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Theology

Belief

Sandra

The simple definition of saving belief in the Bible, is the belief that Jesus is God’s son and he died on the cross in my place for the payment of my sin. The Bible teaches that this belief results in salvation. This is the truth.

But I think that what we believe, beyond the simple definition, affects what we are saved from.

I think it is possible to believe very little of the full beautiful gospel, and to be saved in a legal way, but miss out on being saved in the fullest way that God intends/desires us to be saved.

The implications of the cross are huge.  I think that we stop too short in our belief.  Each aspect of the gospel requires unpacking, and we need to examine our beliefs about each aspect to experience salvation in the fullest sense.

There is so much more to believe or not believe.

Who is God?

God is love.  All his motivations are out of love.  God is good. I can trust him. He is the source of life. He is the power source of our freedom.  He is in control. I am not.  He is the rightful authority.  He has the truth about how life should be lived.

If you don’t believe he is good you may hate, or fear him.

If you don’t believe he is your source, you may not experience his power.

You may believe that Jesus died for your sins, but not really trust God’s way of life. You may continue to make decisions for yourself about how to live.

Who are we?  What does it mean for us to be restored to our original design?

The truth is that you are God’s prized creation.  You possess dignity. You are worthy of respect.  You are worthy of high esteem. You are God’s chosen and adopted child.  You are a loved son or a loved daughter. You are a citizen of heaven.  You are God’s heir.  You are worth dying for. You are worth saving.  You are worth loving every day of eternity. God’s love is the source of all of our needs, and our very life.  God’s love provides our identity, value, confidence, and security.   We would become dependent upon God to get our needs met for love, significance and affirmation.

Do you believe this, or do you chronically struggle with looking to sources other than God? Do you go to other things to meet your needs, because you believe that they will fill you?

What is the truth about the world and its values?

Humanity and the whole world system is broken and needs fixing. Do you believe that there is anything to be saved from?  We may really believe that the world is just fine.

What is our Purpose?

What is our mission in the world?

You could also believe so many versions of the gospel.  If we don’t examine our beliefs, we can easily go very wrong.

If you believed that the message of the gospel was that you would go to hell if you didn’t pray a prayer, then you might pray a prayer out of fear and then just go back to living your life your own way.

If you believed that God is primarily an angry judge, then you might live in fear of sinning and losing God’s love. You might live in shame because you can’t live up to God’s standards, and give up in defeat.

If you believe that God only accepts those who perform you may work tirelessly to earn his approval but never reach your goal.

If you believe that God is primarily a loving father who has your best interest in mind you will receive life from his love, and desire to follow him.

If you believe God’s original design for life was good, you will want to return to it.

This is all complicated by the fact that we can hold contradictory beliefs at the same time. We have many subconscious beliefs, that are opposed to the intellectual belief that we think we have.

We should be searching ourselves to discover what we really believe.  It doesn’t do any good to force ourselves to live according to truths that we don’t believe.  It won’t work, because actions flow out of our deepest subconscious beliefs.

I think that if we want to be completely restored to our original design, and experience the abundant life that God offers, and experience God himself, then there is so much more to believe then the fact that Jesus died for our sin.

See the next post for an exploration of the concept of Salvation.

Theology

The Gospel is Bigger

Sandra

When I was first introduced to the gospel, Sin was defined for me as actions or thoughts that were against God’s law.  Belief referred to believing that Christ died for my sins, and Salvation was defined as being saved from eternal punishment.

I learned that the important steps to growing as a Christian were to read the Bible, pray, witness, go to church, and live a holy life.

This is a true and simple presentation of the gospel, but sometimes I think the gospel gets made so simple that is loses everything that is beautiful and powerful about it.  The gospel is so much bigger.  I think that by simplifying it, we lose out on the fuller concepts.  It is the fuller concepts of Sin, Salvation and Belief that have changed my life.

Sin

In the garden, Eve’s sin was not just eating the fruit when she was told not to.  Her sin started when she believed that she could find wisdom and life apart from God. The action was a result of something much deeper at work, believing the lie.

We were designed to be dependent upon God for affection, wisdom, leadership, protection, and Life.  The beginning of all sin is believing that we can find a source of Life, other than God.  We allow sin in when we believe that we know, better than God, how to live an abundant and meaningful life.  We sin when we don’t trust God with our lives.  All of our sin actions flow out of our sin beliefs.

