Why Would Anyone Choose the God of the Bible?

Why Would Anyone Choose the God of the Bible?

Our world regularly decries the God of the Bible as at least a myth, and at most a monster, begging the question, “Why would anyone choose the Bible?” This article takes the stories of those who chose to follow the God of the Bible despite the odds.

NATIVE AMERICANS CHOOSE JESUS CHRIST DESPITE PERSECUTION

My husband pastors a small rural church comprised of mostly Native American followers of Jesus. They choose to follow Jesus Christ despite generations of oral stories proclaiming the atrocities of being forced to convert to “Christianity”. This time no one forced them.

Some congregation members tell stories about a time prior to choosing to follow Jesus. They readily joined in with family members who mocked those who followed Jesus Christ. Years later, finding no hope themselves, they too cried out to Jesus and discovered why their relatives had been willing to endure persecution for their faith. They too now suffer willingly for their faith in Christ.

Why would people choose to leave their Native religion and face persecution to follow Jesus Christ?

A YOUNG MAN CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE EXPERIENCES INSTANT TRANSFORMATION

As a child, my husband’s parents would send him and his siblings to church but they didn’t attend. There he would hear about the love of Jesus that included the realities of hell. Once he got into high school, however, he stopped attending church regularly, rejecting all he’d been taught as a child.

At the age of nineteen, a severe breakup with his fiancé left him suicidal. He recalls that those Sunday School stories of hell kept him from driving into bridge abutments “moments before steal hit concrete”.

Unable to find relief, in desperation he finally cried out to God, “If you’re real, just give me a reason to live and I’ll do anything for you!” Instantly he felt an overwhelming peace. He soon found a Bible-believing church who loved and taught him the Word. He grew in his faith and eventually went into the ministry.

How could someone’s life be so dramatically changed in an instant?

POST TRAUMA, FILLED WITH QUESTIONS, HE CHOOSES GOD AGAIN

My husband and his first wife spent twenty-six years together in ministry. In their twentieth year of marriage, his wife’s health began to deteriorate, and after six years of illness she passed away one night while he was at work. He found her the next morning, his boys waking to him screaming her name over and over as he attempted to revive her with CPR.

Having seen people miraculously healed throughout their years of ministry, he strongly believed she too would be healed. So when she passed, he experienced intense doubt and questions to the point that he left the ministry. Although he struggled with feelings of abandonment by God, he now states that he also found solace in spending time with God through prayer and worship.

Two years after her death, and four years after the death of my first husband, Gary and I were married.

Years later Gary realized that as her health failed and his workload intensified, he spent far less time in God’s Word, the Bible, which contributed to his “crisis of faith”. He now believes that had he spent more time with God’s Word back then, his crisis of faith would not have been as severe. Not because God was angered, but because he now realizes that his time with the Lord may have strengthened him during those extremely difficult year after her death.

A year ago, God opened a door for us to return to ministry. Gary now readily proclaims that although he still has questions, serving God fulfills him as much as it did before his family’s trauma.

Why would someone who’s endured such trauma choose to serve God after all they’ve been through?

Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says,

WHY I DAILY CHOOSE TO FOLLOW JESUS

My life experiences have included:

  • Feeling desperately alone as a teenager
  • Losing my rock and comfort of twenty-five years of marriage to cancer at forty-eight years of age
  • Experiencing intense loneliness while raising a child with autism and mood disorder

I experienced such feelings of loss and depression in my pre-teen years, that had I not already known Jesus, I wouldn’t have made it. I have often said that without Jesus I would have either committed suicide, ended up on drugs, or flung myself at any man that came along. Throughout the loneliness that wracked the years I raised our son with autism, and then through the pain of losing my husband, I also was able to remain steady through the peace and presence of God. Had Jesus not chosen me as a child to walk with him, and had I not chosen throughout life to continue to walk with him despite the intense pain, I would have a very different life now. I seldom deal with depression and anxiety. I feel fulfilled. I continue to grow in my relationship with the God who loves and cares for me.

God longs for you to experience the transformed life through Jesus Christ that we have found. A life worth living despite the trials and struggles. I would even say that if this interests you at all, he’s calling you to cry out to him for help.

Maybe you’ve cried out to God before, to no avail. Would you now be willing to yield as my husband once did when he cried, “God I’ll do anything if you’ll give me a reason to live”? Why not try? If you’re willing to honestly yield as Gary once did proclaiming, “if you’re real, give me a reason to live and I’ll do anything you ask” God will listen and respond. Jesus said so right here:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Wish to read more about this Jesus and my story with him? Here are a couple more articles to consider:

Facing Loneliness (This is a longer than normal post)

Caution, Emotions at Play!

I have also written at length about my experiences raising our son in a chapter of “Life Repurposed” by Michelle Rayburn. My story is found on page 123 “God in My Loneliness”.

You may find comfort from this article about Jesus’ interactions with two blind men who desperately wanted their sight.

