Let's Play God

I find myself fascinated at how often I try and play God. Or maybe it's how often I try and put myself in His shoes and speak for Him instead of letting Him speak for Himself. I guess that's the same thing. I just got home a little while ago from taking a couple of my friends to the Atlanta Airport and they gave me a cup of coffee to keep me awake on my drive home I believe once I got home the caffeine kicked in and now I'm wired to go for a while. It's 6:24am. I tried to lie down and go to sleep but God kept speaking to me, not crazy audibly or anything, I was just restless and thoughts of writing this book kept coming to my mind. So, I got up, used the restroom and jotted down a few key points that had come to mind and here I sit.

Over and over again I catch myself questioning my beliefs. Not that there's a God, or if I believe in the right thing. But almost second guessing everything that I believe on a spiritual level. Tonight something profound was almost screamed in my ear while I was trying to get back to sleep. The voice, something from within said these words, "The only one that should ever make me question anything on a spiritual level is God." How true! So often I let circumstances or someone around me make me question decisions that I make because of "conviction" or my belief system. I know most people think I'm a nut job when I mention that I'm a Christian. It's a known fact that everyone around me, friends and acquaintances know what I believe and why. But that's not why I am writing this at such an odd time in the morning, running on an hour and fifteen minutes of sleep.
I sat down at the computer this morning because I have this urge to talk about how we play God so often. How we let ourselves get bogged down in our romance with ourselves. How we try and mentally or spiritually slip God's shoes on and say, "I know how I would handle this situation". As if we could ever comprehend anything that God would do. I guess this whole topic came up because I've been feeling rotten about my life lately. I've been feeling as though I could be leading a better life. Not that I should be drinking more water instead of soda. (I probably should, but that's beside the point.) But my spiritual walk has faded. It hasn't ceased to be, it's just taken a seat on the upper deck, actually further back in the "nose bleeds", where it doesn't belong. Conviction has taken a back seat with it as well. Guilt has set in, and I find that over and over again I beat myself down spiritually because I can't accept how much I fail. And so I have a theory on guilt, it's just a theory, but it came to me while I was using the facilities earlier. When we feel guilt it's almost as if say, "if I were God, I couldn't forgive me." But God is above our finite minds. He knows we are going to mess up. He did create us. We can't understand His forgiveness and understanding because we wouldn't be so forgiving and understanding. It all comes down to how enthralled we are with ourselves instead of God.

If we even tried to wrap our tiny little heads around how understanding God is, I believe they would explode. He isn't just going to let things slide. Sin cannot go unpunished. But He isn't that fatherly figure that is going to harp on our wrongdoing for weeks and weeks. God says in His Word to us that, "If we confess our sins He will remove them from His mind, as far as the East is from the West." The last time I checked East and West don't get anywhere near each other, and God is everywhere, so that idea in and of itself makes my brain turn upside down in my head.
It's so funny how we humans act. We try and understand things, or put an explanation on certain topics that we can't even scrape the surface of. I am in the midst of one of my favorite books right now and the author is talking about how it's almost an insult to God Himself to try and make up and equation for Him. I thought that was kind of nice considering I'm not the most brilliant mind on this earth. I like that idea mostly because it reminds me of when Christ talks about faith like children. As children we tend to except things "just because". No explanation required we just go along with it. Our minds aren't tarnished by politics or opinions of elders; we just take things as they are. I wish that our mindset would be like that for our whole lives, because once we begin to grow and mature that childlike innocence disappears and everything gets complicated. A couple of years ago my friend Bobby decided that He could put God into this really neat math equation, or maybe it was chemistry, something with numbers. He showed me the whole thing, about two words into it I was lost, but it sounded really cool. I went along with it because I didn't know any better, but when he would present it to somebody it just started to feel like we were salesmen for this company called "Christ Promoters" or something like that, and this company had just come up with this pitch that could "make your whites whiter and your colors brighter". After a while we gave up on the whole thing, but it kind of gets me back to the point of trying to prove God and putting Him in an equation is almost a slap in the face of Almighty God. Putting God in an equation is the same thing as putting Him in a box. It puts limits on Someone who is not held to limits. If we could understand this then maybe we would quit trying to wear His shoes too. We could quit trying to play God and let God be God and guilt wouldn't be sleeping in the bed with us at night, rather conviction. Tomorrow is a new day for all of us. And if you have confessed your sins, given them up and told God that you really want to change then you won't feel heavy about any wrong you have done. The heaviness is guilt and guilt is not God's doing.

You're not going to live a perfect life. You can leave that up to Jesus, because He was the only one that was able to do so. He was sinless. But what will reduce the gray hairs and wrinkles is repenting and letting Christ know that you want to live a pure and holy life. But don't let your sins get the better of you and make you feel worthless because you can't go a day without messing up in some area. It's a part of life. Think of sin as sticky note reminders that remind us of our place before a Holy and Righteous, Loving God.