A Mysterious, Indefinable, Relational Interaction

Through a dark night of the soul, I came to realize salvation happens through a mysterious, indefinable, relational interaction with Jesus in which we become one with Him. I realized Christian conversion worked more like falling in love than understanding a series of concepts or ideas. This is not to say there are no true ideas, it is only to say there is something else, something beyond. There are true ideas involved in marriage and sex, but marriage and sex also involve something else, and that something else is mysterious.

If we have a controlling personality, in which we like to check things off of lists, this is going to be extremely hard for us to understand and embrace. God gives us no control, really, over this "system" of relationship. Introducing somebody to Jesus is not about presenting ideas, then, as much as it is introducing a person to a Deity who lives and interacts. Evangelism, then, looks like setting somebody up on a blind date: God does the work, we just tell them about Him and where they can find Him.

You might be getting upset by this. You might think I am saying truth should be thrown out, that theology doesn't matter. But this is not what I'm saying at all. What I'm intending to illustrate is that our drive to define God with a mathematical theology has become a false God rather than an arrow that points to the real God. Theology can become an idol, but it is more useful as guardrails on a road to the true God. Theology is very important, but it is not God, and knowing facts about God is not the same as knowing God. Let me give you an extreme example of how very bad we have gotten about this in the West.

About the time I was thinking through these things, I was teaching a class in Canada, and my students were freshman college students, all of whom had grown up in the church. The class was called "Gospel and Culture". I started the class with an experiment. I told the class I was going to share the gospel of Jesus, but I was going to leave something out. I wanted them to figure out what I'd left out. I talked first about sin, about how we are fallen creatures. I told some stories and used some illustrations. I talked about repentance, and again told some stories, then I talked about God's forgiveness, and I talked about heaven. I went on for some time. And when I finally stopped and asked the class to tell me what I left out. After twenty or more minutes of discussion, not one student realized I'd left out Jesus. Not one. And I believe I could repeat that same experiment in Christian classrooms across North America.

What I came to understand, then, is Christian conversion is relational. It is not theological or intellectual any more than marriage is theological or intellectual. In other words, a child could become a Christian if they had a mysterious encounter with Jesus, and a simple thinker could become a Christian if they had a mysterious encounter with Christ, and even a person who was a Muslim or a Buddhist could become a Christian if they had a mysterious relational encounter with Christ. This is the only answer at which I could arrive that matched the reality in which we live, the complexity of Scripture, and the mysterious invitation offered to us by Jesus.

This passage was an excerpt from Searching for God Knows What.

A Mysterious, Indefinable, Relational Interaction is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog