You’ve got it upside down and backwards!

I’ve heard this since I was a teenager. You don’t hear it much today, but it floats up again when I observe how people generally handle the whole God-thing.

People often feel as if everything about life with God is up to them, and that being a believer is hard work.

If they don’t do everything just right, God won’t bless; if they don’t believe enough, he won’t be real; if they work hard to follow the rules of being a Christian (church attendance, giving, praying, Bible study) then God might answer a prayer, might smile on them, might even love them in ways they can feel.

This reminds me of a variety act I saw as a girl on the Ed Sullivan Show. This guy would spin plates on top of several poles, with much frantic effort. Each time one would begin to lose its spin and threaten to fall off the pole, he’d run to it and give it a huge twist to get it going again. Then run to the next one in danger of falling, and repeat, over and over. The only thing that kept those plates from all shattering on the ground was his frantic pole tending.

I see people trying to handle their relationship with God like this. They have to work up the faith to believe in God and then keep propping up that faith in various areas of life. They must re-spin that faith up often that God is real and there for them. It’s all up to them, to keep working up thankfulness.

The God I’ve come to know doesn’t need propping up.

You don’t have to hold Him up. On the contrary, He wants to hold YOU up. All He asks is that we come to Him like the helpless children we are, and trust Him show his good stuff.

God never asks us to work hard, he asks us to bring our weary souls to come rest with him.

He doesn’t want us to conjure him up in our minds and convince ourselves he is real, he wants to REVEAL himself to us. Altogether he offers to hold us up, not the other way around!

Worship IS hard work when there’s no genuine adoration in your heart. Thanksgiving seems fake when you aren’t aware of something to be thankful for. You can’t adore what you do not know.

Prayer IS a chore when you’re talking to empty space. God never meant it to be like this, for you to talk yourself into it, and make it all up. He meant for sincere worship and thanksgiving to arise as a spontaneous joy from a heart that encounters the Joy-giver.

Yes, it begins with faith, with believing someone is really there. But when you come, come to rest, come in your weakness, come in your neediness.

Cease striving and come rest in all of your humanness before this mighty lover of your soul, and simply say,  “I want to know you, and I don’t know how. Please reveal yourself to me. Give me eyes to see you and ears to hear you.”

And when He does, everything else will become a natural RESPONSE to this wonderful, invisible, ever-present Creator God.

Please, please, don’t do Christianity upside down and backwards! Don’t spin your plates of faith; just learn to rest in His love.