I love and enjoy my grandchildren. Laughing, playing, and being silly is my top priority in assuring them that they bring joy to our family and me. However, there comes a day when they exercise their free will, and I must impose my will over their will. The authoritative voice comes from my person and reaches their ears and eyes. They are stunned! They look at me puzzlingly. Then they begin to cry and call for their mother or dad. I become a monster, a stranger. My love for them reveals a different Pops in a new way. A way that inhibits their freedom, and they do not like it.
After a few of these encounters, they stop being scared of me and become angry. If life goes the way it typically does in our society, as teenagers, they will ignore and consider me as irrelevant. They do not feel unloved by me, and I am out of touch with the real world. At least that’s how I thought of my grandparents and even parents.
It just may be that this is a similar way we react to the laws of God. When there is nothing to challenge my thinking, I am right all the time! I am never wrong. But when my thinking becomes actions and attitudes, my thinking bumps into other people’s thinking creating friction. They also think they are always right. What fools they are! Compromise is out of the question! It is not long before some level of conflict begins, or at least dislike or even hatred germinates. The weak seek agreement and the strong impose. Earthbound wisdom comes to find resolution for “my” pain and the absence of costly conflict. Either way, the Creator’s image implanted in the created is distorted and corrupted.
I do not know if it is many, some, or most folks around the world who have to manage their bumping into the limits of their authority and autonomy. They bump into God’s sovereignty. We reason that God our Father is supposed to be like our best image of a loving earthly father who laughs, affirms, and is pleasantly attentive to our happiness. The result is we worship an idol of the Almighty rather than His person.
The “bump” causes a reaction in the person. How can I manage this “bump” and maintain my autonomy, my “rightness,” my holiness? We reason schemes for manipulating the things we have power over in an attempt to gain influence in God exercising His superior supremacy in our troubling circumstance. Perhaps the “Higher Power” is deemed as non-existent; therefore, His boundaries on my actions and attitudes are only superstitions. The bottom line is I want control over my life and your life when it interrupts my life.
Such reasoning is the stuff of “religion.” It is not the stuff of “Life,” the life God offers to His creation. It is not faith. Faith is lovingly accepting God’s authority over our own. Religion is mostly about how one manages life with other people and by winning the favor of God.
Faith is assuming God’s favor is already all over me and matching my living in that assumption, trusting His way is best for Him and, therefore, for me. Mark this, “His way is best for Him” first. After that, or because of that, it is good for me.
Photo – A teachable moment with a small audience, a nurse, and a hunter. Family adventures abound.
Baldwin Heirlooms 