In your life, what comes before God?

GOD BEING GOD - The fear of God, the proverb tells us, is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding (see Proverbs 9:10). “Knowledge” in biblical language never refers to head knowledge but always to experiential involvement. Thus, when Jesus defined eternal life as “that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3, KJV), he was speaking of the constant, close interaction with the Trinitarian being of God. 

Jesus brings this grace into the lives of those who seek and find him. Progressive departure from God leads to life as we know and see it around us. The first of the Ten Commandments deals with this inclination away from God (see Exodus 20:2-3). God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please? 

For the person who does not live honestly and interactively with God, the body becomes the primary area of pleasure and the primary source of terror, torture, and death. “Free love,” as it is euphemistically but falsely called, along with the various forms of perversion, is an extension of body worship (see Romans 1:26-27). 

But sensuality cannot be satisfied. That is partly because the effect of engaging in the practices of sensuality is to deaden feeling, which awakens the desperate need simply to feel, to feel something. We have to have feeling, and it needs to be deep and sustained. 

But if we are not living the great drama of goodness in God’s kingdom, sensuality through the body is all that is left. The drive for self-gratification opens up into a life where nothing is forbidden—one can do whatever one can get away with. “Why?” is replaced with “Why not?” And because this is what these “gods” want—total license—God abandons them to a worthless mind: “As they did not see fit to center their knowledge upon God, God released them into the grip of a nonfunctional mind, to do what is indecent” (Romans 1:28, PAR). 

Such behavior, if not approved outright, is excused or even justified by clever psychological, legal, and moral maneuvers. This has been the end stage of every successful human society. Invariably, such a society begins to believe it is responsible for its success and prosperity and begins to worship itself and rebel against the understandings and practices that allowed it to be successful under God in the first place. But underneath it all is the radical evil of the human heart—a heart that would make me God in place of God.

Johnson, Jan; Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice: Experiments in Spiritual Transformation (Redefining Life) (pp. 37-38). The Navigators. Kindle Edition. 

 

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