Pictures and Belief

...whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.

...whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world,

but that the world might be saved through Him.

He who believes in Him is not judged;

he who does not believe has been judged already,

because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

(John 3:15-18)

I am a long ways from clearly understanding this issue of what it really means to believe. But I am also a long ways from the complete fog that used to surround my thinking about this issue. I continually seek to delve much deeper into knowing what this means for me personally, especially since I am coming to realize that this belief that Jesus talks about is much, much more than an intellectual assent or profession. In fact, I believe that sometimes people can discover to their own amazement that they are believers in their hearts while in their minds they have strongly disagreed with Christians for many years.

Sometimes I wonder how many real believers presently are in open opposition to Christianity as compared with how many professed Christians are in reality unbelievers in their hearts. Unfortunately I am afraid that a great majority of professed Christians will be found to be living in unbelief when the tests come that will expose what is in the heart. But at the same time those tests will also reveal to others the ones who have not intellectual believed in Christianity but their heart beliefs were actually more in line with the true version of Christianity that they had never encountered before.

I have discovered over the past few years that one of the greatest problems in the church is not so much the overt sins that plague our lives that we fail to overcome, but is the misinformation about God that infiltrates our thinking, our beliefs and especially our feelings about God. Much of this misinformation comes from the transposition, misapplication and misinterpretation of most of the religious words that we use in religion. The problem is that we assume we know what all these words mean and so we feel no need to investigate what they might actually mean.

One of the reasons that I have struggled so hard to have much appreciation for John 3:16 all of my life is for these very reasons. First of all, my concept of how God viewed me and felt about me was so dark and frightening that it completely overshadowed any assertions of His love for me in this passage. My experiences with the god I thought was the God of heaven were far more influential to shape my feelings and pictures of God than mere words on paper quoted blithely by religious people. My feelings and beliefs about God were far more influenced by the abusive or legalistic ways that religious people treated me than by any real truths that might have given me a different view of God as He really is.

My experience of course, is not unique. Everyone of us has been raised up in a sinful world full of lies about God. Each of us has experienced ideas about God that are false in unique respects and so all of our ideas about Him are somewhat different from others. Some people have been raised in relatively good homes with parents and surroundings that gave them a much better picture of God than what I was raised in. Many others were raised in atmospheres that seared their minds with pictures of God much closer to demonic caricatures causing them to perceive Him as a hateful tyrant eager to inflict as much pain and fear as possible into their lives.

This is the situation that God is dealing with as He seeks to reshape every sinners opinions about Him and works to unlock all of our hearts so that He can restore us into the deep fellowship and love and intimacy with Him that we were originally created to enjoy. And I believe that, until we begin to understand reality from this perspective at least a little bit, it is going to be nearly impossible for us to properly appreciate the real meaning of these words or allow the Spirit of God to dramatically change our attitudes and relationship with Him.

For me personally I have found it very helpful to keep challenging the real meaning of the words that I am hearing or using when it comes to spiritual things in particular. What I have discovered long ago is that nearly every word that has been used in presenting religion to me has been transposed at least to some degree to mean something it was never intended to mean. Many of the words upon closer examination have been found to mean nearly the exact opposite of what I had come to assume which certainly put a massive strain on the credibility of everything I have been taught. But instead of throwing it all out the window as some have chosen to do, I have sought to look for the real truth behind these words and then tried to recreate the sentences and thoughts with the new meanings of the words as I discovered them. The longer that I do this the more exciting the concepts and pictures of God begin to emerge as a result.

I have often felt the sensation as I make continual discoveries from this process of redefinition and realignment of thoughts and concepts about God and religion, that what I am perceiving is very much like pulling apart a large puzzle that has been forced together improperly and then trying to find where the pieces really fit together correctly. It is as if the picture of God in my heart had been assembled by well-meaning but confused and misguided religious people forcing many of the pieces into places they were never designed to fit. As a result the picture that was artificially constructed in my mind of what God is like was very jumbled, distorted and even quite scary in many respects.

What I have come to realize over the past few years is that I am not alone in this terrible confusion and fear about God. Nearly everyone around me is likewise very confused and afraid of God because of their own versions of distorted ideas about God, though theirs is always somewhat different than mine. In some areas they may have better feelings toward God than I have had but in other aspects their concepts of Him are still very immature or twisted. In this respect I am actually liable to learn some very helpful or enlightening things about truth from the most unexpected sources if I am willing to not be prejudiced or dogmatic in my relationship with them.

The main purpose for Jesus coming to this earth and sharing so much with us in His teachings and relationships with people was to challenge and correct the many lies and perversions about God that have been filling our minds and hearts ever since the fall of Adam. It is Satan's work to constantly confuse and distort our ideas and feelings about God in order to cause us to believe many lies about Him. Satan does this for the main purpose of hurting the heart of God by causing His children to be afraid of Him and to hate Him. Satan is determined to deceive as many as possible in order to inflict as much pain as possible on God as well as on all those created in His image. He has been very effective in this campaign of diabolical evil and hatred, but Jesus came to undo the works of the devil and I want to be part of that restoration process.

Jesus clearly stated that the devil is a liar from the beginning and that his only purpose is to steal, kill and destroy. On the other hand, Jesus repeatedly and emphatically declared that He had come to bring real life, abundant life and life that does not include any condemnation.

I have begun to understand over the past few years that it is on this crucial point that everything else pivots. This is the core issue around which all other issues revolve and is the central focus of true belief. For years I have been seeking to understand what Jesus really meant when He so often talked about our need to believe which is highlighted in the verses above. Over the past few years it has become more and more clear to me that the real core of what it means to believe in God pivots around this central issue of how I perceive Him in my heart.

To the degree that my thinking and feelings about God involve any of the misinformation or interpretations invented by the devil, I am living in unbelief. Of course the problem is that the devil uses this nasty trick of deception so that when we believe lies about God we seldom are aware at all that what we believe is not true. Nearly everyone is quite certain that their opinions about religion and about God are the correct ones and many religious people are more focused on trying to convince or even force others to come into line with their concepts of God and reality more than in questioning their own deeply entrenched opinions about life and religion.

There is almost nothing more dangerous than a person who is quite certain they know all the truth about God or religion. That is the seed-bed from which terrorism springs up. And terrorists come in many more forms than just those who kill others and blow up buildings. The far more effective terrorists are those who force their opinions on those around them through political leverage, religious power or even sheer intimidation and force. All of these versions of attempting to convert others to our way of thinking and believing are all rooted in lies about God deeply rooted in our hearts. It matters not what our profession is or lack of it – everyone has an opinion about what God is like and that opinion is going to be reflected in the way we treat those around us.

I very clearly need much more transformation in the way that I perceive God and His feelings toward me. I know this because the impulses and reactions that I have towards others still reflect far too many misconceptions about God that are too familiar to me in my past. The very nature of the things that tempt me the most can effectively reveal to me the holes in my internal pictures of God that still need to be repaired and filled in more fully. The puzzle is far from being clear to me, but at the same time there are sections that are starting to take shape with a beauty and attractiveness that sometimes amazes me and thrills my soul.

I pray for God to continue to assemble His picture more completely in my heart and mind so that the reflection of His Spirit and disposition begins to glow out of me more appropriately. For it is only as the God of grace and truth begins to be formed more fully inside of me that my life and spirit will become effective to attract others to want to know the power that is transforming my life.