A God of Love and so much more.

"This is what the Almighty LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: You can be saved by returning to Me. You can have rest. You can be strong by being quiet and by trusting Me. But you don't want that." Isaiah 30:15 (GWT)

We don't want to hear anymore of the sin of our fathers that has come down through the generations since Adam surrendered his purpose to the serpent's call and thus created the barrier between a righteous and holy God and fallen man. We have excommunicated the thought of original sin from our sermons and our productions within the church walls, instead of opting for a "love" ideology.

A God who loves us wouldn't punish us for the sin of another, would He? He wouldn't allow those who truly benefit and serve their fellow man to be 'cast into the lake of fire', right? He would represent the ultimate 'feel-good' moments of our lives when our parents or another loved one wrapped us in their arms where we felt protected and safe. He would be something that we could point to and say, "See, He is good…..because He loves me through protecting me from harm, death, and sin's punishment." He is good because we are the ones defining what that good is. Or we accept the church doctrine upon which we base our limited religious knowledge.

And then the world steps in. And like chaff separating from the wheat, our religiosity goes flying off on the invisible wind of painful realization.

There is pain in the world, it happens to people we consider 'good' (i.e. good fathers, mothers, sons, daughters who highlight the honorable things we look to as good). A faithful servant, desiring only the assurance of their loved ones' realization of salvation, frantically proclaims the promise of Christ to those dear ones as they lie gasping for the breath that will keep them alive for one more moment is hopelessly lost when they breathe no more, without any positive sign of salvation's acceptance.

A daughter, struggling with the near death experiences of her father, struggles to ensure confidence in herself that "God has a special place in Heaven for givers like you, Dad." But that easiness that she seeks never comes. And her faith blows away as she watches a man she dearly loves come nearer to death, both physically and spiritually.

A man, realizing his sinful and destructive life, fights daily with himself to overcome those tendencies to seek self-protection, self-fulfillment, and self-worth as priorities and continues to imperfectly love. He cries out to the God of Love as he watches his marriage collapse into a broken ruin at his feet.

We don't want to hear of our own destructive nature, and the inherited birthright of death because of the sinful ways we have cultured since the beginning of mankind. We claim to seek God and when that construct fails to appease our sensibilities, we reject it for another easier adaptable one.

We fight against ourselves in our attempt to gain that which we desire most.

Freedom.

We consider ourselves basically good, born into a world that is working against us at every turn. We look to those who seem to enjoy a fruitful, wealthy, and fulfilling life for the answers we cannot discover ourselves, and are frustrated when they don't work for us. We would rather remain in the dark than to realize the Truth is beyond our manipulations.

And we pass by the very thing that would give us our desires.

We look at those in positions of strength and envy them, not realizing that we can have far greater strength in One who is strength. We only have to stop and listen to His voice, and implant within our hearts the desire to know Him.

In serving a greater Truth, we grow in confidence and comfort in the ability to ride out the inconsistencies of a broken world's attempt to harm us. By growing in knowledge of the True God, we realize that despite the best efforts of the sinful nature we were born with, we can sit in quietness, enabling a peace in our minds that defy all outside influences; unaffected by death, disease, or destructive natures.

And we stop seeking self-fulfillment and self-protection because we gain an supernatural peace that there is Someone who can do the job so much better because He is so much more capable.

Then the impact of what was given on that Cross so many years ago impacts us like a ton of bricks, and we realize that there is nothing any man could've done to give us that.

And we realize there is indeed a God.

Not one of manly construction, not one capable of manipulation, and not one who is only made up of love as man defines it but so much more than a simple explanation of love.

And we find love beyond measure, peace above the struggle, and hope that endures any frightening storm.

We find God.

And we realize He's been waiting for us to turn around and look.

Whitewashing the realization of a broken world.

"In My wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in My anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with destructive fury. I will tear down the wall you have covered with whitewash and will level it to the ground so that its foundation will be laid bare. When it falls, you will be destroyed in it; and you will know that I am the LORD." Ezekiel 13:13-14 (NIV)

God is love. Forget who you were, you are made a new creature and the old has passed away into the forgotten realm of the past. God loves you so much that He wants you to be happy and content, blessed in abundance untold, and overflowing with good tidings. All you have to do is change the way you think and all will be well with life.

Until the first storm comes raging through your world; a child dies from a cancer that suddenly appears, a parent is killed in a building destroyed by terrorists, whole countries abandoned to the rages of war and disease, or (to borrow a phrase) LIFE happens.

And we become embittered, broken, and angry people who once worshipped a God who we thought loved us enough that anything we experienced would be easily deflected by the knowledge that His plans were not to harm us, but to prosper us. We have been told that by mighty and spiritual leaders in those moments that we sat in the comfortable seats in the mega auditorium of the 'local' church. And we believed it, because we don't need to know God any better than that.

But with love, comes wrath. With righteousness, comes indignation. With holiness, comes anger. The incomplete picture that we allow ourselves to have of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob brings us to our knees not in prayerful joy and peace, but in indignation and anger to a God that would allow such events to flatten the world we know and to bring such sorrow into a heart already burdened.

The church has whitewashed the walls of a crumbling theology of "Love, Love, Love" and an immediate gratification world for its members. It promotes the God of Love to the seekers already sorrowed by a world gone mad, by issues and causes that seem empty in their effectiveness, and wars that ravage the population it surrounds. They tone down the heaviness of fighting against our sinful nature, ignore the wrath and judgment of God, and connect with a shallow standoffish attitude to the reality of life with painful experiences, and past conflict.

Then comes a violent wind, a parent who loves God and has brought his children up the same way dies of cancer---- not in a few years, but within days of diagnosis. Then comes hailstones within that wind; a child of three temporarily out of sight of her parents is abducted and killed by a family friend. And in rages the heavy rain; the job that you clung to in an increasingly competitive job market is lost right as you face foreclosure on your home or eviction from your apartment.

And you are destroyed; your faith a joke upon the cosmic landscape of the universe.

You rage against God and the lies that seem so real yesterday.

You turn your back upon God and say 'No thanks, if this is the best You can do.'

The structurally unsound, whitewashed walls of your life collapse on the ground, broken and ruined beyond all repair.

And as you lie strewn across the broken, battered, and utter devastation that once was your life, your heart cries out more loudly, more insistently "There MUST be something more than this!"

If you listen hard to the silence that endures there, you will hear His voice. If you stand still within the once proud example of your faith and listen, He will talk to you.

"I am the LORD." His voice will whisper in the ache of your soul, "Come and feel My comfort; abide in the peace that circumstances cannot control. My love will carry you home, My strength will allow you to endure when you cannot endure."

Beyond all human understanding, our faith will carry us home. Beyond all reasoning by secular means, we have the key to peace in troubled waters.

If we would only truly believe in the complete God, instead of a fashioned idol of our own making.