OUR ATTITUDES…
Have you ever thought that so much about our world is simply “anti-kid”. We have people who will chain themselves to the doors of abortion clinics who protest and call themselves, “pro-life” but, for the most part, our culture, even the church, is not “pro-child”.
Think about it…if you’re going out tonight, what will kind-hearted well-meaning people offer? “Hey! Do you want me to watch your kids for you so you can have fun?” “Do you want me to babysit so you can relax and spend some quality time with your husband?”
What do these well-meaning people really mean? What are they “really” saying? That you will have much MORE fun withOUT your children present.
Everyone in our culture seems to think children are in their way. But, I don’t think God sees us as in His way. We are all He lives for. He is at work in all of our lives every second of the day. He doesn’t turn off the “prayer monitor” to have “alone time” with Jesus. He doesn’t ignore our prayers to “teach us that He’s not always going to answer us”. He doesn’t get the angels to handle our prayers so He can have a “God’s night out”. God is with us always because WE are His joy!
Can you really imagine God parenting you and me like Ezzo says to parent children?
MORE ABOUT FEELINGS…and how they help us to parent…
If you park a car on your foot, God has designed your body that you will feel pain. That pain is not God punishing you for making the error of parking a car on your foot. The pain is not God putting pain on you to teach you a lesson. The pain is a natural physical protective system that God has built into us to protect us. If you are responsive to the pain in your foot you will remove the car and save yourself further pain and damage and possible crippling. If you are not sensitive to the pain, or take drugs to make the pain go away, you will end up crushing your foot, ruining your foot, making yourself incapable of walking, or ending up with some sort of infection from the broken bones and dying.
SO…when you do something like start looking at porn on the internet. God has also set up a natural system to alert you to this danger. You get sick. It is not God punishing you for the sin of looking at porn, nor is it God “putting that sickness on you” to teach you a lesson. It is a natural system designed to protect us by warning us that there is a spiritual car on our spiritual foot and that if we don’t remove it, we could suffer great consequences. If we focus on making the “disease” go away, so we can feel better, we are not supposed to fear that which can destroy our body but that which can send us to hell, and so if we make the pain go away, we can persist in our sin and can end up “in hell”…
God has designed our bodies to send us messages for our good when anything attacks us or threatens our well-being.
Now, if you look at the doctrine of “Original Sin”…that doctrine says that our flesh yearns for sin…tends toward sin… What is that REALLY telling us?
For one thing, if I think “you” are a liar. You just lie lie lie all the time, I’m not going to believe a word you say. And, so, if I believe my body wants to sin. If I believe that my body wants to sin and desires to sin and tends toward sin, I’m not going to trust the messages my body sends me.
If I believe that sin is what nailed Jesus to the cross. If I believe that sin is God’s enemy, what is that going to teach me about “me” if I believe my body just comes out of the womb yearning for and tending toward sin? What am I going to believe about what my body tries to tell me? What am I going to think of mySELF if my body is God’s enemy? What am I going to think of mySELF if my body is MY enemy? How is one to separate the sin that is in me from me? How am I to “hate the sin” and yet love myself? How am I ever to trust myself when sometimes my body tells me to do things that feel good…things that are actually good…how am I to trust that if it feels good it’s OK to do it if I think that my body craves sin?
I believe that believing that my body is born yearning for sin that it will make God a liar because God says that the truth is on my heart. God says that He’s put eternity on my heart. God has constructed my body to be able to warn me when I enter into sin and if I accuse my body of being “sinful” I am making God a liar and I have cut off one major form of communication between me n’ God…
I think this also really disrupts our relationships with God…both in the church and outside…because if we believe this way and we are BELIEVING that God “put this sickness on us” to teach us a lesson, we’re out there preaching that to the world for one thing. So, like the movie, “The Invention of Lying”. When the guy is telling about God…and the people start asking if God makes them get cancer etc and he says “yes” to all this horrid stuff…one of the people in the crowd finally shouts out, “Well, F him!” And, can we blame them? So, this would turn people outside the church against Him…
THEN…it has to affect OUR relationship with HIM! Because, you are my friend…but…if say…I believed that you did something to me…or say you DID…put something like acid in my facewash to make me go thru a horrid period of time where my face would almost fall off and peel and scar…to MAKE ME SEE how beautiful I really am…I do believe this would affect my feelings for you tremendously. If you did that to my daughter or someone else’s…EVEN IF it had the desired good result, I still would not trust you…I’d see you as weird, mean, dangerous…
It would also lead to the disruption of families if people are out there believing that God “hurts us” to punish us when we do wrong ’cause then parents who want to be “godly parents” will likewise enter into that whole parenting style of hurting their kids when they’re naughty…AND…if parents believe that their own flesh is “tending toward sin” then when they FEEL guilty after hurting (spanking) their kids…they won’t be able to get that message. When a lady stands outside her baby’s closed bedroom door listening to that baby cry its tiny heart out and she does not go to it because someone taught her not to but yet every pore of her being is screaming to go to that child…she won’t be able to “give in to her flesh”…when that “flesh” was created by God to do what’s right for her own good!
SO…then not only does it lead to all kinds of misrepresentations of God and how He deals with us…If one of the big things that leads us into disease is being cut off from God, others, and ourselves…it seems to me that the doctrine of Original Sin for one thing is a major contributor to that cycle. It separates us from ourselves and from one of God’s major forms of communication with us…AND…if we cannot love/trust ourselves, how are we to love others? Is it any wonder we have such a hard time loving the sinner but hating the sin in OTHERS when we from our childhoods have been being told that we were born sinful and that all we want to do is sin…that our flesh is our enemy to be fought and hated?
Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, yet, we have identified our own bodies as our own greatest enemy!!!
