Inroads to transformation

confronting lies; relearning truth

I’m taking a break from publishing during the month of July. Please enjoy this post from the archives!

In a group I led at church this week, we talked about some of the false things we believe about God. Those of us who grew up in church all acknowledged that we had the idea that God was a harsh judge, standing with a checklist waiting for us to do something wrong so that he could write it down and be mad at us.¹ I knew I could never live up to God’s standards perfectly and that translated to my being a constant disappointment. I knew about Jesus but somehow I never realized that God loved me, actually even liked me. I never realized that God knew I wouldn’t be perfect and worked patiently toward my transformation to be like Jesus. Or that Jesus was compassionate with my shortcomings and inability to see myself and the world through His eyes. 

It’s not shocking to imagine that I struggled to believe that God loved me. I could say it, yes. I could sing “Jesus Loves Me.” Intellectually I knew it was true: God is love and God loves me. Experientially I did not know it. Instead, strange bits of what I was told about how God felt about me as a woman (specifically from a certain sector of theology) planted themselves deep in the midst of this performance-based moralism and grew. Those distortions and lies malformed how I saw God and how I saw myself.²

There’s a reason the believers of the New Testament are admonished not to be deceived about a variety of topics. It’s because our enemy—God’s enemy—deals in lies. And we are so susceptible to lies. Sometimes Satan doesn’t have to tempt us to rebel against God. If He can get us to believe lies about God, that’s just as well. Even better perhaps, because we don’t know what’s happening in real time.³ Getting us to believe lies about God and about who we are and about the world is just as good as getting us to throw off God’s ways and reject Jesus. It will still keep us from knowing and experiencing God. 

I have only now, in my mid-to-late thirties, started to actually believe deep in my soul that God loves me. That He delights in my existence. That He calls me good. That He feels the same wonder from my existence that I feel about my children’s existence even when I, or them, are behaving poorly. That actually has little to do with my behavior and everything to do with His purpose and my identity in Christ. 

Yesterday at work, I talked to a friend who is as interested in spiritual formation as I am about how we learn to see God in different ways, about how we find healing from the wrong things we have believed about God because they can damage us. Part of it comes from relearning our theology, of course. We need better understandings of God. Part of it is helped by counseling, from talking about these things out loud with safe people. And then there’s a part that takes time and intention. Maybe we sit with certain memories and imagine them, placing Jesus inside of them. How would Jesus actually act there, knowing what we believe to be true about Him? Instead of believing that God was distant or angry or unconcerned, what if we saw Him suffering on our behalf, mourning over our pain and losses? 

I’ve been practicing contemplative prayer recently.⁴ I’m quite bad at it but it’s grown to be an important part of my day. Sometimes in that time, I simply look at the world differently. What if I imagined all of nature and sat contemplating how much God cares for His creation? If I imagined His delight in His world and His grief over its destruction? That will, over time, change both how I see God and how I see the world.

Praying Scripture is a great tool for a different understanding of God and Scripture. Read through a passage—a psalm is the easiest place to start—and pray over each phrase. What does the Spirit bring to mind? What does the phrase make you think of? What part of life is similar? Dissimilar? Does the passage make you think of another person? Is the Spirit prompting you to do something? Should you see the world in a different way? Psalm 104 would be a wonderful place to start to combine this practice with the contemplative prayer.⁵

God wants us to know Him. As much as we don’t want it to be this way, it can be a long and slow process. We have to be committed to our participation in this work. As much as I would prefer this method, it is more unusual for God to essentially snap fingers and change things.⁶ Most of the time we move steadily through a process of change. This is the way God designed humans. 

God does not short circuit our humanity. We are not becoming less human as we become like Jesus but rather more human.⁷ In following Jesus, we learned what it means to be human and being human is often opposite the messages we receive. We participate. God invites us into the work. We aren’t spectators. We aren’t consumers. We aren’t popping popcorn and shoving it in our faces, waiting for God or someone else to live for us.⁸ Eugene Peterson talks about this in many of his books, but right now I’m reading Run with the Horses.⁹ On page 133, he writes, “As spectators and consumers the central and foundational elements of our being human—our ability to create, our drive to excel, our capacity to commune with God—atrophy.” We can become less human, less able to sit with quiet, hidden disciplines, less willing to confront our own lies. We will either find new ways to live or we will not truly live and know God. We are required to participate and submit to this slow work.¹⁰

Some of that participation means practicing spiritual disciplines that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Yet those unfamiliar and uncomfortable practices are part of what will change us, will allow us to know God more fully, will allow us to understand ourselves more deeply. They are definitely part of how I’ve learned that God actually and truly loves me and delights in my existence.¹¹ 

1. This is due to similarities in churches and geographies; there are plenty of other distortions.

2. And also how I saw other people. These are intertwined.

3. I think this is a real life application of Genesis 3 that’s carried throughout the whole Bible.

4. Rich Villodas has a great chapter explaining this practice in his book Good and Beautiful and Kind.

5. I wish evangelicals had more practice in some of these disciplines: lectio divina, contemplative prayer, praying Scripture. I’m slowly bringing them into the ways that I teach at our church.

6. I do think this happens. We see miracles.

7. Possibly less robot-like though. Certainly more embodied.

8. Or just watching other people live their lives in our never-ending scroll.

9. The book was returned to me by that same colleague/friend I mentioned before and when I stopped to look at it, I couldn’t return it to the shelf.

10. There’s that quote that goes something like, “if you don’t do anything different, you won’t get anything different.” Seems like it applies here.

11. I whisper these truths to my boys in hopes that they grow up knowing them. I’m sure they will have other things to relearn though.