With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

by Skye Jethani

But in our zeal to honor the importance of God’s Word and extol its usefulness, we may unintentionally do the opposite. We may reduce the Bible from God’s revelation of himself to merely a revelation of divine principles for life.

This is the sinister shortcoming of the LIFE OVER GOD posture. It causes us to reduce faith to principles, divine laws, and applicable instructions: five steps to a more godly marriage, how to raise kids God’s way, biblical laws of leadership, managing your finances with kingdom principles, etc. But discovering and applying these principles does not actually require a relationship with God. Instead, being a Christian simply means you have exchanged a worldly set of life principles for a new set taken from the Bible. But like an atheist or deist, the Christian deist can put these new principles into practice without God being involved.

“If God’s Spirit left your church, would anyone notice?” Put another way, if everything happening can be explained by human causality, then why do we need God?

From any human perspective Moses was a success. His ministry was immensely effective. Had he lived in our time, Moses would be writing books and teaching seminars on “3 Effective Principles for Drawing Water from Rocks.” But while everyone else praised Moses, the Lord remained unimpressed.