Thoughts on faith
I’ve grown up as a Christian my entire life, with a smorgasbord of church influences ranging from a post-Jesus hippie Calvary Chapel, to a couple mega-church-ish models, to a Reformed Bible Church, went on a trip with Nazarene church, had Christmas communion at a Methodist church, and have a lot of Assembly of God genes in my dna. It’s kind of an odd mishmash of influences, but it’s also (hopefully) helped me see a larger picture of what it means to follow Jesus.
The weird thing was that, up until a few years ago, I don’t know that I really had a vision for what it means to grow to become more like Jesus.
I knew that I should grow.
I knew that I needed to be more committed.
I also knew that it honestly didn’t look very attractive.
Kind of like brushing your teeth. You know you should, but you don’t lay awake at night dreaming about brushing them the next morning.
The visions of life that I caught from the various traditions and books I read were something like:
Be really committed. (So I tried really hard.)
Become a hippie. (Didn’t seem fun.)
Do something big for God. (Now THAT seemed more fun.)
So, I jumped onto the “do something big for God” train and rode that for a long time. Yet, at one point, I noticed that my pursuing big things for God (I don’t really think I accomplished much, but you know, at least I tried.) didn’t seem to make me more like Jesus. To be honest, I noticed through some disillusioning experiences, that I seemed to be becoming a little less like Jesus.
Nothing major, but more impatient. Less joyful. More condescending.
John Ortberg, in one of his books, said something like “God is more interested in who you become, rather than what you do.”
That began to resonate with me, and I began strolling down that path. That path began to make a little more sense as I walked down it, but it was still a little like brushing teeth. There was still no captivating vision of a life growing more like Jesus, except for the fact that I knew it was good for me.
Doing big things seemed far more interesting and compelling.
Then I ran into a couple things that began to dramatically shift my perspective of faith:
- The Divine Conspiracy lectures by Dallas Willard on YouTube.
- Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright.
Both of these hit around the same time and I finally began to see a vision for what life with Jesus was designed to be and what it could be. I’m not sure exactly why I seemed to miss this for over 30 years, but it was as if a door opened to a new world, or more accurately, that the lights turned on in the world I was already in.
