With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

by Skye Jethani

In fact, many of our cultural conflicts can be attributed to people living under God, seeking to impose their values on those who would rather live over him.

In many cases they don’t actually desire God, just his supernatural help. Sometimes it is called consumer Christianity, the prosperity gospel, or health-and-wealth preaching. In each case people are looking to God as a cosmic therapist or divine butler.

Some churches have made it their explicit mission to transform religious consumers into fully devoted followers of Christ. In other words they want people to stop simply living from God and start living for him. This shift is usually measured by a person’s participation in church activities, charitable giving, service to others, and engagement in both local and international missions. We try to convince them to do less for themselves and more for God and others. A particularly successful shift from living from God to living for him occurs when a person leaves her chosen profession and enters “full-time Christian ministry.” Such stories are infrequent but highly publicized in faith communities.

My Christian tradition had taught me that obeying God’s commands and being devoted to his work in the world was the prescription for joy, peace, contentment, and fulfillment, and this is what I had been teaching others. But after a decade in ministry, the evidence, within and around me, was failing to verify this assumption.

Each of these ways of relating to God is also an attempt to mitigate our fears through exerting control. But the problem, as we will explore in later chapters, is that they all fail to deliver on this promise. The reason, simply put, is that seeking control is not the solution to the human condition but is part of the problem.

The football player has given God his worship (“I praise you 24/7”), and in exchange for this he expects to receive God’s help on the field. When that help does not come, he blames God for failing to uphold his end of the deal.

Young people raised within Christian communities are being taught a LIFE UNDER GOD view of the faith. And when God inevitably refuses to submit to our attempts at control via morality and ritual, they become cynical and abandon the church and in many cases the faith as well. The bargain turned out to be a scam.

In secular societies, adherence to God’s commands has become a matter of individual conscience, but this has put followers of traditional religions in a quandary. They believe God’s blessings or curses are dictated by obedience to his commands, but they are no longer empowered to impose their religious convictions on the entire community. Instead they must pursue cultural crusades using channels in politics and popular culture to impress their values on the masses.

He made two primary charges against them. First, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders.”11 The LIFE UNDER GOD view puts its emphasis on appeasing God through behaviors—either in the form of rituals or morality. Formal religions, and those leading them, often create elaborate and arduous lists of requirements for their followers—the “heavy burdens” Jesus condemned.

Jesus’ second charge against the religious leaders was hypocrisy. Remember, the LIFE UNDER GOD posture is fixated on behaviors—following rituals and obeying commands. This way of relating to God places the emphasis on external and visible actions.

While the religious leaders sought obedience and conformity of behavior, Jesus sought to welcome people back into relationship with God. He inspired love and compassion, not simply sacrifice.

The problem with the LIFE UNDER GOD posture can be summarized with the words of the prophet Isaiah, whom Jesus quoted while rebuking the religious authorities: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules that have been taught.”

Whether it’s atheism or deism, the practical implication is the same—God simply has no bearing on one’s daily existence. And the fears and uncertainties that mark our human experience are dealt with the same way—by seeking control. LIFE UNDER GOD seeks control of the world through religion, by manipulating God through ritual or morality. LIFE OVER GOD dismisses this as irrational superstition and seeks control by discovering how the world works and then directly implementing the right principles. LIFE OVER GOD effectively cuts out the middleman and gives us direct control over our lives.

When the Bible is primarily seen as a depository of divine principles for life, it fundamentally changes the way we engage God and his Word. Rather than a vehicle for knowing God and fostering our communion with him, we search the Scriptures for applicable principles that we may employ to control our world and life. This is not Christianity; this is Christian deism. In other words, we actually replace a relationship with God for a relationship with the Bible. If one has the repair manual, why bother with the expense of a mechanic?

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. God can be set aside while we remain in control of our lives.

First, rather than looking to a relationship with God, the LIFE OVER GOD view seeks to discern reliable principles. It reduces and limits God to a reproducible formula. It assumes that the way God has worked in the past is how he will continue to function indefinitely into the future and that once we have discovered these principles that govern God’s actions, we may employ them with guaranteed outcomes.

But the sense of control and autonomy offered by the LIFE OVER GOD posture comes with a heavy price. By marginalizing God’s place, or eliminating him altogether, LIFE OVER GOD leaves us in control. God’s part was finished when he gave us the principles—the watchmaker has given us the owner’s manual for life, and now we are responsible for following the instructions. Implementing God’s principles and the outcomes are left on our shoulders. But this also means we have no one to blame when outcomes are not as expected.

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.

Once we understand our human tendency to give God a makeover in our own image, then asking a person “What is God like?” can be a kind of religious Rorschach test because we tend to project our own identities onto God.

most view God as a “combination divine butler and cosmic therapist.”4 God exists to help them through their problems and achieve what they desire.

The LIFE FROM GOD posture is so appealing because it doesn’t ask us to change. What we desire, what we seek, what we do, and how we live—all shaped by consumerism—are not disrupted.

When we absorb this cultural value into our faith, God can be reduced to an instrument of amusement. He, or his church, supplies us with the means of distracting ourselves from our pains and fears.

And yet so much of contemporary religion is focused on God’s gifts rather than on God. We use God as a means of building or repairing our families; we use him as a sex therapist; he is our political advisor and our financial planner. From God’s hand we seek family, sex, power, and wealth—but do we actually want God himself? We shouldn’t be surprised to find that when we fixate on what we can attain from God, we fail to experience the peace of his presence in our lives.