When we overlook sin at the level of belief, we are missing the root of our sin actions.  How will we ever change our actions if we don’t discover our beliefs and examine them?  And what good is managing our actions on the outside, if we are still not experiencing abundant Life, because of our faulty beliefs that we hold on the inside?

Sin is far more than immoral thoughts and behaviors.  Sin encompasses everything that we believe, think, or do that is not in accordance with our original design.  Sin includes all of our values, pursuits, aspirations, anything and everything that is even slightly off from what God had in mind for us.  Sin is all of the ways that we are deceived, and how we live out that deception.  All lies lead to death, not life.  Sin is the influence that we let in, that leads to death not life.  We all struggle every single day with looking to sources other than God for life.  We try to find love, significance, affirmation and security from sources like our parents, spouses, jobs, and children, just to name a few.  We do this in small ways, like wishing that we would get more respect, affection, praise, or appreciation. Even if we control our behavior and don’t do any action that is listed in the Bible as sin, the belief that we could find life in these things rather than God, is, in a very real sense, living in sin.

The simple definition of sin is a clear, black-and-white list of do’s and don’ts.  It is easy to mistakenly believe that if we are following all of these rules, then we are living without sin.  But if we don’t depend on God, then the essence of sin is at work deep in our soul, and we are still not receiving life or living in a way that brings life.  Living a good Christian life devoid of a dependent connection with God is not living a good Christian life, it is living a good moral life.  Salvation from sin is not merely salvation from the sin actions, but the sin attitude of self-reliance in any given moment.  If we ever want to experience abundant life, we need to acknowledge the spiritual battle over our daily beliefs that keep us from looking to The Source.

There will never be a point in time where I will be able to claim to be without sin.  We have way more sin in our lives than a list of rules could ever uncover.

Now don’t think I am trying to say that because we are more sinful than we used to believe, that we should feel more judgement or shame than we did before.  As Christians, there is no need for experiencing judgment or shame in the first place.  Jesus took away our shame completely, once and for all, when he died on the cross.

Rather than thinking of sin in terms of making you good or bad, think of Sin in terms of making you dead or alive.  I am saying that we are actually more dead than we thought, not more evil than we thought.  God wants to save us from our sin which encompasses all of our false beliefs and empty pursuits, and He desires instead to give us Life; a life that He had designed for us all along, a Life that flows from a deep connection to, and dependence on, His Life-giving Spirit; the Spirit who is working in our hearts to nourish and transform.

See the following Blog for an exploration of the concept of Belief.

My Journal

Idol of Intelligence

Sandra

One of the first things that my counselor asked me was “Why do you give him so much power?”  She was referring to the ability that John had, to make me feel stupid.  And how I would become so angry at him for making me feel stupid because, as it turns out, I held a belief that I had no talent or beauty to speak of, but at least I had my intelligence.  My intelligence was the one thing that I thought gave me value.  I thought I was worthless without it.  So when he made a comment that struck that nerve, it would threaten my whole sense of self-worth.  For example, he would say “I’ve never heard that verse interpreted that way before” and I would hear, “you are stupid”.  I couldn’t feel “ok” about myself if I believed that he believed that I was not intelligent, so I needed him to believe that I was intelligent to feel like I had worth.  When the counselor helped me realize that I had been giving him the power to take away my value, I was shocked.  A lot had to change; I had to find new ways of thinking.   I had to admit that John wasn’t really guilty of “making me” feel stupid.  I had to take responsibility for being so insecure that I was completely dependent on him believing the right things.  It was not fair of me to read into his motives something that was not there, and it was not fair of me to make rules for what he believed. I needed to stop trying to control him.

I needed to release John from the role of providing me a positive view of myself.  I could no longer rely on John as my source of confidence.  It should never be a goal to change anyone or the way they think.  I am releasing this goal.  It is a desire that I will take to God.  I can’t change the way John thinks about me.  I need to know the truth about myself and not give anyone the power to change that.  I need to be “ok” regardless of what others think of me.  I am going to release my need to protect my weaknesses and take the attitude of the ditzy blonde that is not embarrassed by not knowing things.

