Unfinished Faith: Relearning God.

Week 35:

The bit where I introduce:

I read a quote this week that said: “I did not lose God when I wandered. He followed me all the way into the dark.”

How close or far by proximity are you to God right now? Have you wandered a little this past year? If so, does it feel like you’ve left Him behind or does it feel like He’s left you? Turns out in my wanderings, God isn’t nearly as easy to lose as I thought.

The bit where I refer to the Bible and ask a few rhetorical questions:

Luke 15: the part I like to call “the God pursues you” chapter. Luke gives us 3 examples of God seeking what was lost.

 The Lost Sheep : Luke 15:1–7
The shepherd notices the one missing sheep and goes after it until he finds it. The emphasis is on the shepherd’s initiative.

 The Lost Coin : Luke 15:8–10
The woman searches carefully and persistently for the coin until she finds it. Heaven rejoices when what was lost is found.

 The Lost Son : Luke 15:11–32
The father doesn’t force his son to stay. He allows him to leave, but when the son returns, the father sees him from a distance, runs to him, embraces him and welcomes him home.

There is I think a beautiful progression that happens in this chapter,

The sheep is lost and doesn’t know how to get home.
The coin is lost and can’t get itself home.
The son is lost and chooses to come home.

And in every story, love moves first.

I love these stories because they demonstrate, through such practical and deeply human situations, the places we can find ourselves throughout our lives.

Life has a way of complicating what we believe, and sometimes, if we’re honest, we just become tired.

We question. We doubt. We become angry. We pull away. We change our beliefs. We stop praying. We stop going to church. We may even decide we no longer believe at all.

It happens. But here is the beautiful reality I have found.

God’s pursuit of us does not mean He overrides our freedom. The father doesn’t drag his son home. The shepherd doesn’t force the sheep to love him. God does not coerce our hearts into belief.

He allows us to wander.

He allows us to question.

He allows us to wrestle.

He allows us to make choices, even choices that take us away from Him.

There’s a concept known as universalism, heard of it? Universalism says that God’s love and grace will eventually win over every human being, even if that process takes place beyond this life. My simple brain has been looking at it this week and here’s the summary as best I can do.

Traditional Christianity has generally taught that not everyone will ultimately be saved, pointing to passages about judgement, separation and hell for example, Matthew 25:31–46 and Revelation 20.

So, what can happen is there is a genuine biblical tension:

God desires everyone to be saved BUT

the bible also speaks seriously about judgement and people rejecting God.

This doesn’t necessarily mean: “It doesn’t matter what you believe. Everyone automatically goes to heaven.” Christian universalists generally still take sin, judgement, repentance, Jesus and the cross seriously.

Rather, if you believe in universalism you might say: Jesus’s death and resurrection are ultimately powerful enough to reconcile every person to God.

So… the God who says “until he finds it” in Luke 15’s parables is revealing something about the extraordinary persistence of divine love. It is relentless and He won’t stop searching. I find that so comforting and amazed at the overwhelming Love, it is what Jesus embodies… He is Love.

Perhaps Luke 15 leaves us with a bigger question than simply “Will we find our way back to God?” It asks us to consider what God is like when we don’t.

Universalism takes that picture of pursuing love and asks whether God’s grace might ultimately be bigger than our resistance,whether, in the end, God’s love will have the last word and every lost person will finally come home.

Something you might want to wonder this week (I have been) then is…

Is God’s love merely an invitation we can ultimately refuse forever, or is God’s love powerful enough to keep pursuing us until, eventually, every lost child is bought home?

The bit where you get to think about stuff: Questions for the week.

Where have I wandered with my faith and how did it impact my life and choices?

In regard to universalism, where do I stand?

How can I notice changes in what I believe and how close/ far away I am to God?