It takes grace and effort to see God rightly.
Sin distorts our thinking and serves up shame on a daily basis about who we are; how God couldn’t love us; and how if He or others knew the real us, they’d leave.
Many of us struggle with the obstacles of disbelief, skepticism, and cynicism, all of which are forms of protecting ourselves from being disappointed. Cynicism gets rewarded in many circles, because believing in the good seems naïve. Zack Eswine shares that “cynicism and skepticism keep us from embracing goodness and joy, and yet, here’s the thing, cynicism can help you for a while. But it just can’t get you through anything. Because any remedy that would ever come your way, you’re going to doubt it. Because the one thing in life that you trust is your doubt.”
Along with cynicism, we often trust false promises of the good life more than Jesus. The scary thing is that these false promises deliver enough to get by but never what we truly need. Money can buy you comfort but not true joy. Fame can get you fans, but crowds bring trouble of their own. Perfectionism smooths the outside while you condemn yourself on the inside. Even as these narratives fail to fully deliver, we keep asking them to perform for us.
We struggle to trust God is good for us because we don’t know our Bibles as well as we think, or we know we don’t know the Bible so we avoid the Book and topic out of shame.
If skepticism, false promises, and shame aren’t your hang-up in your journey toward spiritual maturity, the obstacle of busy-ness might be. Some of us are too busy doing things for Jesus to really know Jesus, settling for a conditional relationship where activity means acceptance. Jesus has no interest in this offer, but we convince ourselves it’s what He really wants. It’s the same move as the Galatians who began by faith and then depended on works (Gal. 2). We’re welcomed in as children, yet through doubt and self-deception, tell ourselves we’ll last longer if we act like hourly workers.
Finally, the most foundational obstacle many face is thinking of God as a father, let alone a loving father. Jesus seems safe to us because we can read His words and He walked the earth, but Father, that word is spring-loaded for many with emotion, fear, and doubt because of our earthly fathers.
If we get down to it, many people view God the Father as the angry, sin-hating God of the Old Testament and believe that Jesus Christ, God the Son, comes and dies in order to calm the Father down and take care of things.
This outlook on God comes when we’ve made Him in our image and not the other way around.
Do any of these obstacles resonate with you? Which one most obstructs your path as you journey toward maturity in your walk with God?
Throughout life we entrust ourselves (thoughts, emotions, desires) to other fallen human beings, who are largely unable to rightly handle their own emotions, let alone ours. We are loved, let down, cared for, hurt, abused, protected, disappointed, or nourished in these relationships. And then, for whatever reason, we take the bad experiences from the bunch and project them onto God. We expect God to handle us as poorly as others—with silence, disappointment, shame, explosive anger, or trying to fix things with trite Band-Aids when we have a gaping wound.
Do you base the love of God the Father on the failures of your earthly father? On the failures of your friends?
I believe the single most effective weapon against our joy in Christ and becoming who we are made to be is the lie that God is not who He says He is and you can’t trust Him.
But if we take God at His Word, not our own, we hear a different reality. If we get this right, it will change our lives.
In John 15, Jesus tells His disciples: “As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. Remain in my love” (v. 9).
Is this verse difficult to trust? It is often hard for me to believe Jesus means what He says here. I have plenty of objections to why God’s love can’t be that good, which are ways for me to protect myself from being disappointed if He really isn’t.
But He is. We need our default scripts rewritten to see rightly.
“As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. Remain in my love.”
God does not love like we do. His love is better than ours and transforms us to be loved by Him and to love like Him.
Christian, we have moved not just from death to life, but God has reconciled us in love—from slave to sin to child of God.
You don’t have to hang out by the door waiting to see if you’re going to get invited in! You belong in God’s house because it belongs to your heavenly Father; your older brother has a room ready for you. The Holy Spirit is at work in you to encourage and enable faith that God is who He says He is, and what He says about you is true. You don’t have to live waiting for the other shoe to drop or worry you will wear out your welcome with God. His love for you isn’t based on your ability to keep every rule. In fact, God’s love for you has overcome your inability to keep every rule. Believe what He says and abide in His love. For only when you do this, believing what He says about who He is, will you be able to grow.
Excerpted with permission from A Short Guide to Spiritual Disciplines by Mason King. Copyright 2023, B&H Publishing.
