Jeff Johnston

Don’t you just love getting buried into a great book, and then the author writes a statement that just blows you away?

I’ve made the ‘mistake’ of picking up Mark Buchanan’s books before… yet I keep going back for more.  He never fails to tell it like it is, yet with such eloquence. Anytime I feel my soul wandering away from God, stuff like this brings me back in a heartbeat.

I reckon this: the idol of the ‘nice’ God, the ‘safe’ God, has done more damage to Biblical faith than the caricature of the tyrant God ever has.

This Milquetoast pampering deity is nothing but a cosmic lackey, an errand boy we call on to make our golf games pleasant, or to help us escape reality for a little while and then summarily dismiss.

God’s main business is not ensuring that you and I get parking spaces close to the mall entrance or that the bed sheets in the colour we want are on sale. His main business is making you and I holy {Christ-like}.

Later, he goes on to say:

Yet, we yearn for the carnival God, with His dazzling stunts and sleight of hand tricks and potions for quick cures. We like the God who feeds the crowd, and fills the fishnets. But, we’re wary of the God of Scripture: He’s too much into roughhouse and stern measure for our tastes, too prone to battlefields and bone breaking, too beholden to the fellowship of suffering, and altogether too preoccupied with the disguise of weakness.

Ouch.

JJ.