God’s love is deeper than your lowest moment
We admitted to God, to oneself, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
We’re going to focus on the “God” part of this today. The focus on how the steps apply to recovery matters sometimes pulls us away from the ways in which they support our spirituality.
One theme of my teaching in my time at NSC is exploring the question: what kind of God do we follow/worship/believe in/trust/etc.? In large part this is because when we spend time in faith communities over long periods of time our image of God gets distorted (to borrow the language of Dale and Juanita Ryan- who have many lovely books on Amazon you can order).
Our image of God gets distorted because humans reflect God imperfectly, we understand God imperfectly, and we teach about God imperfectly. Teaching about God is like a cosmic game of telephone. You remember that game, right? One person comes up with a sentence, they whisper it to the person next to them, and that person whispers it to the person next to them, and on and on it goes down the line until you get to the last person who repeats what they’ve just heard…and inevitably it is completely different than what the first person said to the second person.
This is because the whispering makes it hard to understand precisely what the person before you says and so each person gets a little bit right and a little bit wrong but the message gets increasingly distorted as it travels from person to person. Teaching about God works quite similarly. We get a little bit right, we get a little bit wrong, and as we pass it down inevitably things get lost in translation.
The big difference is- we don’t just learn about God from what people tell us- we learn about God from how people live. Because, at the end of the day, faith is about how we live…not just what we believe. So when a member of the clergy berates his staff because tithing is down…this shifts how the staff views God. My pastor is supposed to be like God…but does this mean God is like my pastor?
When a leader of the deacons fusses at someone experiencing homelessness for not being clean enough to enter church…we start to wonder. Is my God the kind of God who would fuss at someone over their cleanliness? Or, if this person who has so little compassion is a representative of God…what kind of God is that? Do I want to have anything to do with that God?
Worse yet- most people aren’t asking these kinds of questions. It’s more likely you’ve internalized some messages as a result of things you’ve seen and experienced in faith communities. This leader of the church just yelled at me…there must be something wrong with me.
Our experience of our faith communities and the people in them lead to distortions in how we view God and ourselves. The latter is a big problem, of course, but we’ll try to address that another day. (I’m letting myself ramble a bit in my writing here.)
When it comes to step 5, the distortions we carry of God impact our willingness to admit things to him. We ask ourselves questions. Is he going to be mad at me? Is he going to punish me? If God knew who I really was…he wouldn’t accept me. I’ve done something wrong, so I must not be that faithful, or I must not really believe, etc. etc.
These thoughts illustrate a distorted view of God. They point us to a God who is cruel, unforgiving, cold, and fickle.
Is that the kind of God we worship?
The Old Testament is most clear about this (despite what you may have heard), and pretty emphatic. Consider these words:
The Lord is merciful and compassionate,
very patient, and full of faithful love.
~ Psalm 145:8, CEB
This description of God appears time and time again in the Old Testament. I don’t have an exact count of the number of times it shows up because I just can’t be bothered to do that right now. But this is the dominant description of God throughout scripture, and it appears most commonly in the Old Testament.
God is, often enough, not who we are afraid he is. While we think of God as being angry and/or unwilling to tolerate mistakes, this passage contains the most repeated characteristics of God in the OT. God is merciful and compassionate. Very patient. Full of faithful love.
There are times in scripture where God gets angry and where he does not show mercy, it’s true, but these are not his dominant sides and the Bible is very clear about that (and in most cases it took God 100’s of years to decide to stop showing mercy…which is probably a pretty merciful way to go about deciding what to do with your mercy, if you’re God). The handful of times God acts in ways that don’t match this description hang around in our memories. And- they are frequently over-emphasized by pastors who want people to behave better or give more money. But the Bible is very clear about what traits are dominant. Mercy. Compassion. Patience. Faithful love.
Faithful love is a kind of passionate loyalty. It’s not about infatuation and it’s not about some strong positive feeling (think of all the silly worship songs that are out there these days that make it sound like we need to be in love with God as opposed to loving kinds of people). It’s the idea that God is not going to run away at the first sign of trouble. He will persevere in order to remain in relationship with his people.
That is who God is. It’s not just a part of who God is. It’s a dominant part of who God is. God does not run away at the first sign of trouble. A red flag here or there is not a problem for God. His presence persists.
There may be fears associated with admitting things to God. What will he think of me? Will he still stand by me? Will he abandon me?
Let me answer those in order. He will love you and view you as a beautiful part of his creation. Yes, he will stand by you as he stands by all his people simultaneously. No- he won’t abandon you. That isn’t the kind of God that God is. He will think the exact same thing of you tomorrow as he does today. You are a beloved member of his people. No matter what you’ve done or what you’ve confessed, God stands at the ready to offer all the mercy and compassion you’re able to receive.
