Do you remember the movie The Stepford Wives?  The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands.  Husbands, you can insert your wisecrack (here), but at your own risk.  A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal.

Timothy Keller uses this example to illustrate what some people seem to want to believe about God.  Christianity requires a belief in the Bible.   That’s a big stumbling block in the eyes of some.  The Bible is full of hard things, and contradictions, and upsetting views, they say.  But Keller points out - if you stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you  assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?

Keller goes on to say, “What happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will?  If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you?  You won’t!  You’ll have a Stepford God!  A God essentially, of your own making, and  not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction.  Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.”

There are many many people who profess belief in God who rarely if ever go to church.   By and large these people don’t take the Bible seriously in everyday life.  I wonder if the God they profess belief in, who comfortably lets them off the hook for their laizzez-faire approach to spirituality, is a real God, or simply a God of their imagination. 

Is the God I believe in the God revealed in the Scriptures, or is this God one of my own making? 

Have I gotten hold of a real God?  Has the real God gotten hold of me?

When the real God has gotten hold of us, we worship that God together in church.  I hope to see you there.

In Jesus,

Rev. Rich Morris, pastor