I see now that I was evaluating my value based on the wrong things.  I am not valuable because of my positive traits; I am valuable because of the personhood inside of me that was made in the image of God, because God chose me and adopted me, because Jesus sacrificed his life for me, because God has given me a significant purpose in life.  Because of these things I am valuable and I can esteem myself well.

I have always believed that God loved me, but that didn’t mean I was lovable.  I didn’t see God’s love as providing my value.  Now I believe that I am completely valuable, and yet, I am only valuable because of God, not because of myself. So with my acknowledgement of my self-worth, comes a healthy humility.

Now I think- “maybe I am intelligent/gifted/pretty, maybe I’m not” but I don’t have the feeling that my value is somehow threatened if I’m not.  I feel secure in the stability of receiving my value from the right place.

My new found security has allowed me to be able to love and serve others in a way that I couldn’t before.  I wasn’t able to minister to John because I was too busy trying to protect my crippled self-worth.  I was empty and had nothing to give.  But when all of my needs for love and acceptance are met by God, I am full, and I can give out of the overflow.

Personal Growth

Phantom Wound

Sandra

I wonder if sometimes we experience a painful event and we become very wounded by that specific event.  And I wonder if we have certain wounds that we use as a lens to evaluate every situation from that point forward.  Whenever something pokes that wound, we feel the pain all over again or we hear accusation as if it’s the first time.  We go for years and years or even decades of thinking that we are receiving the same message.  But what if we are really not?  What if our lens of pain is causing us to see things that are not there, or maybe to see things that were never even there in the first place?

I recently watched an episode of This Is Us where Kevin is in a therapy session and tells his family about the pain he felt as a child.  He felt like his brother was his mother’s favorite, and his sister was his father’s favorite.  And he had no one.  He felt like a fifth wheel.  He developed a voice in his head that repeated and said, “You are not enough”.  He tried to drown that voice out with things like football, acting, fame, and then when that didn’t work out, he tried to drown the pain in prescription drugs.

His mother admits that his brother was “easier” to love.  When we see Kevin’s childhood footage, we see that he did experience times that might feel like rejection.  But at the same time he was very loved. The truth was that he had thousands of experiences where his parents reached out to him in love.  But Kevin didn’t remember the love that he experienced, he only remembered the pain.  In the footage of his childhood we also saw how angry, jealous, mean and disrespectful Kevin behaved as a child and how difficult he made it for anyone to love him.  His rejection was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He believed everyone would reject him, so he was angry with them.  His anger came out in treating everyone poorly, and that made it harder for anyone to get close to him.  Also, he believed that he would see rejection, and so he noticed all of the things that could be construed as rejection.  And he failed to notice any of the ways that his family tried to love him.

I wonder if we do this too. One bad experience is used to color everything.  We let our feelings tell us what people must have done to us.  Everyone has their lens that they see things through to interpret events in our lives.  And everyone has feelings that are a result of that interpretation.  I wonder if we could be more open to checking to see if we are seeing things with clear vision.

I wonder if my parents were as neglectful as I experienced them to be.  I wonder if there were hundreds of happy and loving interactions that I just don’t have any memory of.

Early in our marriage John pointed out little mistakes of mine, like forgetting to turn the lights off or hanging the toilet paper the wrong way.  But he learned to have more grace and he stopped pointing out small things.  But those comments had already hurt me.  I felt like he expected perfection and that he was always judging me.

But now as I look back I remember hearing John’s angry voice ringing in my ears each time I made a little mistake, and I would feel more hurt, judged, and angry, even though he had never said one word about those issues for 15 years.  He wasn’t judging me, or saying anything, or even thinking anything.  I was taking something that happened 15 years prior and allowing it to control my thoughts and feelings in the present.  I don’t think he even judged me when he first brought up those things early in our marriage.  But it hurt, so I thought he “hurt” me, and it lodged itself deep.

Sometimes I share an opinion with John and I am not asking him to agree with me, or do anything, I’m just sharing what I think, and the way he reacts, makes me think he is feeling something that is a reaction to something much deeper than what I just shared.  Could he be believing that I am thinking things about him that I’m not even thinking? Could he be hearing accusations where there are none?

I wonder if we all imagine people saying things that they never said.

