I’m gonna find ya
I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha…
I heard these lyrics from the famous Blondie song “One Way Or Another” while coming across a ‘party mix’ radio station playing the ’seek and scan’ game with the car stereo.
That seems to be our mentality of God. Someone who will find us not to love us or be ABBA Father, but as one that will ‘get us’ in retialation for ’something’ we must have done. However, I was blessed by Todd’s (a fellow Brennan Manning fan and forum member) article at his blog that is worth your read.
Growing up in a pentecostal / holiness environment, the mentality that was prevalent through that mindset was that “God was out to ‘get us’ for sinning”. This was absorbed into the mentality of a ‘Last-days Grand Mega End-time revival’ because everyone, like Achan in the Old Testament, had some ‘private sin’ that was unconfessed that was ‘holding back’ the ‘Last-days Grand Mega End-time revival’. In other words…
You better be perfect or God will find another group of people to decide to call His own
You better be perfect or God will permanently cast you away from Him.
You better be perfect because like Moses, one mistake can keep you from experiencing the ‘Last-days Grand Mega End-time revival’ that is supposed to save the masses.
You better be perfect or God will banish you into a lifetime of roaming and unstability.
You better be perfect or God will send you to Hell when you dieto be eternally apart from Him.
No wonder many Christians today who grew up in those environments suffer from the ‘performance trap’, ‘apostolic anxiety’, ‘perfectionalism’, and other forms of neurosis to the point of living in paralysis fearing making a choice (may bring more and eternal punishment/separation from God) to the point where circumstances eventually makes the choice for them to where they do not feel responsible.
God really loves us. He does punish those he loves for our good.
It is exactly what Todd said in his article. We, in our human attempt to understand the true nature of God, try to analogize God down to a human level. Parents normally punish their children in anger and since the average person derives their concept of God from their parents, they come to the conclusion that God is angry at us.
In summary, I will leave you with this thought that I may continue on in future posts.
How can we Christians live a new-covenant lifestyle when it appears that the workplace, government, military, and society as a whole tends to operate out of an old-covenant mindset?
