Posture: What is yours toward God?
Posture: What is yours toward God?
Written by: Marshall Shannon
I read an interesting book earlier this month on how we relate to God in our personal lives. The book is entitled With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God. The author, Skye Jethani, sorted our relational postures toward God into five categories.
Life from God
Life over God
Life for God
Life under God
Life with God.
Below is a summary of one category, Life under God. Perhaps my summaries over the next few days will help you think through how you relate to God in your everyday posture toward Him but to get the full impact I believe you will need to read and study the book.
Life under God
This posture “sees God in simple cause-and-effect terms—we obey his commands and he blesses our lives, our families, our nation”. “Our primary role is to determine what he approves (or disapproves) and work vigilantly to remain within those boundaries.” The way to get what you want from God is to live according to His righteous expectations and He will bless you, answer your prayers and keep you from trouble. It is seeking to gain control over otherwise predictable events by incurring divine favor.
Common Statement: “If we can just stop these liberal judges, God will bless our country again.”
Common understanding: “They believe their primary calling is to live under divine rules in order to avoid calamity.” “Through our obedience we put God into our debt and expect him to do our bidding in exchange for our worship and righteous behavior.” This posture seeks to put us in authority over God.
Common view: “The life under God view puts its emphasis on appeasing God through behaviors—either in the form of rituals or morality.”
Needed correction to this posture: “Life under God cannot be a way of reestablishing a relationship with our Creator because it is actually an attempt to overthrow his rightful place.”
Common Result: “Young people raised within Christian communities are being taught a Life under God view of the faith. And when God inevitably refuses to submit to our attempt at control via morality and ritual, they become cynical and abandon the church and in many cases the faith as well. The bargain turned out to be a scam.” (Pastor Matt Chandler)
Common Response: I did my part why didn’t God do his? I obeyed his commands, attended the services, gave to the church, served in different ministries and witnessed to lost people. Why I didn’t get what I bargained for from God? Why didn’t he hold up his end of the bargain?
Common Problem for leaders: “If blessing or calamity is the result of obeying God’s rules, then keeping everyone in line becomes the paramount mission of religious leaders. Faith gets reduced to dogmatism—adherence to strict moral codes and the enforcement of boundaries and rules. In such places the clergy function as divine police officers and cultural crusaders ensuring no one violates the Almighty’s will, because it’s not just the individual on the line, but the whole community.”
Purpose of the Life under God posture: It was “intended to reduce our fears and provide greater control over our unpredictable world” by our obedience to certain rules and regulations.
Needed Realignment with God and His Word: There is no guarantee that your obedience will bring blessing and help you avoid calamity. It sure didn’t for Job.
Summary: First, you can’t buy God’s blessing and protection by your good works any more than you could buy God’s salvation by your good works. Second, you can’t control God!
Tomorrow we look at Life over God. As we navigate our way through each of these postures I would encourage you to verify each posture with the Word of God and evaluate your own life to discover how you primarily relate to God. We won’t all agree but we can make good use of this exercise to grow and develop.