How does God walk with us?

Some of us must be pushed very far into a corner before we agree to be warriors for God’s way. We’re instead enlisted as warriors for an ideology, a principled position that becomes the focus for everything we do. This is the methodology of living in the world. Choose an ideology and follow its principles. 

Religion can also become an ideology. Maybe more than any other kind of allegiance. We can put our religion first and God a distant assumption. Most of the time we work our religion this way, allowing God little input into our walk.  

God does not operate in this way.

Image by Lorri Lang

God’s love comes in joy and sorrow

By John Pearring


https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/050821.cfm
Acts 16:1-10
John 15:18-21


Exciting things—though dangerous and inevitably fatal to us—mark our walk with God. Saturday’s gospel exposes the truth that God the Father loves us so much he lets us experience everything that Jesus went through. This is the two-edged sword of God’s love. We get joy and sorrow. God allows both of them in our journey of loving God and loving each other. 

Walking with God is exciting and dangerous at the same time because we get to experience God, and we get to experience the world at odds with God. Somehow, God turns all of it into his love.

If we think of warriors, we get a better picture of the two-edged sword anomaly. Warriors are strong, capable of amazing things. They’re also highly vulnerable to injury and death, giving up everything in an instant. Warriors are honored at one moment and despised in the next. To be really good at what they do, they must be appropriately trained, or they’ll revert too quickly to cowardice or the opposite—unbridled violence. Not only is joy and sorrow coming at the warrior, but a fine line exists between good and evil on every side of what they do. They’re capable of inflicting great sorrow if they veer off the path of their tasks. In the end, though, the nation honors the warrior. Warriors die for their country and are buried for their courage, even if they die old and forgotten. And even if they failed at their tasks, dying on the battlefield.

As Jesus’ disciples, we enter a very similar warrior life. The two-edged sword of being a warrior is constantly present. We model Jesus. Jesus performed great miracles, and so hopefully will we. Jesus suffered incredible persecution, and so probably will we. It’s an unfortunate-sounding mix of opposite things. We have to become lovers of God to fully understand how this works out in our favor. Military warriors put nation first. As Jesus’ disciples, we must put God first. Our burial leads to resurrection, and eternal life, even if we die old and forgotten, or mere failures on the world’s battlefield.

Some of us must be pushed very far into a corner before we agree to be warriors for God’s way. We’re instead enlisted as warriors for an ideology, a moral position that becomes the focus for everything we do. This is the methodology of living in the world. Choose an ideology and follow its principles. Religion can also become an ideology. Maybe more than any other kind of allegiance. We can put our religion first and God a distant assumption. Most of the time, we work our religious life this way, allowing God little input into our walk. Our faith becomes documented steps and even an ideological position rather than a relationship to God.

Most of today’s politics concentrate on ideology-based, warring positions. Our nation seems perfectly divided along two ideological lines. (A proper study of our nation’s founding principles reveals a more complicated listing of issues than a simplistic two-way splitting of citizens, but we’re quite a ways from that.) Our battle lines are mainly drawn between emphasizing the “common good” or “freedom.” The common good is perversely sold to us as giving up freedom so that everyone has an equal portion. Freedom, or its banner “liberty,” is twisted into a principle that we properly exercise our freedom by putting ourselves first. These two innocuous and opposite things have formed enemies of our population. Only a few on the extremes actually hold these stringent views, but the vast majority of folks have fallen prey to their shenanigans. Consequently, we’re generically split into two seemingly even, extended groups. The result? We’re incapable of listening to each other because we’re not talking about the same things. 

God does not operate in this way. The principles of common good and liberty are consequences, not rallying cries. How do we justify choosing others over ourselves? By choosing God, we abandon ourselves to his direction and guidance. The world isn’t a buffet of victims to serve or missions to complete. God’s way is intentionally wide open to life. On the other end of the spectrum, freedom is God’s gift to us through the forgiveness of sin. We are slaves to no one. Since all authority comes from God, we honor those who have power over us and allow God to work how he will with them. In God’s way, sacrifice and freedom aren’t opposing PR programs to raise awareness, distribute wealth, improve reputations, or celebrate success. The daily practice of our faith includes freedom and sacrifice at every turn. 

