Here’s another what if! We are up to 8 now…. that’s a whole lot to think about…I am sincerely hoping you have been doing just that…thinking about these things….. and maybe even keep coming back for a little more to muse on…. 
I picked this one up from Wayne Jacobsen….
What if ….. “we just started loving the people God puts before us each day…. He has only asked us to love… one day at a time…. whoever is before us in whatever circumstance we meet them. Everything else he wants to do will flow from that simple reality. I think we have it all backwards. Jesus didn’t ask us to start ministries. He didn’t ask us to accomplish great things. He simply asked us to love others the same way we are loved by him and that will be enough for the whole world to know that we belong to him and that they can too.”
That is a perfect description of the simple life. I always enjoy discovering somebody else who is articulating these same things that I have been trying to communicate throughout these Musings. This is the simple life…just being who we are…where we are…doing the things He has placed into our day….loving those we come in contact with….just loving those He puts in our path each day with His love…pretty simple.
Yes sir….that is as simple as it gets…. no great things to do or accomplish…. no burn out…. no stress… no pressure for greatness…. not only is it the simple life..this loving others as He loved… but it’s an incredible way to live!
What if.… “we just started loving the people God puts before us each day….” Hmmmm….
You would think I was insane if I asked you to invest in my wonderful new company which manufactured nothing and was based on getting some sort of return with no effort on your part whatsoever….all you have to do for this is give me your money. Why that would be almost as silly as saying “just trust God.” Sure….
Oh yes…and I forgot to mention…since I am the CEO and the brilliant one who has figured all this out, I will be taking the first million dollars every year and….should things not quite work out….I will make sure I get several million more as severance pay…..before I pay anyone back. Why are you not lining up at my door to invest your money?
Tozer said, a very long time ago….“What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God….completely….for each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have nothing but God.”
What if…. Tozer is right and our whole way of trusting in other things is wrong….maybe for instance like trusting in my portfolio?
Trusting God alone is as true today as it was back then when Tozer said it….and it is true for more than just Christians….it is true for everyone…..the only safe place is simply to trust God and live for Him instead of ourselves. It was greed…. coupled with our great American get something for nothing attitude….. that created the economic house of cards that is crumbling around us. Many, many people have already lost everything….they actually have nothing left….but God.
For many of us it is essential to lose everything before we will cry out to God… certainly true for me…I think I have lost everything a half dozen times in my 73 years…and each time it has drawn me deeper into my relationship with God….deeper and deeper till I finally discovered that He was all I ever needed.
Maybe the guy who prayed this prayer for Henri Nouwen…. prayed for me too!
“May all your expectations be frustrated. May all your plans be thwarted. May all of your desires be withered into nothingness. That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.”
A blessing prayed over Henri Nouwen by a friend
Hmmmm…maybe he prayed that prayer over a whole lot of bunch of people.
I guess we can make this one What if No. 6…. we have eaten the idea that life is all about something called “success”… to most folks it mean doing great things, making lots of money, having a great, big something or other…. what a lie!
I want you to know how much this has complicated our lives. Do a little just suppose Philip the Muser is right about this…. I mean…
What if…. Philip is right and my life really doesn’t have to be so complicated.
Mother Theresa was being encouraged to turn what she was doing into this great big successful venture by running all around promoting and raising money, using her popularity to be a great success. She responded that God hadn’t called her to be successful …. He called her to love others…. the destitute people she was ministering to in India
Henri Nouwen said: “We are called to be fruitful - not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.”
When we are weak and vulnerable, simply trusting God for everything and seeing His loving hand involved in every situation and circumstance in our lives….no agenda of our own…not on some success track in our lives but only His track….life can become very simple and uncomplicated.
That striving for success thing will drive you nuts! It makes our lives more complicated than we could ever imagine.
So….what if… it didn’t have to be that way. Think about it.
I would invite anyone visiting for the first time to read 3 of the pages to your right.
Why these musings will explain how I got involved with blogging
Philip’s Story will give you an idea of where I am coming from.
Good to have you visit will lay some groundwork for all that will follow.
Everything else…..just daily thoughts and stories, running from one day to another….. starting at the beginning will help it all make sense….. kind of a journey thru my life that I started recording here back in mid-December 2007 ……..I sincerely hope you will enjoy the journey.
I sure have!
Any of you that have been following these musings for any length of time can probably even smell this next “what if” coming….. bear with the old fellow….
No. 4 was: What if….. what God says about Himself is true….and what I believe about Him is not true?
So No. 5 follows right on top of that…how about giving this one some thought…
What if….. what God says about Himself is true…..but many of the things your church told you about Him were not exactly what God had in mind….and many of the things they taught you were not only not true but even keep you from getting to a place of intimacy with Him?
I have said so many things about this particular area, I fear beating a dead horse by re-hashing it. Let me just encourage you to search the scriptures, search your heart, question what you hear, what you are told and have a good old heart to heart talk with the Lord yourself. It is truly amazing the things that come out of one on one with Him.
The operating word here is relationship….a love relationship….a relationship with your creator that has nothing to do with formulas, religious systems, doctrines, meetings, doing this or not doing that…just a love thing between you and God …. how come we have made it so complicated?
What if it really isn’t complicated…..
I’ll have to think about that….maybe it will be no. 6
This is a pretty important one..if one can actually say that one “what if” is more important than another…. they are all significant parts of our individual journeys into God. Wrestling with all these thoughts…asking our questions…is the way we come to know Him…the way we begin to hear Him way down deep inside of us…
My own collision with God has been pretty well explained here over the past 11 months…. this next “what if” is something I saw many years ago and have even used to explain the gospel to people…but I will share that later. Here is the question I needed to answer….the one we all need to answer…..
