Searching For God Knows What - VII

December 1, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller | 2 Comments

donald-miller-2.jpgHere is one last excerpt from my favorite chapter of Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” Here Miller uses Communion to illustrate just how far removed today’s church is in many ways from that of the first century church, especially in terms of real life community. Miller writes:

How odd would it seem to have been one of the members of the early church, shepherded by Paul or Peter, and to come forward a thousand years to see people standing in line or sitting quietly in a large building that looked like a schoolroom or movie theater, to take Communion.

How different it would seem from the way they did it, sitting around somebody’s living room table, grabbing a hunk of bread and holding their own glass of wine, exchanging stories about Christ, perhaps laughing, perhaps crying, consoling each other, telling one another that the Person who had exploded into their hearts was indeed the Son of God, their Bridegroom, come to tell them who they were, come to mend the broken relationships, come to marry them in a spiritual union more beautiful, more intimate than anything they could know on earth.

- Donald Miller in chapter 10 of Searching For God Knows What

Searching For God Knows What - VI

October 26, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel | No Comments

donald-miller-2.jpgHere is another excerpt from my favorite chapter of Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller. In this section of chapter 10 Miller is discussing the dominant metaphors used to describe our relationship with God. He argues that many of the attempts we make to explain the gospel somehow miss this crucial relational dynamic.

Miller writes:

“Biblically, you are hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father, and bride to a bridegroom. The idea of Christ’s disciples being His mother and father and brothers and sisters is also presented. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.

Contrasting this idea, I recently heard a man, while explaining how a person could convert to Christianity, say the experience was not unlike deciding to sit in a chair. He said that while a person can have faith that a chair will hold him, it is not until he sits in the chair that he has acted on his faith.

I wondered as I heard this if the chair was a kind of symbol for Jesus, and how irritated Jesus might be if a lot of people kept trying to sit on Him.

And then I wondered at how Jesus could say He was a Shepherd and we were sheep, and that the Father in heaven was our Father and we were His children, and that He Himself was a Bridegroom and we were His bride, and that He was a King and we were His subjects, and yet we somehow missed His meaning and thought becoming a Christian was like sitting in a chair.”

Searching For God Knows What - V

October 4, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel | No Comments

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgHere is another excerpt from my favorite chapter of Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller. In this section, titled “The Gospel: A Relational Dynamic” Miller is arguing that the essence of the gospel is relational rather than the mental ascent to a set of theological statements or an agreement with a list of bullet points.

Miller writes:

It doesn’t make a great deal of sense that a person who went to Bible college should have a better shot at heaven than a person who didn’t, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense either that somebody sentimental and spiritual has greater access.

I think it is more safe and more beautiful and more true to believe that when a person dies he will go and be with God because, on earth, he had come to know Him, that he had a relational encounter with God not unlike meeting a friend or a lover or having a father or taking a bride, and that in order to engage God he gave up everything, repented and changed his life, as this sort of extreme sacrifice is what is required if true love is to grow. We would expect nothing less in a marriage; why should we accept anything less in becoming unified with Christ?

In fact, I have to tell you, I believe the Bible is screaming this idea and is completely silent on any other, including our formulas and bullet points. It seems, rather, that Christ’s parables, Christ’s words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, were designed to bypass the memorization of ideas and cause us to wrestle with a certain need to cling to Him. In other words, a poetic presentation of the gospel of Jesus is more accurate than a set of steps.

- Donald Miller in chapter 10 of Searching For God Knows What

Searching For God Knows What IV

August 30, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, scripture, way of Jesus | 2 Comments

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgHere is another excellent excerpt from chapter 10 of Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” The title of chapter 10 is “The Gospel of Jesus: It Never Was a Formula.”

Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person to know Jesus they must get a kind of crush on Him. But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and son on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than what would be required by following a kind of recipe.

I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we sometimes hold up as credible: We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans.

If any of these models are true, people who read the Bible before we systematically broke it down, and, for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

Searching For God Knows What III

August 27, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, scripture | 1 Comment

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgPerhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry in and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himslef of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole.

Maybe the gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity with which we might engage God.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

Searching For God Knows What II

August 25, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, theology | 1 Comment

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgIt makes me wonder if, because of this reduced version of the claims of Christ, we believe the gospel is easy to understand, a simple mental exercise, not in the least bit mysterious. And if you think about it, a person has a more difficult time explaining romantic love, for instance, or beauty, or the Trinity, than the gospel of Jesus. John would open his gospel by presenting the idea that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly bullet points for easy consumption. Perhaps our reduction of these ideas has caused us to miss something.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What