Malfunction Part 1 - Out of the box |
| Posted by Mike (mike) on Jan 30 2008 at 3:02 PM |
“Oh no... I don't believe in works at all” he said. “I just believe that the sin we do is on one side and the good things we do are on the other and we hope the good outweighs or at least reduces the bad side!” “ Hmm sounds like works to me” as I waded a little deeper into this businessman's line of thinking. “Oh no! not works at all, I just think our good works make it easier for God to love us, makes us more acceptable”. This fellow is a wonderful man who attends a church in our community.
It seems that within the same sentence he contradicts himself but this is not as unique a situation as we may expect. This happens in the lives of many people, we say we believe something and our lives demonstrate something completely different. We as Christians are very good at speaking out of both sides of our mouths. I am haunted by a quote from an old DC Talk Cd that says “the biggest cause of atheism in the world is Christians They profess Him with their mouth and deny Him with their lives.” This is not an intentional attempt at deceit rather a product of how we have learned church. Sadly, whether we realize it our not, it seems the Christian faith is reduced to a series of intellectual assents to doctrine, being a member of a particular club, giving money to the club and supporting the programs of the club by attending while it not having any real implication on family life, work life / school life – real life. Generally, it fits into a neat religious box and the Jesus we put in our religious box doesn't connect us to life at all.
I use a computer for a lot of my work. Every once in a while it is necessary to run a de-frag to get like files positioned with like files and to clean up program paths that are no longer used. If you don't, your computer slows down and will crash as it goes racing along a command string to find it connected to nothing, a dead end. Then you get freeze ups and crashes! So it is in many of our lives. Limited connectedness which manifests a lack of wholeness – freeze ups and crashes! Like the computer, we have files or blocks of files and these are how we organize our thoughts. We group like thoughts together (though they maybe stored in different areas of the brain). These thoughts are accessed and connected with other experiences that are meaningful and relevant. Often these trains of thought are very compartmentalized and seldom do the thoughts of one compartment influence the others unless we train them too.
We seem to have our home box, work box, school box, club box and our religious box. Everything has it's place, it's ordered and is scheduled to manage a very busy and pressurized life. Many of us struggle to effectively integrate our faith life and the rest of life. We often struggle under the obligations of some form of rule keeping but by and large many do not see any real implications of their faith on making the mortgage payment, relating with friends, disciplining a child, passing a course or closing a big deal. Religious rule keeping doesn't cut it because real life isn't so black and white. Often we fudge the lines on a superficial level to make some sort of connection between the two but in general, compartmentalized thinking is actually a barrier to wholeness.
Just as a computer has an operating system (O.S.) to tell it how to process and access the files or boxes of information, so do we in a sense. Our operating system is built upon our culture, our experiences (good or bad) and our deep values and belief about the world, other people and ourselves. This forms areas like our identity, our significance and sense of well being. It is in this place that fear resides, rejection, anger and of course love, creativity, etc. Your operating system will effect the way you interpret what happens to you, the way you will group information, the way you will remember events and how you will interact or connect with the compartments of your life. It influences how you interact with our world, with Jesus and others. If you are fearful, this will taint how you interpret everything in life as you seek to protect yourself. If we are longing for authentic love, this will effect how you behave to satiate that longing. Likewise, if in your heart of hearts, you see God as mostly angry, cold and distant, this will affect the way you see yourself, your relationship with Him and the rest of the world. I am not talking about what our religious box will say about God, what we parrot – I am talking about what we REALLY believe about God and this will be revealed in how we actually live our real lives.
An un-integrated faith will not effect our O.S., the core of who we are. Jesus is not another compartment to our lives, He is healing our operating system. This happens as we release Him from the religious box and through intimate relationship allow Him access to the very deepest places of our hearts. Into the shadows of our hearts where the hurt, the lies and fear reside. Jesus brings the light of His love and dissipate the shadows bringing healing to those hurts, dispel the lies and with Divine love casts out fear. This is not an intellectual process as much as it is a growing relationship. A fuller and growing understanding of who Jesus is and what He actually did, and does, for us separate from the hype and humanism of much of our western church teaching. This relationship cannot be experienced from a box.
Scripture speaks about abundant life and yet so many ashamedly admit to this being ever allusive in their lives. How does Holy Spirit bring a growing wholeness to our lives? In the next few segments we will be looking at some specific areas which God is connecting to His people in life giving ways. Some basic foundational adjustments to our operating system through which we see God, ourselves and our world will begin a significant transformation.
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