My Paradigm Shift: Part I

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man's spiritual history will positively  demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.  Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.  

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.  We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God...

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, 'What comes into your mind when you think about God?' we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man."

-A.W. Tozer

"The Knowledge of the Holy"

I think the above quote is a good place to start in journaling my spiritual journey.  I have grown up in the Church, for which I am very thankful for, but that comes with a lot of baggage.  I first realized that sometime in the fall of 2006.  I think up until that point of time most of my spiritual growth had been simply building upon past ideas, one block upon another.  Some of the blocks weren't square though, some were starting to crumble.  So, I needed to go back, or rather God did, and replace some of the blocks, repair others, and completely remove some.

The first block that needed replacing was my narrow understanding of what it meant to be a Christian.  I read Don Millers book Blue Like Jazz.  It was in this book that I first realized (sadly) that you didn't have to be a conservative republican to be a Christian.  Shocking, I know, not everyone has to believe or think like me politically, socially and even religiously.  I am not saying that all roads lead to heaven.  In fact, most lead to hell.  But I don't think that it is defined as I always believed.

What I am saying is that you can believe in big government, high taxes, gay marriage, weak national defense (although no one would claim that one),  socialized health care, evolution, and radical environmentalism and still follow Jesus.  In fact you can believe in those things because you follow Jesus.  I used to think that you might be able to believe those things in spite of following Jesus, but not have those views informed by your faith.

This of course led me to the question of just how involved in politics we should even be as Christians.  Lets face it, politics, bureaucrats, and elected officials, no matter what party they are from are NOT going to change the world, not for the better anyway.  I honestly believe there is only one thing that can change the world for good and that one thing is LOVE.  I know it sounds like a hippy thing to say but it is not the weak kind of love that I think of when I think of "hippy love".  It is strong and unrelenting, unconditional, self sacrificing, always giving and never taking and it is extremely personal.  Politics is none of those things.  Politics is about power and control.  Love is about dying to oneself for the gain of the object of love.  The world is changed not by the power of politicians and world leaders but by the love that comes from a servants heart, of course the ultimate example of this came from love incarnate, Jesus.

So my conclusion in this first step of my paradigm shift is that God is not so concerned about peoples politics and so I should be  much more open and accepting of people with opposing political and social beliefs.  As a result I went from being a political junkie to caring very little about politics.

I wrote more about Faith and Politics back in this blog post