“I don’t care about you”

“You are stupid”

“You are not good at your job”

“You have to be perfect”

“I don’t love you”

“You are a burden”

“You are not worthwhile”

And we become hurt over and over even though no one is hurting us.  Maybe it’s our own voice yelling inside our head or some voice from the past but not this person.

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached.  People with amputated limbs will sometimes feel pain in the limb that does not even exist.  I think we carry phantom wounds deep inside.   We feel hurt and we believe that someone is hurting us, but if we look more closely, they aren’t.  The pain is real, but it is coming from a phantom wound.

 

My Journal

Abandoned

Sandra

10 years ago I snapped my Achilles tendon and had to have surgery to repair it.  After surgery I couldn’t walk at all, I didn’t even have crutches.  The day after surgery I was all alone and I had to drag myself on the floor to get to the bathroom, get food, or get my medications.

I felt completely alone, abandoned, and rejected by my friends, family, church, and everyone.  I called my friend in Portland in tears because I was feeling depressed and alone.

Just a couple of years ago I was telling this story, and my friend Crystal was there, and she said, “Wait a minute, I brought you a meal!”

As I have reevaluated that experience I realized that people DID reach out, but I rewrote history to match my feelings.  Now I remember Crystal’s meal, and that my pastor called me, and that my Life group leader asked if I needed meals, and I said “no”.  I felt so abandoned that I forgot about any of the positives of that time.  I looked at the experience through a lens of pain and it blinded me to anything that contradicted my feelings.  I took note of the negatives but not the positives.

I learned several things from Crystal’s awareness opportunity.

Sometimes I’m hurt, but nobody hurt me. I want someone to be responsible for the pain, but there doesn’t need to be a guilty party every time I feel hurt.  I felt abandoned, but that doesn’t mean that anyone really abandoned me.  It was just my own feelings.

Sometimes my hurt feelings are caused by my own insecurities. I might feel like I’m not worth people’s time, so when people don’t reach out, I hear them saying “You don’t matter,” when they never said that or communicated that in any way.  It is my own voice that I am wrestling with.  Or you could say Satan’s voice.

When I expect people to reject me, they do. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do things that set them up.  I treat them like they will, and then they do.  I hardly told anyone about the surgery.  I didn’t ask anyone for help; I expected them to be mind-readers.  And I expected that no one would reach out.  And because I expected to see rejection, that’s exactly what I got.

Expectations set me up to be disappointed. I decide what people should do, and make a rule that that’s what good people do, and then when they don’t, I convict them. I call it rejection.  And I feel rejection. Since then I have learned the skill of turning every expectation into a desire.  A desire is something that I would like, but I don’t have to have. I may ask for something but I don’t treat it like a rule.  So if someone doesn’t meet a desire, I’m OK with that, and not hurt by it.  Expectations just set me up to be angry or hurt when I am disappointed.

I realized that I never asked anyone for any help. My huge revelation was that if I had asked anyone for help, I would have had a houseful of help.  My phone would have been ringing off the hook, I would have had more food in my refrigerator than it could hold, and I would have had 10 personal assistants.  I know that’s the truth, but I never thought about it that way, because I was viewing the situation through a lens of pain and “victim”, and I didn’t want to see a contradictory story.  I felt rejection by people who weren’t even given the chance to reach out.

Thank you for the meal Crystal! It really brought healing to my life!

Personal Growth

Perfectionism

Sandra

Sometimes, the reason that it is hard to get along with others, is that we believe things should be done a certain way. We give almost moral weight to doing things the way that we think are the “right” or “wrong” way, when they are not “wrong” and “right” ways, but different ways.  Getting along with others requires a willingness to give up our personal preferences and desires.  There is nothing wrong with sharing a personal preference.  We can have opinions and even ask for what we want.  The problem is when we let our desires become demands.  If we are getting angry, then we know our desire has become a demand.  Also, when we want things our way too often, we become difficult to get along with.  We need to be able to hold our preferences with an open hand.  This requires the ability to accept and respect the way other people do things, even if they are not our way.

A perfectionist is someone who becomes obsessed with relatively trivial matters.  They declare these matters to be moral (right or wrong), when they are not.  They make trivial matters of utmost importance.  They allow these things to become more important than the relationship, and cause division between people.  They give criticism and withhold praise when things are not perfect.  They are willing to get angry and argue about small issues.