What if….. what God says about Himself is true….and what I believe about Him is not true?
I mean…suppose He is right and I am wrong. Ellen wrestled with that in her search to know God. She finally realized back then…back 40 years ago….that this is the issue…..Jesus says that He is God. Jesus does all kinds of miracles to prove that. He even says that He died to pay the penalty of my sin and rose from the dead so I could have a relationship with His Father. Ellen then must respond to that….what does she do with that claim….does she agree with it or does she not agree with it….
So…Ellen says to herself…..either Jesus is exactly who He says He is …the Son of God… and is worth following…..or he is the biggest liar that ever lived and is not worth following. She made her choice….she agreed with what God says about Himself….and she says it is true… and starts to follow Him….she never looked back…..40 years.
What do I believe about Him? What if…..He’s right and I’m wrong? That’s the gospel you know…the good news is very simple really. God is right. I am wrong. And…. God sent His Son to make me right.
What if….that is true?
Have you ever noticed the obsession we have with our bodies? Consider for a moment all the health programs, wellness stuff, diets of every size, shape and variety….they will be with us forever and ever (all because of our bodies of every size, shape and variety)… Look at all the perfect exercise products and/or programs to get my body fit….. fashions constantly changing to adorn this marvelous body I am so obsessed with to make it beautiful….. etc….etc……..
I am a health/exercise/wellness nut!
Having said that…there is something I also need to say. That this old body just gets older and uglier every day….and….it is going to either wear out some day or just plain quit!
It will be deposited in a grave…cremated…. or maybe the Lord has some other plan for my body…but that part doesn’t really matter because I wrestled with this next what if many, many moons ago. So…..
What if…. your soul is not something you have….but something you are? Just suppose we realized that we are souls and have a body…. and it is not the other way around. Just suppose we come to the full realization that this body I have is really only a container that God put me in for this brief tiny little journey thru time and space….just suppose the real me is my soul and I am going to leave this old carcass of mine to spend eternity with my Father….His Son and the Holy Spirit.
So alrighty then… what if … you don’t have a soul….but you are a soul….and you have a body?
I am going to pursue the “what if” thing for a bit…. hopefully it will stir you the same way it has been stirring me….it is making me think about things…talk to God about things….question the preconceived ideas I had and all the things we have been told to believe…. how much more fun to believe what the Lord Himself shows us than what somebody else tells us we have to believe….
So with that to kick us off this morning…..
What if…… we really understood…….
….how religion has reduced the Scripture from what it really is…a vital living communication from God to us…. to a formula of intellectual assent that somehow gets us to heaven ….maybe…if we do everything we are told to do….
…..how religion has reduced it from a marvelous love story to a not so marvelous theology (which means words-logos, about God-theo)…. oh my and have there ever been many words over the centuries from all the various religious systems men have put together. Think about this wonderful love story that makes possible a day to day relationship with the living God - the creator of all things….and then reduces that to assent with someone’s theological belief system….and then you just better agree with us or you are out…agree with us or you go straight to hell….and…you do not pass go….you do not collect $200.
…..and finally…if we really understoood….how religion has reduced this love that would never cheat on its lover….this intimate, personal, love relationship that is the essence of morality and righteousness that comes out of that kind of relationship…….religion takes that kind of morality and reduces it to a bunch of rules and regulations …. some religious systems with very, very long lists of do’s and don’ts….this is what is right ….this is what is wrong….our way is right…the other way is wrong…and on and on and on…
What if? we really understood….
I love what this stuff does to my head…. where it sends me…. the feelings….the emotions…the crush of God’s presence. I only read a couple paragraphs this morning and I have so much to muse about my brain feels like it is swimming in the oceans and the waves are really up!
Try this first of a few what ifs I would like to throw out there. What does a simple thought like this do for you?
“What if the guy who sold everything he had to buy the incomparable pearl, was God and you were the incomparable pearl?”
Whoa baby…that rocks my socks! Do I realize that that is exactly how God loves us? Do I realize that He gave everything for me….so I could be brought back into a relationsship with Him? He gave His only begotten Son…..His everything…because He loved me so much,,,,this incomparable pearl that once was lost and now is found.
Sorry…can’t handle any more right now….I am totally mushed. Think about it. You might just get a little mushed yourself.
As mentioned yesterday… it really doesn’t take a whole lot to get me going….. yesterday it was Eldredge’s musings on page 102 …. This morning it was while reading my own Daily Prayer and the part about being His co-worker leaped out at me….and off I went…. That was part of what I was trying to communicate yesterday…. If I am Mr. Make It Happen then God becomes my little co-worker… which is both upside down and backwards! We are supposed to stop doing and let Him do all the work!
There are times ….come on now….let’s get real here.. …. when we act like He is not really a co-worker even…. just our little helper…you know…bless these wonderful things I am doing for you, Lord….. especially since I know how to do everything bestest with the mostest on the ball! I’m sorry…maybe I shouldn’t have said it that way… I am probably the only one on the planet who ever felt way.
Then this morning, I also barely got started reading a little of Wayne Jacobsen’s Musings and came across this one….
“Perhaps being fruitful isn’t a matter of starting something, following a five-year plan, and achieving it. Perhaps it is a matter of simply being able to respond to the people and situations around us with his love in our heart and his voice in our ear. For most of my life I have drawn too direct a line between what I think God wants and what I must do to get it. It seems Jesus warned us about that: If you try to save your life you’ll lose it. If you try to be first you’ll end up last.
He only asked us to love, one day at a time, whoever is before us in whatever circumstance we meet them. Everything else he wants to do will flow from that simple reality.”
Boy….do I ever want to live that way…. I’m challenged today….hope you are too!