Changing my mind

A useful thing I learned from my dad was that you can sell back soda bottles for money!  Well, you used to be able to, back when all soda pop came in glass bottles.  You could sell them for anywhere from a nickel to a dime to fifteen cents, depending on size of the bottle and the store you were selling them at.

It was called redemption. You were taking what was likely going to be trashed and eventually put in a landfill and selling it back to a company that would take it, melt it down, and reuse the glass for new bottles of soda.  Kind of like the circle of life for Coke.

The word redemption or redeemed came up in church occasionally too.  And it came up when mom took us all shopping for a million grocery items on Saturdays and had a stack of coupons she'd redeem or use to get money off our shopping bill.

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It's one of those fluffy, churchy words in one sense and something practical and related to exchange in the market place in another sense.  And it wasn't until a lot of years later that I'd put all that together when studying different languages and studying scripture.

One of those foundational things that has been unmoving through this growth/deconstruction/rebuilding phase is the idea of redemption.  "God don't make junk" my mom would say.  Everything could be reused or repurposed, you just have to look for it and not assume the worst.

Regardless of whatever situation I find myself in, there is something potentially good in it, through it, and/or on the other side of it.  Paul said to rejoice in the Lord always, not to rejoice in or about the things you're going through, but in the Lord - he's never leaving you or forsaking you.

And there have been points of time in life when that thought has wavered a good bit. "So what?  God hasn't left me, but what about my sick kid?  Sure, God isn't forsaking me, but this pain that won't go away sure seems like forsaking."  You get the idea.

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So a part of growth is allowing your honest thoughts about God and your situation to get hit hard, challenged, kicked around, and shown no mercy at all.  It's not a matter of doubt, it's a matter of "What does this really mean?  What does it really do?  Why doesn't X, Y, & Z happen?"

One of the largest beneficiaries of this process was my idea about what God does or doesn't do.  The part of my thinking that has been redeemed is still the knowledge that God is always there and never leaves or stops loving me or rejects me.

The part that has been transformed in this redemption process is the idea that God gives me stuff or alters the forces of nature for me in any kind of tit for tat, exchange for goods/services kind of set up.  That is pretty much absent in scripture, at least in the New Testament part.

Yes, yes, I know the word "blessing" and how we throw it around instead of "good things given to us". We just like to spiritualize it and use blessing instead of saying "God please give us good things and here's our detailed list of the good things we'd like."

A blog post is too short a format to unpack all the objections and personal stories that people will like want to fling at me.  I get it/them and understand where you're coming from and I'll just summarize by saying there's a big difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament/covenant with God.

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Would it be nice to get a lot of stuff from God?  Sure, but that's not the point of having God.  The good news is not "You might be saved when you die and IF you play your cards right, all the stuff in your life here will go good for you and your family."  That is just NOT the good news or the gospel.

In the New Covenant we have with God, we have 100% forgiveness of sin (past, present, and future), the gift of God's Spirit living in us (now and forever), and that's just about it.  The blessing is we get to walk with him and know him and vice versa, he walks with us and sees the world through our eyes/experiences.

Kind of like the country song with the line "I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden", God never promised that "rose garden" kind of life here and now.  Can he do that?  Might he do that?  Well sure, he can do anything, but that's not his promise to us.  We're not Jews under the Old Law promises.

Now, I know that completely messes up a LOT of people's ideas about God and whether or not it's worth knowing him, following him, etc.  It brings up SO many questions like "What do we pray for?  How do we pray?" And don't bring up "the Lord's prayer" that was given under the Old Law....

...Jesus was showing them how to pray while they were still under the Old Covenant and things got significantly better between the sermon on the mount and the letters Paul and others wrote some years later.  More on that soon.

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Back to redemption and redeeming.  Most of my early upbringing taught that redemption, spiritually speaking, was essentially adding new ideas into my mind.  I still had all my other ideas in mind, Jesus just gave me *more* things to think about.

But redemption, for me now, means more along the lines of Romans 12 and Ephesians 4-5 where Paul talks about a transformation process.  We are transformed by the renewing of our mind.  We put on the mind of Christ and *take off* the other way of thinking.

So now, in view of God's mercies - the amazing good things he has done and will continue to do - the things I think are valuable and worth pursuing have changed.  What used to be the most valuable things (comfortable life, etc) are nice, but even better is knowing God and walking with him.

I used to hear people say that kind of thing and think "You sound like you have been smoking a bag of crack".  Now I get it more so.  Because God has redeemed or renewed or begun transforming my mind, my goals, my way of thinking.

So to summarize again and point to where this is all going next, a big part of the rebuilding of faith for me has been changing what is seen as valuable, good, and worth pursing.  "Going to church" means something completely different.  "Walking with God" ditto.  More soon.