This week Bear Creek is starting a series of worship services about allowing ourselves to be wooed by God. I know that it’s kind of strange to think of God this way, but God is someone who gently draws us to him/her/them. As I understand it, that is the gift and the action of God’s prevenient grace, to draw us closer. To prepare our heart so that it will be open enough to hear and respond to God’s love. The problem with our relationship with God is that our “ego” likes to keep control of us by keeping us “surfing” only on the surface. And so, when we try to “listen deeper” or “go deeper” we often encounter resistance…and that resistance is our “ego”, and ego that isn’t willing to let us let go.
In order to let ourselves be “wooed” by God, we must be willing to let go. And in order to let go, we must trust.
When I was a young boy, I had a hard time learning how to swim. Part of the reason for this was that all my lessons were at a swimming pool where the shallow end, but I was so short that the water was still just above my head. And so I’d cling to the side of the pool, holding on for dear life, because I knew that if I let go, I would sink!!!
Swimming pools to this day still cause my heart rate to rise!
It was my mother who finally figured this out. One day she took me to a shallow lake, we called it the “golf course” for some reason, and there at that lake mom waded with me out to about my waist and gently had me lay on my back. All the while promising me that she had me, that she would hold me. And as I leaned back, she slowly coaxed me to relax. “I’ve got you, Brook, I’ve got you. Just relax and breathe. Nothing is going to hurt you here. Just trust me, and learn to trust the water. They key to swimming, Brook, is to trust the water.” On and on she wooed, and before I knew it she had let go and I was floating in that water all by myself. Within the week I was swimming!
No wonder when we talk about religion, we often put it in terms of faith. To believe is to have faith and to have faith is to trust.
The problem today is that we live in a world that has moved more and more to distrust. We have been taught by our high schools and universities and seminaries about a process of learning that is all about de-construction. All about tearing things apart, so that we can put them back together again, but when we do, we often have been so rattled that we don’t trust enough anymore to put them back together.
I have been listening and reading about Abraham Lincoln lately and I came across a YouTube video called “Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray: Lincoln”. In this video a Lincoln scholar was asked by the moderator about a tendency in our cultural era to pull apart folks in our history, to de-construct” them, in order to get to the true building blocks of who they are, and then put them back together. But, in doing this, we tend to “ignore massive achievement,” and to “zoom in on small failings”. Our tendency is to isolate these “failings” and so focus on them that we end up discrediting some of the major accomplishments they made…and we, thereby, portray them in “bad faith”. (99) Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 04 Abraham Lincoln - YouTube (Start at about 49:00 to hear this main point).
I believe with all my heart, that this is often what happens to us when we start down the path of “unbelief”. We let this world’s “deconstructions” take our faith apart, and lift up only the “failings” of who we are. And in so doing, we end up only believing in what we are not. We become a people of “unbelief”. A people who only know what we “do not” believe.
The truth is that “faith” and “belief” have helped people get through, get up, and rise above some of the most incredible obstacles that this world has ever known. The truth is that there is an incredible sustaining power (a grace) that can come to us when we learn to listen to the deep, abiding love of God…when we learn to listen and trust in that love.
My hope is that we all can be moved these next weeks from an attitude of “disbelief” and “distrust” to an attitude of allowing our hearts to be wooed towards the yes of faith and belief.
These last couple of years, I have so enjoyed watching my granddaughter learn how to swim. Last week Cassie and Devon sent me a picture of her swimming across the pool all by herself. That effort took months of patient teaching from teachers, parents, and even grandparents. All of us teaching her how to trust. And in the end, because of that trust, Emerson was able to let go and swim. May the church learn to teach in the same way.
Your friend and pastor, learning to let God woo me to a better place, Brook