A perfectionist also holds themselves to an impossibly high moral standard, and judges themselves harshly for not achieving perfection.  They also sometimes see themselves as less flawed than they actually are, because it is too scary to admit to themselves that they are not perfect.  Perfectionism gives a false sense of value, and false sense of pride.

The root cause of perfectionism is a belief that your worth is determined by the opinion of others, and by what you accomplish, and fail to accomplish.  They believe that they gain or lose value based on their behavior.  A perfectionist has too low of an opinion of himself because he has normal human limitations and fails to be perfect.  But he is also prideful in his ability to maintain stricter criteria than other humans.

The cure for perfectionism is to accept yourself as a human being with human limits and human vulnerabilities to mistakes and criticisms.

The way you see yourself affects the way you treat others, because we evaluate others using the same criteria we use for ourselves.  Your value does not come from being perfect.  Remember that when you make a mistake, it does not need to threaten your value.  Learn to be comfortable with mistakes and imperfection.  Have compassion for yourself instead of getting angry with yourself.  This will lead to having more patience and compassion for others.

Strive to be perfectly human (dependent on God) instead of being perfect.  In other words, know your identity.

Most people look to their skills, accomplishments, status, and or appearance for their identity.  Identity is very tied to self-acceptance, self-worth, self-image, and self-esteem.  It is all “how I view myself”.  People use these things as a source of being “ok” with yourself, feeling like you are “enough”, feeling confident and secure, liking yourself.  When we get our identity from things about us, it leads to either pride or self-hatred/low self-esteem.  We need to discover our God given identity and gain our self-acceptance from the only true source of our worth.

Who are you? What is your Identity? You are God’s prized creation.  You possess dignity. You are worthy of respect.  You are worthy of high esteem. You are God’s chosen and adopted child.  You are a loved son or a loved daughter.  You are a citizen of heaven.  You are God’s heir.  You are worth dying for. You are worth saving.  You are worth loving every day of eternity.

3 Biblical Truths:

1.We are only valuable because of God’s love. We are not valuable because of looks, talents, or anything that we do.  God’s love is the only thing that makes us valuable.  This truth leads us to humility as we realize our need for dependence on God rather than ourselves.  We are incapable of earning our own value.

2.We are completely valuable because of God’s love. God’s love actually makes us worthy of respect and high esteem.  This truth leads us to a very positive self-image, but not in a prideful way, because it is based on what God has done not what we have done.  We receive our value as a gift, not something we can earn.  This gift is unconditional; it can’t be earned or lost by our behavior.  We can be confident and secure in our value as a person at all times because of God’s love.

3.We can never be more or less valuable than anyone else.  There is no room for comparison.  God decides who is valuable, not us, and not the world.  And God said everyone has value, so everyone does. God says that every single one of us is important, valuable and needed, and no one is any more or less valuable than anyone else. God gave us value and we should not let anyone take it away.  We need to decide to be secure in His love for us.  And we should never treat someone else like they are less valuable than us, because that would be like stealing away from them the value that God gave them.

Personal Growth

God’s Acceptance

Sandra

Sometimes when people tell us that we have hurt them, we become angry and defensive.  We don’t want to take on more blame than we deserve.  We find a way to turn the blame back on them.  We blame them for hurting us.  But the truth is the pain that we feel comes from our own realization of being sinners, and not wanting to be a sinner because we must protect our view of ourselves.  We want to see ourselves in a good light.  Admitting being a sinner is admitting failure.  It is survival, we must protect our view of ourselves because if we are not good people even though we try to be, we are a failure at life.  We don’t want to admit that we have faults, because then we can’t evaluate ourselves as a good person. We need to see ourselves as a good person because self-worth is based on seeing yourself in a good light.  Self-esteem is liking yourself, and you can’t like yourself if you are not a good person.

