Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing-and How We Can Revive Them

by Jonathan Merritt

In order to speak God from scratch, we begin with what we have accepted. Then, we break it down, challenging our preconceptions. Finally, we build it back up in a way that is more helpful, richer, and beautiful.

That’s where creeds help. They ground us in our true identities as children of God who can lovingly disagree on most matters. By learning to speak the creeds again, we end the brutal heresy hunt that now runs rampant without restraint or criteria.

Justin Holcomb says, “If a believer genuinely accepts the Nicene Creed, they should not be dubbed a heretic.”

Christian leaders from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr. were called heretics.

German theologian Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who “speaks to this hour’s need” will skirt the edge of heresy. But, he adds, “Only those who risks heresies can gain the truth.”11 His words are as true as ever.

Learning to speak God from scratch is not for the fainthearted. We state what we believe but not always what we ought to say. We use grown-up words but not always the words we used growing up.

No matter how much time is invested in ministering and mentoring, your parent will be your parent first, and not your pastor.

Lectio divina

Not only does prayer change our brains and bodies in the moment, but when practiced over time, it leads to permanent physiological transformation.

I was helpless like Job, brought low before God out of sheer desperation. When he was faced with his own pain, he could only bow before the Divine and listen to the wind. The difference between us is that once Job submitted, God restored him. I had no such luck. I was incarcerated in the prison of my own body.

In a world where so many are writhing under the weight of chronic pain, Americans—and especially Jesus followers—must find a way to speak about pain that is helpful, informed, and compassionate.

Rather than speak of pain as the enemy of all enemies or a celebrated house guest, we might talk of pain as an unfortunate, terrible teacher.

Our frameworks of expectations work pretty well for us…as long as God seems to do what we want God to do. But the moment God doesn’t conform to our expectations, our whole world rattles. A baby is born with a disability. A person you love abandons you for another. A friend dies before her time. The expectations you placed on God ferment into distrust, into disappointment. As author Anne Lamott says, “Expectations are resentments under construction.”

Many of us—perhaps tens of millions—have a common experience when it comes to spirituality. We expect God to be something and then discover that God is not at all like that.

Jesus is a king but not the kind they wanted. He will serve rather than be served. He will die and not be killed. He enters unarmed, waging peace. This makes a larger point, that God does not intend to meet our expectations. Instead, God intends to meet our needs.

Disillusionment occurs when God shatters our fantasies, tears down our idols, dismantles our cardboard cutouts. It is the result of discovering that God does not conform to our expectations but rather exists as a mystery beyond those expectations.

When we talk about disappointment, we’re really speaking about a divine gateway to spiritual clarity that can only come through a life-shattering experience of disillusionment.

I’m dismantling mirages I’ve constructed around productivity and identity and self-worth. I can no longer work twelve-to-fourteen-hour days, so… I can no longer pretend that who I am is enhanced by how much I produce, so… I can no longer ground my sense of worth in accomplishments and accolades, and… I can no longer pretend that God will keep me healthy or heal my every ache and pain. I have traded these lies for a truth: that in times of difficulty, God offers us presence, not a parachute.

What we experience as disappointment is an invitation to give up holding tight to what we hope is true. To stop trying to cast God in our image. To let God be who God is, not who we wish God would be.

choice is ours. And who knows? If we decide to step off the dopamine roller coaster, maybe we’ll find ourselves at the foot of a cross, giving up all we have for the One who gave up everything for us.

In Romans, he talks about “the wages of sin,” an idea that would sound strange to earlier Jewish writers. But Paul doesn’t seem to mind. He’s speaking God in the world that exists, not the world that existed once.

We might say that sin is whatever contributes to life being less than what God intends. 12

Unfortunately, modern American Christians haven’t much to say about this kind of grace. Which is probably why when you ask nonreligious people what they think of Christians, they will often say “judgmental” or “hypocritical” before “gracious.”

“Grace happened, that’s what,” I replied. “And I hate it—and I love it.”

What if we began thinking about blessings as immaterial and internal, spiritual and supernatural? It’s difficult to imagine attaching #blessed to these sorts of virtues today and having the post go viral. But I bet we’d be better for it.

Maybe we are the shepherd and the woman. How often do we take inventory of our communities, and upon identifying those who are now “lost” and disconnected from us, take ownership for the role we may have played in their estrangement? In this view, lost-ness does not quarantine “outsiders” from “insiders.” It makes space for “insiders” to own the roles they’ve played in fracturing community and work to reconcile “outsiders.” If religious “insiders” began living that lesson, there would truly be “rejoicing in heaven.”