What I DON’T Believe in!!!

As a young man, I would have told you that I was an atheist.  Not the card-carrying, T-shirt wearing variety.  Just the kind of guy who, if you asked me, did not believe in God.  Today, I understand a bit better who I was back then.  The picture of God in my mind, made no sense…so I disposed of my picture.  I thought my picture was God.

Today men and women have movements and meetings, websites and debates built around this belief called atheism.  It means “without god belief”.  ”A”  means without, “theism” is a belief in a god”.  I am amazed at the emotion and organization around a “non-belief“.  Movements stir people to rally about what they don’t believe.  Weird huh?  Here’s what I have learned about me.  My non-belief had more to do with emotions and reactions than it did any kind of faith or non-faith.  Many atheists I hear today, really have been hurt or have perceived an injury from someone or something claiming to represent God.  So they build an entire relational system around what they DON’T believe.    It’s a good thing christians don’t do that.

Or…wait…what if we do?  What if in our own camp, movements have formed as a response against what we perceive someone else is not doing right?  I mean, we wouldn’t do it on purpose, but we might just try to do it better because we see what we believe someone else is doing wrong.  So a leader might stand up and say, “WE do things this way, here is our creed, and our practice…”  and whether he follows up out loud or in his heart, he might actually entertain the thought that “ahhh..now someone is finally doing it right…not like those people over there”

Worse, what if a great deal of our system is built around how NOT to have church.  You see Paul wrote in the New Testament about a lot of things to NOT do.  So we develop a number of strategies to adhere to the warnings of this great Saint.  We can become the best at not making the mistakes we were warned against.

It makes more sense to me to look at what Jesus did and said, and try to emulate that, than it does to build our doctrines around the correction of mistakes.

Let’s look at an even bigger picture.  What if we think this whole “Christianity” thing is about NOT sinning?  We shape our whole lives around trying to avoid bad behavior, thinking God designed us to NOT sin.  Certainly He did not make us FOR sin.  But we could avoid sin our whole lives and still never step into the fulness of who He created us to be.  If you become that person…well, it seems pretty natural that you will act like that person.  It would be sad if Christians were known more by what we don’t do, than by the amazing things I see being done by Christ-Followers.

Before we make too much fun of the atheists who organize around what they DON’T believe perhaps we should look at the speck in our eye…or wait…is that a log.