When I was young, I was terrified of God. That may sound foreign to some reading this, but what I knew and understood about Him ignited a deep fear that plagued me for many years. My fear was not always obvious. It did not simply show itself as me constantly crouching in a corner of my room, scared God would toss a lightening bolt at me. My fear presented itself in other ways.
When we know God, but do not trust Him, fear is inevitable.
I learned a lot about God growing up. Some of it was good and truthful information, some bad and distorted. I have learned that it is typical for all of us to gather both good and bad information over the course of our lives about Him. One problem is, we tend to lean towards the distortions rather than the truth. From all the information I gathered, God did not seem like someone I could trust. I knew I was supposed to have faith in Him, but deep down, I was scared of Him so I would make sure to keep Him at a distance. If He got close, I figured He would see me for who I really was and punish me somehow.
Knowing God, without trusting Him, leaves us with two options.
There’s two ways I often responded to my fears and kept others at a distance. First, I could ignore them, or act as if they were not there. Knowing that God was everywhere did not stop me from acting like He wasn’t. I would do this when I was certain my behavior would displease Him. If I could block out the fact that He was present, I felt like I was easing some of the pain of guilt, shame, and fear that was tormenting me. If that would not work, I could always try to make Him happy. The tricky thing about trying to appease Him is that it looked like I was attempting to get close to Him. Heck, even I thought I was doing that. However, trying to please someone you believe deep down cannot be pleased does not lead to intimacy. Instead, it leads to an “arm’s length” approach in which I tried to keep God at a safe distance so that He was not quite as angry as He could be, while still wanting more from me. It was similar to the old saying, “Ain’t nobody happy if mama ain’t happy”, which carries the assumption that all mothers are very hard to please, but you must try your best to do so to avoid their wrath. For me, it was “If God ain’t happy, nobody ain’t happy”. And, in my mind, He was never happy with me for long!
What if God is not asking us to work harder to please Him?
The last decade of my life has been a wild one. Through many hardships, I have discovered that I had been mistaken, in a lot of ways, about this God I thought I knew. As it turns out, God is not as unhappy with me as I thought. He is not expecting me to do more for Him to please Him. Instead, He invites us all into a relationship with Him in which He strongly desires us to be close with Him. The last thing He wants is for His children to be scared of Him, so that we run or try to make Him happy with things that He doesn’t even want from us. Instead, what He really wants is what anyone seeking an authentic relationship wants: trust, along with the giving and receiving of love. He’s already taken care of all the garbage that could keep us from Him. Jesus came into this world and displayed His Father’s love in all that He did, right down to taking care of that sin problem we all have. Through Jesus, God is pleased with us!
When we do not rest in our Father’s grace and assume He loves us no matter what, we are left with two empty and heartbreaking approaches to life: trying to appease Him or avoiding Him. When we embrace the reality of His unconditional love, and let Him teach us how to live in it, we begin to find ourselves less scared, more free, and discovering who He really created us to be as we walk alongside Him.
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