Theology Thursday: How to Love God
Americans no longer believe in objective truth, so the standard for judging is now everyone’s own personal feelings. We choose policies, friends, jobs, and even churches based on how we feel about them because we have faith in our intuition. We’ve even gotten to the point where hurting someone’s feelings can be a crime.
The Christian life is the exact opposite of living by our feelings. After regeneration, the sanctification process is the transforming our minds through the truth of God’s Word. The process can be summed up by our children’s Sunday school catechism:
Question: How can you be wise? Answer: If I believe, not what the world says, and not what my heart says, but what God says, then I will be wise.
This is why the ministry at BBC is built studying and knowing the Scriptures. We should be continually reading and meditating on God’s Words, which will supernaturally renew our minds, replacing false thinking habits with true ones. An emphasis on theology is not so that we can sounds smart and quibble over minutia; we study theology to know God. Affection for God is good and important, but as Paul Washer explains in the video below, knowledge is a much firmer foundation.
We need to stop looking for emotional experiences and think of our Christian life as gardening. When you go out to water and weed your plants, usually nothing happens, but if you do your job faithfully, you do it trusting in a bountiful harvest. Reading about the feast of booths in the book of Leviticus isn’t the soul-lifting experience that we crave, but we can trust that a steady reading of God’s Word and prayer will transform us and produce a good harvest.
If you are feeling cold toward God or hopeless and anxious, learn about God, and let what you know about Him transform everything about you.