Fast Food Theology
There is a perspective on God that is often preached as if He were a Burger King God. You can have it your way. Pray, ask for what you want, and if you do what you’re supposed to, you’ll get it. Have problems with what the Bible says you shouldn’t be doing? Just ignore those parts. Think the Bible tells you to do things that are too hard? You can just ignore those parts too. It’s fine. So long as you’re happy, everything else is debatable. If Job taught us anything, its that our happiness is always God’s top priority after all. Other times, God is pitched like Wendy’s. Pay a little money and you can get a lot for it. The four for four for faith, if you will.
Faith is all too often sold and marketed as a generic cure-all. Buy in a little, be a good person, and it’s an easy street to heaven from there. It’s pitched that bad things don’t happen to those who have faith. Since those who have faith are good people, and bad things aren’t allowed to happen to good people when they’ve signed up to be watched out for by God. The truth isn’t quite so marketable.
Romans 5:3-5 “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
James 1:2-3 “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”
The truth is the Bible promises us a great deal of things in life. Among them is suffering. We will always face trials in life, the quality of our faith and the consistency of our tithes do little to avert that. However, a relationship with Christ has a mighty impact upon how we go through these trials. With Christ, we have the hope and love that pulls us through and helps us to grow from our struggling. What doesn’t kill you can make you stronger, but it can just as easily break us when we’re on our own. While we are promised strife in life, we are also promised an eternity of peace afterward. This is all possible because we have a McDonalds God. One who says, “I’m lovin’ it,” even when we don’t deserve it.
Romans 8:18 “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
John 16:33 “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Minister to Teens at
Generations of Grace in
Lebanon, TN
Comments
Post a Comment