Learning to See
To see all the posts in this series, click here.
A major hope for Redemption Church is that we help people see the world differently.
One of my main hopes for Redemption Church is that we help people to see the world differently. In particular, I want us to learn to see God in the world all around us. I want us to see Him at work in feeding the birds and in making flowers grow--just like Jesus tried to teach us. I want us to see the things about God (that He's good, that He cares for creation, that He's patient, and so on) because I believe that in seeing these things about God we actually see God. So many of us long to see God--it's time we opened our eyes.
Enough with low-level supervisors--let's go all the way up the chain of command and deal with the CEO, God Himself.
The problem is that when we don't use our eyes to see God at work, we see other forces and powers of the world at work--and we begin to think that those forces and powers are ultimate. We begin to believe that if somehow we can get on the right side of those powers, we can bend them to work in our favor. So we pray and hope and work and spend our entire lives trying to control powers that aren't even really the ones that are ultimately in charge. We spend our entire lives wrangling with middle management rather than going to the founder and CEO.
(As a sidenote, this is why I find so many other religions lacking from the very outset. If your "god" is one of many, he or she isn't really all that powerful. If your "god" has someone else that it answers to or calls "god," why don't you pray to your god's god instead of your god? Christianity has an amazingly robust and comforting view of God because our God claims to have created all things that aren't God. The earth, moon, and stars? God created those. Time, space, physical matter, and the laws of physics? God created those too.)
And what happens when we treat middle management like the CEO is what the Bible calls idolatry. We set our sights too low and waste our lives trying to please powerless, lifeless deities. You know the saying "you are what you eat"? Well, the Bible says you are what you worship (Psalm 115:8). And if we spend our lives bowing to and serving lifeless, powerless entities, we also end up as lifeless and powerless. It's time we opened our eyes.
Unfortunately, many of us agree with this concept but bristle at it in practice.
Some of us outright deny that God is at work in the world. I think those of us who would make such a claim have a hard time explaining much of anything in the world. In other words, we "got some 'splainin' to do!" But we'll deal with that some other time. For now, let me just point out that I think many people in this camp are there precisely because they see so little good about the world--there's no way they think that there any sort of benevolent deity in charge of this mess. Well, if anyone in this camp sticks around Redemption Church for a while, we hope that they start to see a little more good around them in the world, even in the midst of this broken mess that we agree desperately needs to be fixed.
Others of us, even many of us who would call ourselves Christians, claim to believe that God is at work in the world but bristle whenever we hear people speak like God is working in our lives--we think other people sound insincerely spiritual or downright stupid when they're constantly blathering on about God this and God that. There's certainly a risk of over-explaining everything in the world as some sort of blessing or punishment by God (Jesus warned us against doing exactly that when some people around Him were arguing that bad things that had happened must have been a result of God's anger at a certain person), but this risk shouldn't cause us to overreact and not see God at work at all. For those of us in this group, I urge you to bear with us. We're not shooting for easy peasy believism that explains away everything good in life as from God and everything hard as "from the devil" in an attempt to console ourselves that everything will work out exactly like we've always hoped and dreamed. We realize God's complicated. We realize that the world is broken. We want to be honest. We want to ask hard questions when there are hard questions to ask (I've still got plenty of them about the Newtown massacre from several months back). But if you'll bear with us, hopefully we'll show you how even in the midst of pessimism there's hope--life-giving hope.
So how do we learn to see? And how do we learn to see properly?
Stay tuned to find out. We'll think through this a bit more over the next few posts.
In the meantime, check out Redemption Church's very first video where we talk a bit more about what we are learning to see:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY2Cj5u_heI?rel=0&w=1280&h=720]
