January 4, 2005

God Outside the Box

I ran across this in my reading and realized that this is the very issue I've been trying to put to words with a particular aspect of many of the Christian groups I've been involved with. What if our little formulas and tracts and little bridge diagrams and special evangelism classes that teach us to go and give people the tracts and bridge diagrams ... what if they're all, as my wife says, a "bunch of hooey?" What if we should just get rid of them and start focusing on something a little deeper and yet a little simpler? What if we need to just stop taking God apart and putting Him in little jars of formeldehyde on the shelves and instead just talk with Him and read about Him and get to know Him, and maybe tell people about HIM instead of parts of Him? Anyway, here's the section, may you be inspired:

"Jesus was always, and I mean always, talking about love, about people, about relationship, and He never once broke anything into steps or formulas. What if, because we were constantly trying to dissect His message, we were missing a blatant invitation? I began to wonder if becoming a Christian did not work more like falling in love than agreeing with a list of true principles. I had met a lot of people who agreed with all those true principles, and they were jerks, and a lot of other people who believed in those principles, but who also claimed to love Jesus, who were not jerks. It seems like something else has to take place in the heart for somebody to become a believer, for somebody to understand the gospel of Jesus. It begain to seem like more than just a cerebral exercise. What if the gospel of Jesus was an invitation to know God?" ~Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

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