Monday, February 13, 2012

Finding God

I have just finished reading a book entitled FINDING GOD by Larry Crabb for the second time. Actually the full title is "Moving Through Your Problems Toward Finding God."  This book is  challenging, encouraging and thought provoking.  We know that Paul put a very high priority on knowing God (Phil. 3:7-11).  He said, this is the "one thing I do" (3:13).  Is your #1 goal in life to "know Christ?"

Consider the following from Dr. Crabb's book:

     To believe Christ (faith), to serve Christ (love), and to wait for Christ (hope): that is what it means to find God.

     But to the degree that you haven't found him, your passions are out of control.  Trust is out.  You want to explain and control; therefore, you reduce mystery to manageable categories and attempt to run your own life without depending on Christ.

     You like to be right. You call it earnestly contending for the faith, and you persuade yourself that you are God's ally in defending truth.  But your angry spirit of smugness and condescension gives you away. Compassion and humility yield to arrogance.

     You long to heal, to relieve pain.  But when that becomes a higher priority than worship, you create a god who suits your humane purpose, and you devote your life to helping people feel better about themselves.  You end up using a false god rather than worshiping the true One.

     You long to connect with the supernatural.  You embrace mystery, fall prostrate before God in humility, and yield yourself to no higher purpose than experiencing him.  But your focus is on experience.  You demand it.  So you come up with methods to get it.  Eventually, you become more caught up with your theology of finding God and the evidence that you have done so than with God himself.

     To every cry from you passion-filled hearts, God replies, "CHRIST."

     Let your passion to explain become a passion to know Christ and all that he reveals through the book that God wrote about him.  Think hard, explore, take risks in your ideas, talk to people about their lives, but never leave the chair by the fire for very long.  Let your work of faith be always to believe he is good.


I encourage you to put Dr. Larry Crabb on your reading list. 









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