Allowing God the centre

In recent months, something has begun to change in how I see God's role in my life.  Doing what God wants has always been very important to me and has already influenced a number of aspects of how I live day to day.  However, I've recently come to think that what God really wants is to be the centre of my life.  Absolutely everything I do ought to be shaped by and flow from that centre.
What does that mean?

I'm not all that sure yet.  For some people it means living a quite unusual life, such as the life of a hermit or of a wandering preacher.  But without a specific call to do so, it seems to me wrong to let go of the income, house etc. that you rely on to stay alive, or even to let go of the things that make you happy.  On the pragmatic side, I've recently had it brought home to me that I find it extremely hard to put aside my grumpiness and serve other people when I haven't done anything fun recently.  On the theological side, the Western Church has long believed that the chief end of man (and woman!) is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

It does, however, mean that it shouldn't be possible for 'the things God wants me to do' to get squeezed out of my life, as I shouldn't be doing anything at all that is not part of his call on me.

I find this an exciting way of understanding how I should live, and I look forward to seeing what comes of it.  It's already given me a new angle on Jesus' instruction to love one's neighbour as one's self.  Sometimes I've heard people say that that command includes an implicit one to love one's self, but that's never really felt right to me.  It doesn't really seem to fit with what Jesus was saying, plus I'm suspicious of such a comfortable reading of one of Jesus' parables!  Just recently, though, I've come to think that I'm probably not capable of loving my neighbour like that if I don't look after my own needs as well.  I think that that gives me a yardstick that I expect I'll find helpful, even though it's a very subjective one.

Making requests to God

As mentioned earlier, for years I've felt that it makes no sense to ask God for things.  He already knows everything, and can work out much better than me what needs to be done.

But just recently I've realised I've had it all wrong.  God wants to relate to me.  That's at least one of the reasons why Jesus died: so that God could talk to me¹.  So of course I should tell him about what's important to me and how I'd like the world to be.  He went to some pretty extreme lengths so he could be in communication with me!

¹ If that sounds to you like it's bordering on the blasphemous, it does to me, too!  But I think it's true, too.  Before sin entered the world, God hung out with Adam and Eve.  Then sin cut them off from him, and hence he from them.  Jesus came and died in order to remove that barrier that kept people cut off from God and God from them.

Suffering

This is my response to a comment I got by email after my recent post on prayer.  My friend said:

You say you pray for daily bread for people. I have struggled to understand how God - who loves us more than the sparrows and who promised to provide for all our needs, can let so many many people die of starvation every single day.

Here was my response (unpolished and mostly off-the-cuff with my trademark never-ending sentences) in case anyone else has been wondering similar things.

Those are big questions, and ones that I have thought about a lot since getting sick. Not just in relation to myself, but also as I have realised that someone in my condition in at least 1/3 of the world would die of it because resources are so tight where they live.

My first answer is that God didn't want it to be this way. He made us a perfect world that was 'just right', and his plan was for us to always live in that world that was perfect. However, we/Adam and Eve stuffed it up and now there is all manner of suffering. In the book of Romans, Paul talks about all creation 'groaning', and [my friend's close relative]'s sickness and mine, as well as all those people dying of starvation etc., are all part of creation groaning.

My second answer is that God has bigger priorities than ending suffering in the here and now. Martin and I read a chapter or so of the Bible together every morning and in the last couple of years we've mostly been reading from the Old Testament. In our reading we've been really struck by how different God's perspective on mortal life is from ours. It seems to be terribly hugely important to God that people are in a good relationship to Him, but not hugely important whether they stay alive or not. I guess that makes sense in the context of eternity.

So in the New Testament it says that Jesus' death was the first step towards fixing what was broken in the world, but it won't be 100% right until Jesus comes back to live here permanently and everything is made new again. That hasn't happened yet, and I think the Bible says it won't until everyone on earth has had the chance to hear the gospel (e.g. Matthew 24, Mark 13), although I'm not 100% sure that's what those texts mean. Assuming that is the meaning it then seems that, even though he's completely capable of healing all that suffering, God has decided to limit himself and not do so in the light of the greater good of giving people the opportunity of living with him in eternity. I don't 100% see why fixing what's gone wrong in the world would get in the way of that, but it appears that it does.

And my third and final answer is that God has given us the job of dealing with suffering on earth. We (the Church) are the 'firstfruits' of that new world. As I understand it, one of the things the church exists for is to show people what things will be like in the New Heaven/New Earth so that they are attracted to it and want to be a part of it. We are also Christ's body on Earth, so we have to carry on Jesus' work. In Luke 4, Jesus described his work like this:

¹⁸ "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (NIV)

Because we are his body, that's our calling, too. Perhaps one reason why there is so much suffering, so many people dying of starvation, so many people with chronic and terminal illnesses etc. is because the Church isn't doing it's job.

