Okay, so here’s a confession…. super-holy-Christians annoy me.
I’m sure you know the sort of Christian I mean, they’re the sort of Christian who have a bible verse for everything…they know the verse, they know where it is. They always have black leather bound bibles (usually of the King James variety), they get up early and have early morning bible reading sessions, they always want to pray, their world revolves around God and just from those actions you know they are “super-holy”.
They don’t go around claiming they are super holy but are just so passionate about God…
And I’ve been thinking about why these sorts of Christians annoy me and I’ve been thinking about closeness to God.
Almost every preacher everywhere (including me) has probably said at some point that to get away from messing up you need to be close to God, the closer to God you are, the more you know him then the more like him you become.
The problem is that getting closer to God requires persistancy. Matt Thiessen writes the lyric ‘and from the lack of my persistancy we’re less than half as close as I wanna be’ in reference to closeness to God, and the problem with persistancy is that the more I realise the need to be persistent, the more I realise that it all boils down to being like one of the ’super-holy’ Christians that annoy me so.
From that I conclude that the reason these Christians annoy me so much is not because they get the idea to pray before me, it’s not because they get up stupidly early to study the bible and it’s not because they’re more passionate about God than me…it’s because I know I should be like that…the only difference between them and me is that they have found persistancy…in other words they have got their arse in gear for God when I haven’t.
Having said these Christians annoy me they also inspire me. One guy I know gets up every morning to read his bible, he always wants to pray and he’s always so positive about his faith…hardly ever cynical and I have the utmost respect for this guy because I know he has found persistancy.
The problem with God is that so many things seem to jump in the way, why? I remember reading the entire 6th Harry Potter book in about 12 hours and then feeling God say ’so how come you get this book, read it passionately for hours, not putting it down, knowing you’re tired but wanting to finish it yet my book sits unopened?’
I wonder how come that is? Do we have the wrong view of the bible? Do we see it as a book? and if we do does that hinder the way we read it, because if it’s just seen as a book parts of it are down-right dull!
Take this as an example, if I was to get given a diary of a complete stranger telling me about their travels, their thoughts, thing they’d encountered, their Christmas with their family etc. I think it would be boring…yet if I knew this person, if I knew that by reading this intimate outpouring of themselves I would get to know them better, that by wanting me to read it they wanted to share their deepest secrets and fears and passions with me I don’t think it would be boring at all, I think it would motivate me, I wouldn’t put the diary down.
Perhaps by referring to the Bible as the Bible we make it sound dull, perhaps we make it feel like a text book, perhaps by calling it the bible we remove some of the passion that should go with it? Or rather, by thinking of it as a book do we not categorise it with the thousands of other books out there?
Perhaps if we thought of it as “God’s Diary” or “The Outpouring Of God’s greatest secrets, fears, experiences, feelings etc.” we would have more passion to read it.
We partly experience things by the image we have of it before hand, if I go somewhere thinking it’ll be dull and boring then chances are I’ll find it just that, whereas if I do something thinking it’ll be new and different and exciting perhaps my overall experience will be more positive. They say patients who want to recover from illness, patients who have that will to live are halfway there. It’s partly in the mind.
So to draw back to what has become a huge blog of me rambling I think back to where I started this all and wonder if I might actually for once have a point…I wonder if we changed our view point of ‘The Bible’ whether we’d find more passion for it. I know we are called to get closer and closer to God, we are called into a relationship with him…just getting there requires persistancy.
I don’t think there’s a proper way to summerise this blog so I won’t, I shall merely click ‘Publish Post’ and think about the ideas I’ve had.
