Good News Quote #21

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

The way my students talk about it, God's will is out there waiting to be found, like the one person they're convinced God has for them to marry. But how do you know where to look? And how do you know when you've really found it? (Once again, the "how do you know?" questions, with their accompanying anxieties, are a sign that something's gone wrong). What happens if you mistake the will of God and don't marry "the one" that God has for you? (Do you wonder why evangelical Christians have as high a divorce rate as everyone else?) Or what happens if you only get God's "second best" will for your life? (Do you wonder why "disappointment with God" is such a trend among evangelicals?) A whole boatload of anxieties is tied up with this notion of "finding God's will."

Good News Quote #20

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

Sometimes the logical contradictions lead to contortions that really are very hard to ignore. Take for example another thing you're supposed to say when you're playing this game. Whenever you aim to do some good deed, you have to try not to do it "in your own strength." So it seems there is this special way of doing things -- not using your own strength -- and that's what Christians are supposed to do. So how do you do it? My students have tried to explain it by saying, "you have to do it... through God." That captures the weirdness of the game about as well as possible. You're actually doing it all, but you're doing it through God. Which seems to mean: you're doing it by making God do it -- that's how you have to do it -- and you do that not by doing it, but by "letting" God do it. Get it?


I don't.

Good News Quote #19

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

We're supposed to give control to God, which mean we're the ones who are in control to start with. That means it's ultimately up to us -- God has no control unless we give it to him. It's often put this way: God can't work in your life unless you let him. This is an astonishing piece of fantasy. Where in the Bible or anywhere else in God's creation did people get the idea that God was so helpless? If God can't do anything unless we let him, then God is not really God, and indeed he is less real than any person we know. After all, you don't have to "let" real people work in your life. They have an effect on you whether you like it or not, precisely because they're real. Of course, working with them (cooperating or obeying) is different from working against them (fighting or rebelling). But they have an effect on your life one way or another, because real people do stuff that affects you whether you let them or not.

Good News Quote #18

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

Because we are persons, we are not controlled but commanded. And of course the nature of the command is important too. The lord gives his stewards talents and some general instructions about doing business (see Luke 19:13) but he does not tell them what decisions to make. That's their responsibility. That's what their own heart, will, and intelligence are for: not to be yielded or surrendered, but to be used as best they can.


And that means they'll have to learn. For they are not God and they will make mistakes. Nothing in the lord's instructions suggests that his servants are supposed to be infallible. They will probably make some bad investments from time to time. But if they keep at it, practicing the art of investment (meaning, of course, how to invest their talents in the growth of the Lord's kingdom) and learning from their mistakes, then they will grow in understanding and wisdom, and they'll do well enough.

Good News Quote #17

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

To do the good works that God has commanded us to do is obedience, which is the heart of traditional Christian morality. To see the difference between this Christian obedience and the very untraditional notion of "letting God take control," we can look at our Lord's parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30). [...]


The first thing to notice here is who's giving control to whom. The servants do not give control to the master, but the other way round. He has put a certain number of talents in their control, and they're the ones who have to do something with what's now under their control. So they're in no position to just "let the lord take control." That would be getting things completely backward! Just imagine how the master would respond if any of his servants tried to give control of the talents back to him, saying, "I'll let you do it all, Lord. I give control to you. I surrender all -- I yield it all to you!" That's not a way to honor him: it's disobedience, an out-and-out refusal of the work he has given them to do. What will the lord do with such foolish servants?

Good News Quote #16

From Chapter Three, Why You Don't Have to "Let God Take Control": Or, How Obedience Is for Responsible Adults.

The misunderstanding on which much of the new evangelical theology is based is the idea that when God is working in you, then you're not working. It's as if his working replaces yours, so you're not doing anything -- you're just letting God do it. But that doesn't really work, because then you have to make sure that you're really letting God do it -- and so you get all anxious about whether you're really doing that -- and "letting God" becomes one more thing you have to do on top of everything else -- and it's the worst of all because it's so inward and psychological and hard to see -- and you have to wonder: how do you know if you're really letting God do it -- or are you still just trying to do it in your own strength? As usual, the obsession with "how do you know?" questions is a sign that something's wrong -- there's a false presupposition here. The truth is that you don't have to know whether you're really letting God do it, because in fact you're always the one who's doing it. The inner acts of your heart are always your own, even when they're a result of God working in you. That's the both/and. The false presupposition is that it's an either/or proposition: either you're doing it or God is, so if you're at work, God isn't.

Good News Quote #15

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

But then -- we might want to ask -- how do we know the Spirit is working within us at all? Like many "how do you know?" questions, this turns out to be a very modern obsession, which often results in our searching our own hearts instead of searching the Scriptures. The biblical answer to questions about how we know God keeps coming back to God's word and especially his promise. There is a promise of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures (Gal. 3:14; see also Acts 2:38). If we think that's not good enough, then we'll end up having to look to ourselves for an answer. So the more anxious we are, the less we trust God's word, and the more likely we are to try looking into our own hearts to find the Holy Spirit.


But honestly, God's word is good enough. It is hard for us sinners to trust it -- we would much rather see things for ourselves than trust what God has to say, even about himself -- but trusting God's word is what faith does, and faith is how we know who God really is.