The Problem of God

I pray you’d be willing to listen and go where the evidence leads, to question your questions, and doubt your doubts. Even if it brings you to the end of yourself and to believe in things that scare you, that you never thought you would. To follow him to places you never dreamed of, places he wants to lead you, rather than places you’ve agreed to go on your own terms.
For such is the risk, and the adventure, of Christianity.

ill we trust the one who comes to save us? The one who will lead us, however shakily, to the true harbor?

We don’t realize that God’s rewiring of our hearts prepares us for a greater glory than any of us can imagine, and that that freedom, beauty, and joy, however disorienting to begin with, leads to the fullest life.

ut what if our feelings and desires are betraying us? What if we can’t trust how we feel in a given moment because we can’t push past what keeps us comfortable and preoccupied? What if we sense that this longing, if we follow it, will change everything, so we ignore it and choose the comfort of the shore? What if the reason God is a problem is that he causes us to come face to face with the fact that he has a claim on our lives?

God upsets our comfortable lives where we have the illusion of being in control. But as long as our needs are met, we don’t want to question too deeply because it will mean changing things, and we aren’t sure we’ll like it. The prospect of a different reality frightens us. It feels like anything but freedom. In other words, some people would rather not be saved. The truth sets us free only if we want it to.

But we must understand that, in reality, this approach to life is the opposite of freedom, even though it may feel like freedom. And this fact, beyond everything else, may be the hardest thing to come to terms with.

Maybe, that’s what you need saving from today: the philosophies and worldviews you have chosen to adopt in your life, not because they make the most sense or are the most historical and scientific, but for other reasons

e need to turn from ways of thinking and living that are not in line with how God made us to live. In knowing God, we find that he must be our ultimate satisfaction, and that once we drink of his grace, we will never thirst for all the God-substitutes we look to (John 4:14).

ou can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

. S. Lewis points out, that a middle-of-the-road option is not a rational option when it comes to the problem of Jesus:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or he would be the devil of hell.