Trust vs Obedience

This is a copy of an e-mail I sent to a friend continuing a long conversation we've been having about church, religion, etc. etc.

Failure to understand how much He love me and and the ability to give up all my striving to "do it right" in order to "be" what he wants me to be. I can't disappoint God, he has no expectations of me. I've been reading 1 John 4:7-21 everyday for a little while and I see new things all the time about this issue of love.

Normally, when I find myself unkind or critical of someone or something, I just say, "you are just so evil and sinful" and try harder. But, I'm learning to say, "that's OK, at least you are sensitive to your unkindness" and I trust that God is still working in me. Rather than seeing obedience as the main thing, I believe the issue is trust. Do I trust the heart of God toward me or do I trust myself more? That was the issue in the Garden, God could have put the tree of knowledge far away from where they were or not planted it in the first place. But then, there would have been nothing to test their trust in God. God wants people who truly love and trust him, not fear and obey because they want to avoid "bad things".

That passage in 1 John says that when we live in love we live in God and God lives in us. I use to love the passages and preachers who would say we could not trust our emotions, that facts are all that matter and I'd dutifully put my heart up on the shelf. I'm not saying facts aren't important but we have to get the complete picture. The fact is that there are many things in the Biblical accounts that are contradictory. In Proverbs we read that if we train our children in the way they should go, when they are old they won't stray from it. However, Proverbs also says that when we train children in the way they should go, they turn out a mess and go ways they were not trained. So which is it? It's both, sometimes it will work out and other times it won't.

The Bible is not and owners manual for human life. Even if it were, God wouldn't want us to relate to him only based on what it says there. I think I said something before in an e-mail about having a friend and the only thing you know about them are instructions they gave you in writing, letters they'd written or gifts they'd given. What about the possibility of hearing from God afresh? I think its in James where it says Elijah was a man just like us and God spoke to him. I haven't heard, or I did and ignored it, but I'm going to keep listening and holding out hope that I can hear fresh things from God. He has not abandoned us to flounder around hoping to find some direction in the stories of other people's lives that might be applicable to us.

I love the Bible and cherish all that God has for me in it but it is not more important than my love for God or God's love for me.

Hope I'm making some sort of sense. I love you Bob (name changed to protect the not so innocent) and I love that you keep asking and questioning and sometimes get pissed off at the way things are, even in the church. It isn't perfect and probably isn't close to what the early fathers had in mind. Jesus never said anything about church except what he said about those who are part of the Body of Christ and that is a far cry from what we call church.