But the truth is, we are not good. Our sin nature is not likable and we can’t get rid of it.  But our sin nature is not us.  Our true self is our spirit which is redeemed by God and it is only “good” because Christ has redeemed it, not because of our own success.  We ourselves could never be good.  But we can love our redeemed selves, not because of goodness but because of gratefulness to God with humility.  We can love our “self” that is clean and redeemed by God. But we still have to fully own (admit to) our sinfulness; it is a part of us.  The fact that we are still sinners does not have to threaten our love/acceptance of ourselves; we can love ourselves the exact way that God does.  He loves us even in our sin because we are worth it not because of righteous things we have done but because of his grace.  We can love ourselves in spite of our sinfulness because we have been redeemed.  This is a humble love for ourselves because we did not earn our lovableness, God provided our value by his choice to love us. When we try to love ourselves because we are so good it is based on a lie, a false evaluation of ourselves, because no one is good even on their best days.  Goodness is not achievable, so if goodness is the indicator of self-like, no one can every really like themselves legitimately because we are sinners and will continue to sin until death.  We need to have a healthy love and acceptance of ourselves based on what God has done, not what we have done.  And we need to fully accept that we are not only sinners, but we are responsible for each and every one of our sinful thoughts and actions, and we need to hold ourselves responsible for our sin rather than deny that it exists.

“A complete knowing of our self in relation to God requires knowing our self as deeply loved by God, our self as deeply sinful, and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored.”  “A genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self.”  David Benner

When we recognize that we don’t need to be “good” to be a valuable person, we are free to accept ourselves, the good, bad, and the ugly.  We can acknowledge our shortcomings and not be so threatened.  We can listen to the feelings of others and actually care about how they feel and apologize when necessary, even when we ourselves are in pain.  When we know our true identity in Christ, we become secure.  We become strong enough to hear painful things about ourselves.  And we become strong enough to care about others in spite of the pain.

 

Blogs

God is Not Condemning

Sandra

If you have in your mind a condemning God, you don’t have the right view of God.  When you have received his love you won’t be afraid; you will hear “I love you.”

1 Jn. 4:17-18 says: “Love is made complete so that we will have confidence on the day of judgement…There is no fear in love. Love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” When we have received God’s love, we don’t need to fear losing our forgiven state with Him.

Rom. 8:1-2 “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

John 3:17 says “God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Rom. 8: 33-39 says that “Nothing can separate us from the love of God.”

When we “believed”, we were declared “not guilty.”  There is no more separation. There is no more anger, or wrath. We do not have to fear condemnation or guilt.  (Jn. 3:18; Heb. 10:14; 17-18) We are legally “not guilty” by believing.   A guilty Christian is an oxymoron.  We don’t become guilty again each time we sin.  We don’t lose God’s love or acceptance when we sin.  Jesus died for all of our sins, past, present, and future.  The whole point of Jesus death was so that He could have a relationship with us even though we are, and continue to be, sinners.  He knew that we would wrestle with a desire to be independent from Him until the day we die.  God sees our inability as a part of our reality and he is not mad at our weakness.  In Matt. 5:3 Jesus calls being “poor in spirit” or being in a state of incompleteness before God, “a blessed state”.  In 2 Cor. 12:7-10, Paul says that our weakness keeps us humble and dependent upon God’s strength.

If we are still feeling guilty when we sin, the problem is inside of us.  God does not give us feelings of guilt.  The Holy Spirit sends us messages of conviction, not feelings.  We decide how to feel about the message.  God does not motivate us by guilt, he motivates us by love.  The more we receive God’s love, the more that we will be motivated by his love to live the way that we were created to live. We don’t need guilt motivation.  God does want us to know how terrible sin is and that it needs judgment, but only so that we understand how great our salvation is, not so that we think we are bad forever.  He has rescued us.  He wants us to see ourselves as rescued forever, not judged forever.

God does not want us feeling guilty.  Jesus died on the cross to cure us of our guilt.  Guilt does not motivate us to change for the right reason.  Guilt is focuses on how we feel about ourselves, not on the offended party or the destructiveness of our actions.  When we feel guilty, we want it to go away so that we can feel better about ourselves.  But when we are motivated by God’s love for us and therefore our love for his perfect design, and for all of his valuable creations, then we change because we have empathy for the people that we hurt and we have a desire to do things that are right because they bring life and not death.

God’s acceptance of you, and therefore your acceptance of yourself as a continually sinful person, does not cause you to sin more.  The lack of fear allows you to face the truth instead of deny it or try to escape the guilt feelings. Once you don’t have to worry about guilt anymore, you are free to be motivated by love.  When you realize that God is “for you”, and he loves you, and has always had your best interest in mind, you understand that all of his instructions and commands are good, and benefit you, and bring life.   This leads to freedom from sin motivated by love rather than guilt.