Suddenly, Today is So Very Different

What if You’ve Misjudged God?

What if You’ve Misjudged God?

So often people assume the pain and suffering in the world are the results of either an absent or uncaring Father (God). However, there are so many Bible verses that speak to God’s tender care over his children. Why the discrepancy between what we seem to see and what God states about himself?

Psalm 23 is one of the passages in the Bible that compares God’s tenderness and care of his people to a shepherd. It made me wonder, what this psalm (or poem) would look like if the sheep wanted to choose their own way rather than follow the shepherd? How would this psalm change and how could this help us possibly gain a different view of God?

This post takes a tongue-in-cheek look at what that might look like and then examines the promises God gives for those who follow the shepherd’s voice.

PSALM 23

God my shepherd! I don’t need a thing.

I don’t need a thing? What about all the stuff I want? God, why are you so legalistic?

You have bedded me down in lush meadows, you find me quiet pools to drink from. True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction.

But I wanna go where I wanna go. (I don’t understand why I feel so anxious.)

Even when the way goes through death valley, I am not afraid when you walk at my side. Your trusty shepherd’s crook makes me feel secure.

God, where are you now? Why have you allowed this pain? This says you go through it with your sheep, so why don’t I sense you anywhere? Why do I feel so unprotected and vulnerable?

You serve me a six-course dinner right in front of my enemies. You revive my drooping head; my cup brims with blessing.

I like what the world offers better. It tastes better, feels better, looks better. But why do I always end up wanting more? When it gets quiet and I have time to think, why do I feel so empty?

Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I’m back home in the house of my God for the rest of my life. (The Message Translation)

I have a lot of things chasing after me. Drugs, alcohol, sex, status, and possessions, but nothing ends up like what you say you offer me. What would it look like to have God’s beauty and love chase after me? Is it possible? Would he be willing to welcome me in his home?

Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. I am back home in the house of God. Psalm 23:6

WHAT IF YOU’VE MISJUDGED GOD’S HEART TOWARD YOU?

Isaiah 53:6 states, “All of us like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s path to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him [Jesus] the sins of us all.”

Could it be that:

  • What you are now experiencing isn’t the result of God’s neglect but your own choices to go your own way?
  • Could it be that your pain is compounded because others in your world have done the same, all focusing so much on their own way they hurt everyone around them?
  • Have your judgments about God come through your longings to go your own way rather than on the reality of who God is?

WHAT IF YOU’VE MISJUDGED GOD’S PATH FOR YOUR LIFE?

Psalm 23 depicts God’s intentions for you. But God’s intentions can only be realized if you follow his personal shepherd. Making a personal choice to refuse results in natural consequences even God may not have chosen for you because makes no promises if you follow another shepherd or venture out on your own. God’s appointed shepherd is Jesus Christ:

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep. A hired hand will run when he sees a wolf coming. He will abandon the sheep because they don’t belong to him and he isn’t their shepherd. And so the wolf attacks them and scatters the flock. The hired hand runs away because he’s working only for hte money and doesn’t really care about the sheep.

I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me, just as my Father knows me and I know the Father. So I sacrifice my life for the sheep. I have other sheep, too, that are not in this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They will listen to my voice, and there will be one flock with one shepherd.

The Father loves me because I sacrifice my life so I may take it back again. No one can take my life from me. I sacrifice it voluntarily. For I have the authority to lay it down when I want to and also to take it up again. For this is what my Father has commanded.

John 10:11-19 (NLT)

Could your current pain be caused by misjudging God and going your own way? Could it also be your pain has been caused by others who have misjudged God and therefore misrepresented him to you? Not everyone who called themselves by Jesus’ name actually know him. You will know someone has met Jesus, the great shepherd, when they speak the totality of God’s Word in love and grace, and when they act like Jesus.

Peace be still...

GOD’S LONGINGS FOR THE LOST AND HURTING

In Psalm 23, God likens himself to a loving shepherd. In the New Testament, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd. He had a lot to say about those who considered themselves shepherds of God’s “flock” but don’t act as God would toward his children, causing others to misjudge him.

One day Jesus told a story to a bunch of religious people who thought they spoke for God, but didn’t, because they had no heart for lost sheep. Many misjudged God because of it. Jesus came to set the record straight:

Tax collectors and other notorious sinners often came to listen to Jesus teach. This made the Pharisees and teachers of religious law complain that he was associating with such sinful people – even eating with them!

So Jesus told them this story: “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to sarch for the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders. When he arrives, he will call together his friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’ In the same way, there is more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away!

Luke 15:1-7 (NLT)

Do you think maybe you’ve misjudged God? Do you feel like a lost sheep in need of being found? God’s good shepherd, Jesus, is right here. Right now, So simply tell Jesus that you are ready for a shepherd and you want to become part of his family. He’ll make certain your request is granted. He and his father love lost and hurting sheep.

Want to dialogue further, Comment below or contact me privately at soulcries@rlseaton.com.