Somewhere in their spiritual formation they were taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that what mattered was not God’s love for them, but how much they could accomplish for him.

Among younger evangelicals there is a push to broaden the scope of God’s mission in the world. While not abandoning the importance of evangelism, some are eager to incorporate compassion and justice as central to the church’s work. Debates rage about the validity of these pursuits and whether they are as urgent as rescuing souls, but the traditional and younger evangelicals agree that we are to live our lives for God by accomplishing his mission however we may define it.

Paul’s language here is telling. When he wrote of “knowing” Christ, the word did not mean an intellectual knowledge about someone, but rather an intimate and experiential knowledge. This personal connection with Christ is what Paul valued above all else, and why he could find joy even while in chains.

He understood that his calling (to be a messenger to the Gentiles) was not the same as his treasure (to be united with Christ). His communion with Christ rooted and preceded his work for him.

What brought the father joy was not the older son’s service but simply his presence—having his son with him. This was what the father cared about most, not his property or which son received more. While the sons were fixated on their father’s wealth, the father was fixated on his sons. This is what they failed to understand, and it is what LIFE FROM GOD and FOR GOD fail to grasp. God’s gifts are a blessing and his work is important, but neither can nor should replace God as our focus.

Like the mosaic ceiling in Ravenna, LIFE WITH GOD is so far beyond our imagination that it must be revealed to us. We cannot begin to imagine the beauty that exists behind the shadows. A light beyond ourselves must be turned on so that we can begin to see. And this is precisely what occurred when God took on flesh and made his dwelling among us.

We affirm that Christ is indeed Immanuel, God with us, and that in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

If we peeled back the physical and metaphysical layers of time and space and peered into the very core of the universe, we would not discover divine will, natural law, personal desire, or global mission. Instead we would find God existing in eternal relationship with himself.

The LIFE WITH GOD posture is predicated on the view that relationship is at the core of the cosmos: God the Father with God the Son with God the Holy Spirit. And so we should not be surprised to discover that when God desired to restore his broken relationship with people, he sent his Son to dwell with us. His plan to restore his creation was not to send a list of rules and rituals to follow (LIFE UNDER GOD), nor was it the implementation of useful principles (LIFE OVER GOD). He did not send a genie to grant us our desires (LIFE FROM GOD), nor did he give us a task to accomplish (LIFE FOR GOD). Instead God himself came to be with us—to walk with us once again as he had done in Eden in the beginning.

But LIFE WITH GOD is different because its goal is not to use God, its goal is God. He ceases to be a device we employ or a commodity we consume. Instead God himself becomes the focus of our desire.

The reason most people gravitate to one of the other four postures is because they’ve never received a clear vision of who God is, and so they settle for something less.

While our problem of relating to God is far more than semantics, it has been my experience that when most people hear or think about God, they have a less than complete, and sometimes entirely flawed, vision of who he is. As a result, they do not tend to desire him. At best they see him as a useful instrument for achieving something more desirous.

God would cease to be how we acquire our treasure, and he would become our treasure.

But the man whom Jesus had healed had experienced more than his power—he had also seen his goodness. The healed man had a very different vision of Jesus and therefore a different response. He wanted to be with Jesus.

The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It’s a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don’t want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.

It is possible to have an interpersonal, experiential, interactive relationship with God well before one’s body assumes room temperature.

Coming to see prayer as communion and not just communication changes its place in our Christian life. If God is truly our treasure, and if we have faith that through Christ we have been united with him, then prayer ceases to be a Christian’s duty and becomes our joy because it is how we experience our treasure in the now.

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.

It is the experiential knowledge of God’s love—his unyielding goodness toward us—that delivers us from fear and gives us the courage to surrender to him. Real faith, real surrender is only possible in the LIFE WITH GOD posture. As John said, “Perfect love casts out fear.”

It may sound like a rudimentary idea, but God’s protection over his sheep cannot be quickly glossed over on the way to deeper theologies. It is a truth that must be deeply internalized and experienced in communion with him, because it is only when we come to a profound trust in his love and care for us that our vision of the world is transformed. Rather than seeing the cosmos as a threatening place that provokes fear, with our good shepherd beside us, we can actually come to “fear no evil.”

if we are seeking God as a means of attaining status, favor, or longevity in the world, then we’ve missed the message of Jesus entirely.

Os Guinness said it this way: “First and foremost we are called to Someone (God), not to something (such as motherhood, politics, or teaching) or to somewhere (such as the inner city or Outer Mongolia).”17 In other words, it is not our circumstances or behaviors or radical decisions that give our lives meaning and hope, but our unity with God himself.

What brings a person value, significance, and hope is not what he does but with whom he does it. The call to live in continual communion with God means that every person’s life, no matter how mundane, is elevated to sacred heights.

No condition of life is more honorable than another, because nothing God does lacks value. If he is with us in marriage or singleness, and in the garage, the office, or the home, then these very different lives are each significant. Each of them carries the same dignity and hope.

Hope does not depend on what’s happening around your boat. Hope depends on who is in your boat.

When God clearly reveals himself, his beauty and his goodness, he then becomes the object of our desire rather than a means of achieving some lesser goal. But in silence and solitude we discover something more: God delights in us too. We discover that we are his beloved children, and that his joy is not found in using or controlling us as instruments of his will, but rather as the objects of his love.

The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you by loud singing.