Theology

Does God Leave Us When We Sin?

Sandra

Many Christians believe that when they sin, God turns away from them, he leaves them because he can’t be in the presence of sin.  And then when we repent he comes back.

I have been thinking about this and it seems to me that the Bible teaches something different.

First of all, there are many examples in the Bible that make it clear that God can be in the presence of sin.  Satan was in the presence of the Lord in Job chapter 1 verses 6-12 and chapter 2 verses 1-7. God not only allowed Satan in his presence, but took his suggestion to strike Job.   Jesus was God incarnate.  He came into our world and lived and ate with sinners.  Also the Bible teaches in Jeremiah 23:23-24 that God is omnipresent.  God is present everywhere.  He fills heaven and earth.  If he is everywhere, then he is in the presence of sinful people.

If God could only be around us when we were morally perfect, wouldn’t that mean that such a thing was possible?  Have you ever had a day you were morally perfect? I haven’t.  Every Christian in the world wrestles with sin every single day of his or her life.  Even the apostle Paul complained, “The good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (Romans 7:20).  Paul also said in 1 Corinthians 4:4 that even though his conscience is clear, it does not mean that he is innocent.  None of us is conformed to the image of Christ overnight.  Sanctification is a lifelong process.  That process will not be complete until we are clothed with our imperishable bodies, enter the Holy City, and see the Lord face to face.  If we had to be morally perfect for God to be in our presence, then he would never be in our presence. And yet God lives inside of us. (1 Cor. 3:16) And he is with us. (Matt. 28:20; Heb. 13:5)

If God can only be around us when we are sinless, that would make God’s forgiveness conditional.  God’s love for us always has been and always will be in spite of our behavior, not because of our behavior. (Eph. 2:4-5 “We were by nature objects of wrath.  But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.”  Titus 3:3-5 At one time we were foolish, disobedient… but when the love of God appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” Rom. 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”)  The Bible clearly teaches that salvation is given because of God’s grace, not because of our good behavior.  And if it is not based on our behavior before our salvation, it doesn’t get taken away based on behavior after. (Rom. 11:6; Gal. 2:16, Gal. 2:21; Eph. 28-9)  The Bible also clearly teaches that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 8:1-2; Jn. 3:17; Rom 8:33-39)

Maybe the idea that God can’t be in the presence of sin comes from Habakkuk 1:13 where it says that God’s “eyes are too pure to look on evil”.  Could it be that Habakkuk 1:13 is a picture of God’s moral perfection and holiness?  Maybe it is not meant to be a statement about his physical presence. We know God does not literally have eyes.  God is spirit (Jn. 4:24) and does not have a physical presence.

The Bible teaches that God is opposed to sin and evil, that he is holy and righteous.  We know that eventually he will quarantine evil from good when he creates the New Heaven and Earth (Rev. 21).  At that time, God will physically separate those who love him from those who don’t.  Those who love him will no longer be in the presence of sin from that point forward.

Until then, God tolerates the presence of sin in order to accomplish his purposes with mankind.  Thank goodness, because if God truly could not be in the presence of sin, none of us would be here!

My Journal

My Story

Sandra

For years John and I repeated the same patterns.  He would do something or not do something, I would feel like he didn’t love me and become angry.  No matter how many times he told me that he loved me, I never believed him.  I thought that he was just being a good person and loving me out of duty.  The most consistent fight was over his being late for dinner.  I felt that it was proof that he did not love me.  We tried to work it out on our own but we couldn’t, so we started meeting with another pastor couple.  They listened and encouraged us.  The wife recognized that I had low self-esteem and gave me some verses to memorize about God’s love.  It was while I was thinking about God’s love that I realized that I was not believing that I was worthy of love because I had never been loved.  It didn’t matter how much John actually loved me, I would have never believed him, because the problem was inside of me.  I had always thought that I believed that God loved me, but it didn’t make a difference in my life because I didn’t realize that love made me valuable.  So I didn’t really like myself and I was convinced I wasn’t worth loving by anyone else.  As a child I felt that my parents never told me they loved me, never spent time with me, never came to any of my cross country meets or any other important events in my life.  I used to beg my dad to teach me to golf or how to fish because he had taught my brother, but he always refused.  My parents hardly ever even talked to me.  When we needed medical attention my parents never seemed to notice. We would just suffer with disease until our school called home.  They didn’t protect us from people who they should have protected us from.  I was so angry because of the pain of not being loved by anyone.  So I believed that all of John’s actions of love were only out of duty because he could not possibly truly love me, because deep down I believed I was not valuable enough to love.   When I realized this false belief, I began to accept John’s love as genuine.  I realized that I was deeply hurt, but the hurt wasn’t caused by John.  I had been angry at the wrong person.  I was punishing him for my own insecurity.  I needed to resolve the hurt so that I didn’t have to live an angry life any more.