When I pray for 'daily bread' for people, I'm asking that they will have the resources they need to get through the day. That doesn't always happen, but I still ask! Not infrequently, God then asks me to be the means of answering that prayer: I get a strong sense that God wants me to phone someone up, offer that they can stay at our place, take them muffins or whatever. I also ask God to make them aware of him going through the day with them.

Prayer

At our church we have a slot in the service most weeks called 'Journeying with God'.  Anyone who wants can come forward and share something with the congregation at this time.  As I can't actually go to church, occasionally I record a little video to be played at this time.  Here is my latest one:

 

 (I couldn't actually make the video work this time, but I also couldn't figure out how to put up audio on this blog, so this is an audio recording accompanied by a static picture of me sitting where I was when I made the recording.)

In it I share that I've never really prayed much for other people but recently I've realised that I need to, even though doing so doesn't really make sense to me.  As I've prayed I haven't seen it making a difference for the people I pray for but I have seen it make a real difference in me!  It's made me more involved in my community and more open to God prompting me to do things for the people I pray for, and it's reshaped my view of many of the situations I'm praying for in line with the Bible.

God speaks through the Bible

While I have questions as to just what the Bible is, one thing I am sure of is that God speaks to people through it.  I am grateful to live in an age and a country where Bibles are readily available to me and to practically everyone I know.  I believe that anyone who reads the Bible carefully and in its entirety will meet God in its pages and will be challenged to respond to Him.

I also believe that God uses the Bible to critique (and judge) the way we live.  In a society where Bibles are freely available and are being read, people can only keep on claiming wrong is right for a limited time: eventually the truth will out!

I was reminded of this yesterday, listening to an episode of Outlook (the BBC World Service's daily 'human interest' show) that I had downloaded earlier.  One of the stories* was of Joan Mulholland, one of the many 'freedom riders' who were part of the US civil rights struggle.  She told how, as a kid, she had ventured into the black part of town.  She was shocked by the primitive conditions she found there because she had been taught at Sunday School to love her neighbour as herself.  She saw what her elders hadn't noticed: that her neighbours included black people and that it wasn't loving to treat them so badly.  When she grew up she worked to change the system that she realised was at odds with the teaching of the Bible.


* this link will only work till the end of June 2011

In the eyes of God

I've been praying for a friend who has serious mental health issues and who brings her struggles to God in the same way I bring mine.  I don't know much more about how she understands God than that, and I've been struggling to understand what it could mean for someone like her to be a Christian.  As well as being paranoid and consequently terrified by just about everything, she also struggles intellectually to understand all kinds of simple things.  All of that has made it hard for me to pray for her as I've been limited by my ideas of what God could do for and with her.  I've simply been praying that God would give her freedom from fear and contentment with her life.

Then a few days ago something dawned on me.  For God, the distance He has to condescend to communicate from His infinity to my boundedness is practically identical to the distance He has to condescend to my friend.  He is so far above us, so utterly Other, that the huge differences I see between my friend and myself pale into insignificance.  I realised that God can use her in His service just as easily and effectively as He can use me.

The way I pray for her, as well as the way I pray for the children in my church's Sunday School, has changed profoundly as a result.

What is scripture?

I've often heard the Bible described as a 'manual for living' or 'God's roadmap for your life', and I think that that's often how I've used it.  I've looked for guidelines to tell me how I should live, how I could expect God to interact with me etc., as well as looked for things to inspire me to keep going in hard times.

Reading through the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles in recent months I've found very little that can be used that way.  I've started to ask: why are these stories here?  They must be important to have made it into the Bible, but I can't see the point of many of them.  That's led to the question 'what is Scripture?'  If it includes these bits, then it can't quite be what I've always thought it is!

I don't have much of an answer to this question, so I'd love to hear your thoughts!  A recent post by Tim Bulkeley from Carey Baptist College provides a partial answer.  He says that the Bible is written for you but not about you, so you shouldn't expect to be able to take Bible passages and simply map them onto your own life.  That's at least a partial answer to what scripture isn't, but what is it?

An obvious place to look for answers is in the Bible itself: what does it say that it is?  The only direct answer I know to this is in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (NIV)

So it is useful for forming you into the kind of person who can do good (God's?) work.

In this light Martin's take on Chronicles makes some sense.  He thinks we need to look at these stories of the kings of Judah as a whole, and as such that they show the steady decline in fortunes of the kingdom as its kings steadily move away from God's law.  Understand that is probably helpful in the individual's formation, but it hardly seems to need to be said in quite so many words!

So I'm largely left with my original question.  What do you think scripture is?