Hopefully you, my readers, are having as much fun with these smart and stupid ways of thinking about God as I am having in sharing them. As I shared, I am taking these ideas from Michael Shevack and Jack Bemporad, although I’m editing the material a good deal.
The sixth smart way to think about God is GOD IS PERSONAL. This is how the authors begin talking about this.
Sooner or later we all have to put up or shut up – we have to stop thinking about God and start acting. If you believe in God, you can’t spend an eternity sitting on the fence. You have to commit. Either you start bringing God into your personal life and start living Him, or even your smartest lessons will remain hopelessly stupid. If you believe in God, He must become a practical matter. He must have real and true consequences for your life or you are, to put it bluntly, a hypocrite.
If you believe in God, you can’t do anything you want. You can’t live just for money! You can’t live just for pleasure! You can’t live just for yourself!
If you believe in God, there are real-life decisions you have to make and they are not always convenient.
God should affect your life-style, that is your habits, your goals, your family. God should affect how you interact with others, even your enemies.
If you believe in God, He must become the standard by which you evaluate your decisions. Our living God must be a part of living, integrated into our lives on every level. Either we start to develop this kind of relationship with Him or we are functional atheists. The important thing is to begin to relate to God in a way that makes you feel closer emotionally and intellectually. Then pray. It’s a way of having a conversation with God. He can help you connect to life more deeply and more intimately than before. You may be able to feel God’s presence in the people and events that enter your life. God has to become at least as much a part of your daily ritual as brushing your teeth.
Religion can be a help, especially if it encourages questions and encourages people to grow within themselves and in their relationship to God and others. With the support of religion, a person can work through difficulties, grapple with doubts and gain a closer, more intimate feeling toward God.
Hopefully our religion helps us develop a more intelligent image or idea of God. It provides the thoughts and ideas of centuries of people thinking about God and His relationship with us. It can help us discover our true God inside ourselves. Although we may not be able, at first, to hear Him within us, if we are patient and persist in trying to come to know Him, we will begin to hear His voice within us.