I started really working on the question of where our value comes from and realized I had been trying to get my sense of value from the opinions of the people around me.  I have finally come to terms with the fact that people don’t get to tell me my value, I am simply valuable because God created all human beings with value.  It can’t be taken away by anyone but it also can’t be earned.  My value is a gift from God and I am completely dependent on Him for it.  I have become very realistic about my weaknesses and inability to be “good” and yet I still believe I am immensely valuable and worthy of love.  My dad doesn’t get to tell me by his treatment of me that I am not worth anything.  The belief that he could, is a lie.  God is the only one who gets to assign my worth.  Worth also does not come through our own accomplishments such as physical appearance, popularity, intelligence, wealth, competence, ability, talents, grades or success.  It feels like it does, but it doesn’t.  I am only valuable because of God’s love and I am completely valuable because of God’s love.  There is no one who is more valuable or less valuable than anyone else, all people are valuable simply because they are made in the image of God and are deeply loved by Him.  Brad Pitt is equal in value to Nick Vujicic (a paraplegic); the homeless or disabled person is equal to the president of the United States; there is no room for comparison.  We can never be more or less valuable than anyone else.

God has become the loving father that I never had.  I have reclaimed the true meaning of father.  I choose not to allow my dad to define ”father” for me anymore.  I am choosing now to allow The Father’s love to transform me in a way I never did before.  I have become completely dependent on His view of me.  I have a set of verses that I read every day to remind me.  When I don’t go to God for the truth, I slip back into believing I have to earn love, or rely on people propping up my insecurity, or be good at something to be worth anything.  God reminds me that love is unconditional, and love gives me value that cannot be taken.

I have agreed with God that a father should love his girls well and that my father is guilty of not doing that. Yet I have also accepted that I am equally deserving of judgment, God is the only rightful judge, and I have received the free gift of forgiveness. So I really can’t withhold forgiveness from anyone else without becoming ungrateful and callous to the forgiveness I have received.

Another thing I learned through counseling was that blaming my parents for the way I turned out was keeping me from growing.  Although it is true that their neglect did result in my lack of social skills, a low view of myself, and mistrust of people’s motives towards me, I had to take responsibility for learning how to grow in those areas.  These shortcomings were not my fault as a child but as an adult they are my responsibility to take ownership of and do the hard work of changing my thinking, my behavior, and become an emotionally, relationally, and spiritually healthy person.  When I was holding my parents responsible I could just dislike myself and feel sorry for myself, but when I took ownership of my own brokenness, it opened my eyes to my part in perpetuating these things in my life. I realized that I could change myself and I didn’t have to be a slave to their mistakes. Whether they apologized or not, or changed or not or even acknowledged it or not, I am choosing to not allow them to have so much power over my life.

I am learning to own my part in my poor self- image, angry behavior, bitter attitude, pride, etc.  It’s no longer my parent’s issue, its mine.  I am responsible for who I am and how I behave.  I need to be secure enough in myself to be able to allow others to be who they are, warts and all, and not let it affect how I feel about myself.  When I am secure in myself I don’t have to require that people around me build me up, think well of me, or like me, etc.  If their differences upset me, there is something wrong inside of me rather than them.  Security in God means that nothing and no one can shake my belief that I am “OK”, I am loved, and I am worth something.  Taking responsibility for my own behavior does not mean that other people aren’t responsible for their behavior, it just means they are responsible to God rather than to me.  I can’t control others anyway so it is best to give up trying.  It is amazing how much love I have to give others when I am completely secure in myself because of God, and I can love them even though they don’t think or act the way I think they should.