"With" Review--Part Two

It's easy to take fault with the title of this book--With: Reimaging the Way You Relate to God. With? Huh? And what's precisely wrong about how I relate to God? 

One example from my life is my LIFE FOR GOD obsession that I wrote about in my spiritual memoir, Getting Off the Niceness Treadmill, published in 2009. That obsession was wrong--I was looking for significance and the credit for all the nice things I did FOR others and God. But biblical kindness that gives God the glory is what is needed and God doesn't need me working for Him. He just wants to be WITH me.


The Point of Skye Jethani's New Book

Some of us have grown up in legalism. For example, I was not allowed to dance in high school and I also signed a code in the 1960's in a Christian college that I would not dance. This is Life UNDER God. What's really wrong with life under God? I gave you the outward conformity without my heart.  Just adhering to a creed, even a correct creed, may be Life UNDER God.

Life OVER God is of course ignoring God's Word, or secularism. Pastors can use management of churches, grow them large and hollow with Life OVER God. You can be a Christian deist, the author points out.

Life FROM God? Doesn't God bless us? God does bless us, but sometimes he uses suffering to draw us close to Himself. He is not the divine sugar daddy where we run to get what WE want.

Christianity Today editor and author Skye Jethani  hit me where I needed to be struck in With .  I had wished that Jethani had used a lot more Scripture, but he didn't write it for me--it's for a broad audience, I believe. In that broad audience he spoke to me and I suspect will to others.

I have spent much time in Scripture in 2011--the whole Bible again in a year, and this time typing up my highlights and meditating on them. Next year? I have known for some time that my prayer and meditation needs more attention. Because I am UNDER God? No. Because as Jethani points out God desires to be WITH me and I desire to be WITH Him. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy needs Life WITH God, meditating, contemplating, communing and treasuring the LORD.

LORD,

I come to You not to feel good

or to get certain prayers answered,

but because You want to be with me.

I treasure You, LORD, and want to be found in You--

not because of any worthiness of my own--

but because of Jesus' worth and His wanting communion with me.

Forgive me for taking pride in religiosity

like "correct theology" and knowing creeds, 

when you didn't want that preoccupation on my part.

Forgive me for not thanking You for Your provisions.

Forgive me for not trusting You.

Take away all that distracts me from You during my day

and give me the discipline of practicing your presence.

Help me pray without ceasing. Amen.

Review of WITH: Reimaging the Way You Relate to God--Part One

I first heard the author on a Christian radio station and Skye Jethani's ideas resonated with me in my church experiences and observations. This new book has not been on blogs that I have noticed, however I think it has something to say to all Christians and it will merit more than one post. Scott McKnight says it will do for this generation what J. B. Phillips' Your God Is Too Small did for a previous generation. Jethani points out four views in terms of relating to God.

All of life is under God and He determines what will happen--what His will is. We need to follow His will or receive His judgment.

Jethani writes: "Many popular forms of modern Christianity leave little room for God." p. 49 Their existence is over God. Natural laws or principles control life.

Life from God includes the prosperity gospel or the name-it-and-claim it gospel. God exists to bless me and is giving us a second chance..

Life for God means that the Christian needs to have a mission to fulfill to help usher in God's kingdom.


Which is the correct view? There is some truth in each of these positions, but Jethani writes:

Having trusted Christ and the sufficiency of his sacrifice on the cross, [many people] assume any further experience of God must wait until death, when they will be set free and ushered into his presence. This view dismisses the remaining years of life as an inconvenient delay before entering eternity, and it sees the earth as little more than God's waiting room. But this is not at all consistent with what Scripture teaches. p. 110, 111

What does Scripture teach? This blog gets very little comments of late and I encourage your comments before part two on Jethani's book is posted.