With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

by Skye Jethani

His instructions were designed to help us navigate through this world, but when morality slips into moralism, our fears are compounded rather than alleviated.

A friend once asked me, “If God’s Spirit left your church, would anyone notice?”

This is the third great failure of the LIFE OVER GOD approach—it causes us to gauge success based on effective outcomes rather than faithfulness to God’s calling.

I like how Kevin DeYoung explained it: “With a biblical understanding of the Trinity we can say that God did not create in order to be loved, but rather, created out of the overflow of the perfect love that had always existed among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who ever live in perfect and mutual relationship and delight.”5

Nouwen’s trapeze exemplifies faith. Faith is the opposite of seeking control. It is surrendering control. It embraces the truth that control is an illusion—we never had it and we never will. Rather than trying to overcome our fears by seeking more control, the solution offered by LIFE WITH GOD is precisely the opposite—we overcome fear by surrendering control. But surrender is only possible if we have total assurance that we are safe. We must be convinced that if we let go we will be caught. This assurance only comes when we trust that our heavenly Father desires to be with us and will not let us fall.

Faith is the courage to release the trapeze trusting that the Catcher will rescue us. Hope is the peace and assurance we experience as we soar untethered through the air knowing the Catcher will not let us fall. But once we are caught, once we are safely and fully in his grasp, faith and hope disappear. All that remains is the love between the Catcher and the caught.