God Has a Name

Jesus spent the bulk of his time helping religious people see that a lot of what they thought about God was wrong too.

As if what we think and feel about God is an accurate barometer for what he is actually like.

As the saying goes, “God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”4

From Moses to Matthew, they just assume we have no idea what God is like.

Here’s the problem: we usually end up with a God who looks an awful lot like us.

Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life.

says more about us than it does about God. Our theology is like a mirror to the soul. It shows us what’s deep inside.

In the modern world, we start with the assumption that we know what God is like, and then we judge every religion or church or sermon or book based on our view of God.

How exactly does God’s will interact with our will? The classic “sovereignty versus free will” debate. Honestly? I don’t know. But I’m sure of this: prayer is not just going through the motions. It does something. Our prayers have the potential to alter the course of history. And God’s action in history is, in some strange way, contingent on our prayers.

But that’s a gross misreading of God’s promise to Abraham. God never said we would live trouble-free. Honestly, Jesus made the opposite promise: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”13 This is one of the many promises in the Bible we tend to skip over and ignore.

It turns out that sin is its own punishment, and obedience its own reward.

Whatever it is, the odds are that it will be hard work. It will be painfully slow. And frustrating at times. The best things in life always are. But trust me, it will be worth it. So keep at it, my friends. Don’t give up. Not yet. Be faithful, like the God you worship. And never forget to live in the moment, because the moment is all we have.

From the beginning of human history, God, the Creator of everything, has been looking for friends, for free, intelligent, creative partners to collaborate with on running the world.

To the Scripture writers, hope is the absolute expectation of coming good based on the character of God.

God is more concerned with your long-term character than your short-term happiness. And he’s more than willing to sacrifice the one to get to the other.

A lot of people feel guilty because they don’t enjoy prayer. Some people dread it. Others just push through it because they know it’s the right thing to do. Most of us avoid it. That’s because most of us don’t actually pray. Prayer is what Moses did with God in the tent. What Jesus did with the Father in Gethsemane. It’s brutally honest, naked, and vulnerable. It’s when your deepest desires and fears and hopes and dreams leak out of your mouth with no inhibition. It’s when you talk to God with the edit button in the off position and you feel safe and heard and loved. It’s the kind of relational exchange you can’t get enough of.

It’s not that God doesn’t want you to live a rich and satisfying life—I believe he does. He’s your Father. What father doesn’t want success and prosperity for his kids? But like any good father, he takes the long view. He’s willing to discipline his kids to see them grow and mature into their full potential.

Prayer can move the hand of God. Prayer can get God to change his mind—think about the gravity of that.

When people read the Bible—especially the Old Testament—like a collection of short stories that each teach a moral lesson, it’s misleading. That’s not what it is. It’s a brutally honest, raw, uncut story about God’s faithfulness to Israel, and Israel’s struggle to be a faithful bride in return.

But we all have a gap. Between who we are and who God is. Between the way we live and the way of Jesus. Following Jesus is about closing that gap, one step at a time.

The future is not set in stone. The prayers we pray and the decisions we make in the here and now have a direct, line-of-sight effect on what does—or does not—happen down the line. Because God responds.

Prayer is when your life trajectory is going in the wrong direction, so you dialogue with God and he responds and your life goes another way.

Marriage only works when nobody is keeping score. When nobody “wins” or “loses.” When every day is a chance to give and receive mercy.

There are prayers in the Scriptures—in the books Moses wrote and especially in Psalms—where I cringe, half expecting lightning to strike the person dead. But it doesn’t. In fact, God seems to love that kind of raw, uncut prayer, skirting the line between blasphemy and desperate faith. He’s not nearly as scared of honesty as we are.

For Jesus, heaven is the place where God’s will is done all the time. Earth, on the other hand, is the place where God’s will is done some of the time. Because on earth, there are other “wills” at play. God isn’t the only one with a will—an agenda for what he wants to see happen in the world, and the capacity to carry it out.

So when evil comes to smash in your door, don’t have a crisis of faith, as if Yahweh is to blame. The odds are, he’s not. Instead, grieve and lament and meet God in the place of pain. But then get up and join Jesus in his quest to turn evil around for good.

Notice that Jesus assumed that God’s will was not done on earth. Hence, his prayer.

For Israel to live in a polyamorous relationship with the “gods” rather than stay faithful to her true husband. And the by-product of this illicit affair is injustice—it tears apart the social fabric of the world.

decades. You can’t do what you love until you’re good at what you do. But sociologists argue that to become really good at your craft takes most people about ten thousand hours—that’s at least a decade of hard work. What would it look like to seize upon a dream for your life and run after it? Not at a sprint, but at a slow, steady pace, ready to wait for a very long time to see God’s calling on your life materialize and bloom to life?

You’re not just a software engineer or an entrepreneur at a tech start-up—you’re a temple on legs. A house of God.

For those of you skeptics like myself who have a really hard time with the “big fish” story, there is good reason to believe that Jonah isn’t an autobiography. That it’s more like historical fiction. Jonah was real, and Assyria was real, but it’s the only prophetic book in the Bible that doesn’t start with a marker for its date and time (usually they start by saying the year of the king). Plus, it’s chock-full of hyperbolic language. My Hebrew professor called it “an ancient Jewish comic book.” Personally, I learn toward that view, but I’m fine with either.