Exposing our distrust

Jesus seeks to root out distrust from our lives. How? By exposing it and showing us where we don't trust Him.

But this is a painful process. Why would He do this and allow us to go through the pain of seeing our failures? Doesn't He love us?

God is not trying to make us feel bad, or shame us, or to condemn us for not being faithful or not loving Him more. He is seeking to get us to abandon our distrust of Him so we will experience more of His love. Our distrust clouds our ability to see Him and His infinite love more fully.

He is not exposing us because he's mad or upset with us; just the opposite. It is so we will draw nearer to him so we might experience more of his love. 

God's love is perfectly set upon us and determined by Christ's faithfulness, not ours. But experiencing His love more fully depends on us and how faithfully we pursue Him.

Peter denying Christ three times and then Christ engaging him to feed His sheep after he resurrected is a classic example of this process of exposing our distrust of God so we might follow Him more faithfully.

For a discussion on how we must first see God's love to acknowledge our unfaithfulness, click here

Does God send people to hell?

What makes heaven a place of bliss? It is the delight we will experience in God and by being in His presence. But if we do not delight in Him and His presence now, what makes us think we will in ¹eternity?

It is not as if a switch suddenly flips on, filling us with delight the moment we stand before Him, after a lifetime spent with that switch turned off.  

For those who wanted nothing to do with God—and even despised Him—all their lives, being in His presence will not be a delight. It will be a shock, fearfully dreadful. This will be especially true when they realize that God gave ²clear indication of His desire for a loving relationship with them and did everything necessary to extend His love, yet they rejected both it and Him by rejecting Christ.

Requiring someone who spent a lifetime rejecting God to remain in His presence would be a greater hell than hell itself.

Imagine living in a house with someone you distrusted, ignored, and avoided all your life; not exactly my idea of fun. And not because your assessment was correct but because you believed it was and refused to believe otherwise. 

So how have we rejected God?

We reject Him when we live our lives as if He does not matter, even though all we are and all we have is a gift from Him—when, in effect, we simply couldn’t care less about Him. If we thought of Him at all, it was only briefly in our most ³desperate moments, and even then not for the purpose of knowing Him, but merely in order to find relief from our suffering.

If God does not matter to us and we avoid Him now, He will not force Himself upon us. Instead, He will honor our wish to live without Him.

The reality is that God does not send people to hell. They choose it themselves, day by day, by living as if God is insignificant or does not exist at all—when the truth is ⁴exactly the opposite.

To live this way is to live a lie. It runs contrary to who God is, to who we were created to be, to our very design, and to God’s loving desire for us.

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Footnotes:

¹The more we come to delight in God in this life the more we will delight in Him throughout eternity. The reward of our faithfulness to God in this life is God himself. 

https://thotsaboutgod.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-necessity-of-dependence.html

²By sending His Son and by giving us all the blessings of creation.

³But this usually passes quickly because He didn't give us the relief we demanded on our terms.

⁴Every good thing that we have and are comes from God. Nothing that is would be if there was not God. God is the source of life, love, and all things. 

Every breath we take or receive?

All of life - our own and the planets' - requires energy to operate. We're there is no energy, there is no life.

Some of the main sources of energy are the sun, wind (air), fire, electricity, magnetism, atoms, flowing water, food (for our personal energy), etc. Without these, there is no energy or life, much less the pleasures or conveniences of life.

But more importantly is understanding that we are not the cause of any of these. Yet we have complete access - if not regular use - of virtually all of them. They are always available for our use and benefit. And this reveals the heart of our true condition. 

Are we the cause of these or the means by which they exist? If not, then ²who or what is? Since there is no life without these, wouldn't it be important to know what or who is the cause, acknowledge this, and be grateful to the ²provider of them?

Are we grateful for these resources, or do we take them for granted because they are always available or accessible? 

Do we assume they are ours to use whenever we want or see fit? Do we ⁴demand to have them without interruption and ⁴become angry if we are cut off from them or they from us?

Because we always have use of or access to these, we live life as if we ¹always will. But will we?

Why do we approach life this way? 

If we take these resources for granted, this is due to not recognizing that all we are and have are gifts; i.e., they are available to us because something or ²someone other than us provides and sustains them (and could also rightfully and easily not provide them).

Would it be wrong for a parent to deny their teenage child the use of their parents' valuable car or beach house for some reason? Easy access or use of something is not the same as ownership no matter how easily or long that use has occurred or continues. We forget over time, use of these only continues because of love, not as a right.  

If we truly understood and believed that everything is a gift - vs a right - we would wake up every day grateful for all we are and have down to our very breath. These are gifts! But most don't wake up grateful. Most whine and complain about what they don't have or have lost. Many live in a perpetual state of having a pity party.

Most assume all we have is rightfully ours. They are not gifts on loan but the fruit of time plus chance and ours to use as I see fit. They may even get upset if you suggest otherwise.

Instead, if we lose these blessings of life, we get angry and even bitter as if it's our right to have them. And if others have greater access to or use of them, we become envious.

To pray before we eat and say "thank you for the bounty we are about to receive" should be our approach to all of life. When we wake up, we should ³thank God for the very breath we take in and for the use and enjoyment of everything else we depend on to sustain our life. And also grateful for our 5 senses that allow us to take in and experience all the good things around us, instead of being angry if we lose them.

Why? We are not the cause or the one who maintains these things, but simply the recipients and beneficiaries. We should be grateful!

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Footnotes:

¹which is why death is such a shock and blow to us. We simply take life for granted until we or someone else no longer has it.

The fact that death is such a shock indicates how much we take all we are and have for granted. Life is not a given but a gift which is owned, controlled, and maintained ultimately by someone else, not us. We may be able to manipulate things to go the way we want, but only to a limited degree -  never fully. We are ultimately not in charge and are dependent on these for our very existence. 

Because we do not regularly ponder or appreciate the gifts of life, it shows how resistant (rebellious) and arrogant we are to seeing the true nature of things.

²Contrary to the consensus of much of the scientific community, I propose there is a Creator. This is a posture or position of faith. But so is a materialistic worldview, which requires more faith than believing in intelligent design, i.e., the things we observe align more with the existence of a Designer than their happening by random chance. For more on this, click here. 

³like David, we should say, "...this is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. 

And if, like Job, we experience loss we should say, "...the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." 

When we truly recognize this, we will be full of gratitude every morning when we rise and take another breath. 

⁴To whom are we making these demands to and becoming angry with? Isn't it curious that most of us blame God when things go wrong, while at the same time ignore Him most of our lives or deny He exists at all? This only exposes how arrogant and ungrateful we are!