The Harder Lesson

I thought I would share a communication that I had with a member.

He writes:

Eric, To whom is it harder to get THE LESSON across? Someone just hearing of God's love or someone that has turned their backs on their first love and Savior? I hesitated about sending you this note until today. My brother-in-law and sister will be with us on Sunday, the Lord willing. He was my roommate at Freed-Hardeman Jr. College and has been my best friend since the 7th grade. Somewhere along the line, he has given up on the Lord. Probably the most intelligent person I've known my whole life but simply doesn't believe anymore. We remain best friends but do not discuss God. I pray for you and your family constantly. Your work and words mean so much to us. We come home, feeling refreshed and ready to tackle another week from our drive to Columbia on Sunday mornings. Keep on keeping on. God bless.

I wrote:

God bless you for your words of encouragement. I praise God that you are fed and filled by your sacrificial drive to and from. You will never know what that means to me. But to answer your question I tend to believe it works on a case by case basis. There are those who have never known Christ that have had so many wounds that they can’t believe anyone especially God would love them while others who never knew Christ fall head over heels immediately upon the meeting. Now with those who have turned from Christ I tend to believe they turn not from God but their misconceptions about God. I think all of us have a tendency to create for ourselves a idea of God pieced together by fragments of scripture, pop cultural fallacy, ideas that come from our own experiences, etc. And that idea of God sometimes is vastly different than the God in the Bible ( It’s hard to even realize the fact that God is so much bigger than what we find in the Bible. He has only revealed that which humanity can understand of Him. But He is infinitely bigger than what our minds can conceive of. We can’t grasp that because we have a hard time understanding the little bit He has given us.) So it is quite natural to come up with grave misconceptions and when the mistaken God doesn’t function like the real God we tend to turn away. So some people begin seeing God for who He is vs. who they thought He was and fall head over heels immediately while others refuse to believe God could be anything other than what they can conceive of with their petty consciousness and get stuck. But what we do is pray harder than we have ever before and allow God to use us all to love your friend into deeper relationship and deeper truth. If it’s God’s will I look forward to meeting them and I pray God has His way with him this weekend.

Your Brother,
Eric