Think you know the Bible? Think you know what its all about? Comfortable with your religion and your country and your life? Then you've probably failed to ask the tough questions.
I often think of that poor guy who thought he knew it all. He was rich, handsome, capable and he was hip. Religiously hip. He heard of this dude in Nazareth who was telling people how to get into Heaven. He decided to go ask this dude how he could get into Heaven - what could it hurt? I mean, even with a tithe of 10% or 20% for that matter, there'd be plenty to go around. Not fearing the answer in the least, the man found this rabbi and asked him what it would take for him to get into Heaven. "Sell all your possessions and follow me. For I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into Heaven." Whoah! Not exactly the sort of answer he was looking for. I'm sure his response was, "Uh, never mind. Forget I asked."
We learn, don't we? We know better than to ask those questions. We know better because we know that we are not going to like the answers. When it says that we should feed the hungry, house the homeless and visit the sick and those in prison... it doesn't really mean that, does it? I mean, you don't include homeless people in that group? Or the mentally unstable? Right? No, wait... don't answer that. I don't want to know.
I am in the third act of my novel now and I suppose one of the reasons I stopped a few weeks back (aside from the whole wilderness thing) was that I'm at that point where the characters start asking the tough questions. You never know how prepared you are to finish a book until you ask a tough question. Because in fiction, just like in real life, sometimes the answers aren't what you expect. The notes for the scene said that the character asks such and such question and gets such and such answer. No problem, right? Except that when I wrote the question, I realized that the answer wouldn't work. It didn't make sense. And the answer that did make sense took me and my novel into places I wasn't expecting and I was uncomfortable with the implications. I had to stop and rethink the idea of asking the tough questions. Maybe just a few softball questions for a change. Something nice and easy. Does Jesus love me? Yes, Jesus loves me... the Bible tells me so.
Complacency isn't a condition of laziness or low moral character - its a fear of asking the tough questions, because the answers may not be what we expect. We don't want to be moved off our perch. We like the view. If we don't ask the questions about what our country is really doing in Iraq, we don't have to face the potentially troubling answer. If we don't ask whether we weren't somehow partially to blame for 9/11, then we can sit on our moral high horse for a while and complain that we're so abused by the rest of the world. If we don't give a man the opportunity to answer to serious steroid using allegations, we can rest assured that our questions are enough to convict him. We won't ever know what the answers are if we don't ask the questions. And if we don't get the answers, we can not move forward and grow. We can not come right before the world and before God.
Entertainment isn't always about fun and escape. Sometimes, for the sake of drama, we are forced to ask the big questions - regardless of where the answers may lead us.
1 comment:
Good post. Often times, in our places of worship, the buildings that we call "churches", we don't do enough to ask the hard questions of ourselves - about whether we are truly seeking God's counsel. It is too easy to follow our own will and not His.
It is easy to become complacent in the way we worship, too - we must continue to challenge ourselves, and move out of the boxes we have built for ourselves. We must challenge ourselves and others to think differently, set aside our own preferences, whether it is about music, about prayer, about fellowship, about Sunday School. As long as it's God-led, we'll be okay.
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