The Thing About Believing
God has made our brains to receive, decode and process a jaw-dropping quantity of information, like sixty bits per second, whatever that is in layman’s terms, but today’s lightning-fast tech developments are blowing past our max inputs with staggering results. This barrage of incoming data has a detrimental effect on our psyches, both in impacting our receptivity for discerning and believing truth (God loves us) and in leaving us open and vulnerable in discerning fiction. So, we may quote Scripture, sing worship songs, pray using the floweriest, churchiest vocabulary and still camp out warily at a distance from the ‘too-good-to-be-true’ love tsunami flowing out from the Father heart of God. The following conviction: ‘I believe it for everyone else, but not for me,’ is, regrettably, birthed out of one of Satan’s most insidious, trust-inhibiting, Ambassador-crippling lies (God doesn’t really love me, doesn’t really forgive me). It’s time to pull back the curtain.
Matthew 7: 7-11
1. Our ‘loves-to-give-good-gifts’ ________________________________________ – vv. 9-11
2. Our ‘ask-seek-knock’ ___________________________________________________. – v. 7
3. Our ‘receiving, finding, opening’ Eternal-God _____________________________– v. 8
In our worship of friend-Jesus have we, in our exalted human imaginings, fashioned a friend-God who has become less than the God of the Bible and at the same time who has been reduced (in our thinking) to a being less powerful, less interested, less loving, even less trustworthy?