By demonizing an opposing ideology, we do everything to win so another guy will lose. If they win, we lose. And, it’s working out to be weirdly true. The war of this kind allows revenge, fosters ruthless payback, incorporates legal wrangling, and becomes overtly fascist in silencing our carefully crafted enemy lists. That’s the world’s two-edged sword. Someone must win, and someone must lose.

We seldom hear anything about God in the ideology wars. Other than presuming that God is on one side or the other. Mostly, the presumption is that God is non-existent, non-plussed, or busy. God’s constant daily role and his guidance cannot be allowed or heard for those following an ideology. An ideology replaces God with some elite characters who have usurped God’s position and serve a non-entity. 

Here’s how to tell that the God of love isn’t present in ideologies. Ideologies insist upon winners and losers being good winners and good losers. Love is sexual reward and adulation. Winners get the rewards, and losers wait for their turn. God doesn’t teach us about being classy and kind as winners or being submissive and quiet when we lose. That’s not God’s thing. God’s two-edged sword is about loving whether things seem to be working out or whether we appear to be complete failures. Love has no fit in the ideology conversation.

In Acts today, we find out how God operates with disciples who follow him. We read that Paul and his merry band have established a steady trail of success. They travel from one place to another, convincing both Gentile and Jew. “Day after day the churches grew stronger in faith and increased in number.”

Then, a strange thing happens. The traveling Christians experience roadblocks, and failures portend ahead of them. They don’t interpret this as their personal failures. They see God at work.

They traveled through the Phrygian and Galatian territory
because they had been prevented by the Holy Spirit
from preaching the message in the province of Asia.
When they came to Mysia, they tried to go on into Bithynia,
but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them,
so they crossed through Mysia and came down to Troas.

Those two corrections on the path of Paul and his fellow Christians weren’t on a roadmap. After arduous travel and wasted time, they were forced to change course in the moment. They knew, however, that they were following the Holy Spirit’s lead. They couldn’t see far ahead. They ran into difficulties after following God’s lead. He moved them around like chess pieces as an act of love. The disciples could only see where to go after each move. They saw God as the loving chess master.

These corrections weren’t an hour or two of frustration. Days, probably weeks, mounted up as they traveled. Food supplies were probably low. God wasn’t protecting them from being tired, we can be sure. It’s not until Paul stopped, likely exhausted by the wasted time and fruitless travel, that God gave a clue about what to do next. You can imagine the conversations that must have taken place among them as they plodded from one place to the next. 

“During the night Paul had a vision.”

How do we know these dreams are visions from God? In the morning, we walk where the dream said we should go. We take the words of our visions to heart. We are the same disciples as the early Christians. At some point, after plodding along and frustrated, we will finally hear the plan of where God wants us to go. God just might come to us in our dreams.

“… implored him with these words, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

God likely gave them their original directions to Asia and Bithynia, and only later told them to skip these areas. Jesus and the Holy Spirit consistently want us to know the Father in everything we do. The walk with God isn’t a travel book, with warnings at every turn. So too, was Jesus’ path. At great peril to himself, Jesus loved us more than the world could ever imagine. The Holy Spirit guides us through the same perilous journey, at times successful in the eyes of the world. At other times the world will push back. Those times will be when we cannot claim any success, but instead we should point to the Father as loving us.

“If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.
If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.”

If we walk with God, he will intervene. If we veer off course, he will let us do what we want. In both cases, there will be consequences. It’s when we understand that he’s with us either way—in our walk with him, and our running away from him—when we either choose to be his friend or his enemy. The two-edged sword is still composed of God’s purpose.

If we know him, he will use us as he wants. If we don’t know him, the same thing is true. We usually find that out the hard way. Our frustrations with God’s choices for us are God’s opportunities for kindness. His frustrations with us are our opportunities to return kindness to him.

God will stop us repeatedly to close doors for this moment or the next, to insist that we see what he wants to show, and if necessary, he will interrupt us with oracles who will tell us where we should go. If success has shifted us to focus on ourselves, God will direct us back to him with the force of a father leading his children through a dark forest.

We may feel lost, frustrated, and overburdened, but our walk of trust with our Father God drives us to continue because all of it is a constant and flowing exercise of God’s love.

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