-We craft for ourselves a God we want to serve then we strive
to appease and impress this false image.
-We incorporate religious exercise into our schedules to
prove devotion
-We judge others on an imbalanced and sliding scale while
judging ourselves in absolutes
-We fight with our faith family and offend our real family
all the while rarely ever going out of our way to connect with others who are
in “real” need.
“We trade intimacy for busyness and relationship for ritual.”
In all this we set ourselves up to feel and be disappointed.
This god we’ve attempted to construct is never like the God that is; he cannot
be satisfied, he always expects more and will guilt you into a lonely,
secluded, intellectually pompous and barren grave.
It starts with us being too prideful to admit that “we” honestly
have no idea who He is or what He wants. So we start to “do” things in hopes to
make up for our lack of knowledge – then we guilt others by our seeming
scholarship and devotion.
Performance is and always will be a poor substitute for living
in the will of the Father. Our expectations should give way to our desire. Our
expectation is reward and punishment but our desire is Love; overpowering,
unabashed, everlasting Love. And that’s exactly what we find when we stop
striving and allow Him to reveal Himself without our instinctive preconceptions
and limited ideas.
