together, because if you don’t you’re not good enough and obviously deserve to be completely discarded and abused.” As if our Lord Jesus ever had an air of superiority about him - he came to DIE for us! And meanwhile he served many, many humans just like us; people who were dirt poor, very rich, in the deepest pits of sin and ignorance or overly righteous. How could I think that Jesus Christ would tell me that if I “lost my saltiness” I was scum? His tone, I believe, is a loving admonition: be careful, sister, your saltiness is of great value, but if you lose your salty flavor – if you lose that which gives you your identity as the salt of the earth, something valuable, healing, and delicious – you get trampled. People will throw you out and use you to de-ice their driveways because they won’t see what is different about you.

I don’t know how accurate I am in saying all of this, but all I’m trying to convey is that Jesus isn’t telling us that we’re not good enough or that if we do such and such we will start to fall short. We didn’t earn what he did for us in the first place, so how can we ever earn it by being really good (Romans 5:6-11)? Or how can we UNearn it?

PART 2
So that was the part about unconditional love communicated through the possibly mean-sounding things Christ says.
This is the part about the purity of heart that God desires from us.

If there were no other example, we could just look at what Jesus’ life looked like to see that God wants us to be devoted to Him through and through rather than only appearing dutiful to Him. Jesus never took more credit than was fair for him, a man. He would not even call himself good – the Son of our Heavenly Father, the only perfect being to ever walk God’s green earth. He did things that would cause most of us to cringe and run, and he did them out of unpolluted compassion and obedience. Letting a strange woman pour oil all over him; touching lepers and all kinds of diseased, smelly outcasts; healing the ear of a soldier come to take him to his torture and horrible death when his own disciple chopped it off trying to defend him… I could go on and on.

I have a little more clarity regarding some of my zillions of questions, and I can’t wait for more. Will I ever find the answers to some of them?? It doesn’t feel like it yet, but I’ll try not to be a me of little faith :)

The first square... yes, Square One.

I’m thankful for people who can get me to question what I believe using an insider’s approach. As in, they aren’t TRYING to get me to rethink my whole faith. Simply suggesting a new way of looking at a singular belief is enough to get the little gears in my head turning.

Right now I feel like I’m going through the very unfamiliar process of questioning every little thing I believe.

At the start of the summer every step I took felt like I was walking on a waterbed because of the countless changes taking place simultaneously. But having a few months of waterbed-treading was a great opportunity for me to grasp for what I thought I knew and to find out how stable it really was. Upon trying to get my footing this way, I ended up wildly flailing about instead. I was not that secure in what I knew to be true and needless to say I’ve been a quite the wreck - I haven’t handled it very gracefully. But what can I say! Nobody is perfect. God loves me regardless.

Anyway, I realized that I have all of this stuff in my head about God's promises and about how He feels about me, etc, but for some reason I don't actually live as if it were true, which caused all my floundering. So I decided I needed to go back to the fundamentals of what I believe, in hopes of at least understanding what it is that's keeping me from really living in the freedom Christ died and rose to give me. There’s something I’m not getting that hopefully I can eventually take hold of and continue hanging on to next time my life is in such dramatic transition.

These are only like 3% of the questions that have been circulating in my head since I figured out that I may not have been on as solid of ground as I thought...

Who am I?
God only made one of everyone, so I don't want to try to take somebody else’s spot, but I want to know who *I* am.

What does God want from me?
A relationship, but what kind?

What does God think of me?  I swear, I should know this already!

What's this business about getting rewards for what I do in my lifetime?
How important is every little good thing I do?
Do the bad things I do have much weight?
What attitude am I supposed to have about my "service" to God, and do I have pure motives?
How much should I obsess about this stuff?
How much am I supposed to enjoy life? Is it bad to not enjoy life because I’m worried about doing things right? Is it bad to enjoy life too much and forget about my responsibilities?

What is grace? I know I don’t have to earn salvation, but am I not supposed to be working hard to avoid sin? What is the balance?

I don’t feel bad admitting that I really am not understanding the practicalities of God’s heart for His babies, and namely me. In fact, as uncomfortable as it is, searching is a great place to be for me because I know that God NEVER disappoints. I resolved to read the New Testament from the beginning, just looking for the basics (hum… are my questions even about basic things? I don’t even know what is basic and what is not anymore!), because I know God placed the answers to all of my questions in those pages.  I'll try to share what I learn as time goes on...

Stellar Kart - Automatic

As sure as a phoenix sunrise
And the yanks in the playoffs every year
You're absolutely faithful
I'm positively prone to disappear

But like I breathe
And my heart beats
I wanna love you like it's automatic
Make you into my good habit
You're the only one that really matters
Every minute everyday it's automatically ok
When I make it all about you

It's a mixed up messed up world with
An unsatisfaction guarantee
So I'm pledging my allegiance
To the one and only one
Who can set me free

Just like I breathe
And my heart beats
I wanna love you like it's automatic
Make you into my good habit
You're the only one that really matters
Every minute everyday it's automatically ok
When I make it all about you

But I'm not a robot
Made with no thought
What's the point of living life without the will to choose
To run with the have nots
Or go with the sure shot

I'm with you

I wanna love you like it's automatic
Make you into my good habit
You're the only one that really matters

Love you like it's automatic
Tired of being so erratic

You're the only one that really matters
Every minute everyday it's automatically ok
Every minute everyday it's automatically ok
When I make it all about you

GONNA MAKE IT ALL ABOUT YOU

Selfless and Selfish Sharing

Another reason God wants us to talk to each other about our experience with Him:

I PRAY THAT YOU MAY BE ACTIVE IN SHARING YOUR FAITH, SO THAT YOU WILL HAVE A FULL UNDERSTANDING OF EVERY GOOD THING WE HAVE IN CHRIST. PHILEMON 1:6

God's Words are Life

More and more I realize that if I’m going to do anything more than hardly survive every day then I have to be digesting God’s Word. Digesting as in, so it becomes part of me, not so it makes me get sleepy while I try to read it.

So doing this, which is hard for me because I have to try not to be shy about people reading my writing, is my effort to absorb God’s love. And! I have incentive because I know that “thinking out loud” about what I need to do to be more like Christ might inspire others, too. I would argue that God wants us to be sharing our thoughts on such an important topic, even if it’s in the form of bad writing on a website! Haha!

MY DAUGHTER, BE ATTENTIVE TO MY WORDS; INCLINE YOUR EAR TO MY SAYINGS.  LET THEM NOT ESCAPE FROM YOUR SIGHT; KEEP THEM WITHIN YOUR HEART.  FOR THEY ARE LIFE TO THOSE WHO FIND THEM, AND HEALING TO ALL THEIR FLESH.
PROVERBS 4:20-22