They who gossip about God…
We’ve all felt it. The sting of someone talking about us behind our backs. It hurts. It wounds and it takes a while to heal. Gossip often involves spreading a lie at the expense of someone else’s reputation, and to make matters worse, they aren’t there to defend themselves.
We’ve all felt it. The raw desire for vindication in those moments when our reputation suffers unfairly at the hands of another.
We’ve all felt it. The aching need and heart cry for justice, for someone to set the record straight. Far too often our cries seem to fall on deaf ears. We are left alone, it seems, in our pain.
The fact is that gossip wounds us. And our pain becomes twice as difficult when we realize that we have gossiped about others. We all want to be authentic and we want to be transparent individuals. It often pains us deeply when we don’t live up to our stated values.
We can also largely relate to having serious questions about God and His goodness. Being human, we tend to react with great pain and sorrow when we are confronted with the painful realities that life can often bring. Whether we lose a job, a family member, or even something simple that we own, we can have a roiling cry erupt from our hearts fairly screaming out “Where are You?” when life swings sideways and we suffer loss. It is even harder to handle when one tough event after another pummels us when we’re already down.
Entire volumes have been written for centuries regarding what we perceive as a lack of justice for our particular situations. These topics have been debated in academia for decades upon decades. To be honest, very little in the way of truly satisfactory resolutions have been arrived at as far as most of us know. Clearly, the solution must lie outside of us and our intellectual musings and work. More than one person has given up on God due to the reality of suffering and evil in the world.
Forsaking God doesn’t work any better than the alternative, though. How many times have we been on our knees, crying out to God for help, for justice, asking Him to return whatever or whomever we have lost? How many times in those moments have small voices whispered to us in our pain that God no longer loves us, or cares, or observes what is happening to us? How many times have we listened to this? In our pain and often in our anger, we have lashed out at God, reminding Him of where we believe His failures are in not sparing us pain.
When we become disappointed with God, we tend to immediately form opinions about Him. I’d have to say that it seems as if our negative opinions aren’t exactly fair. Yes, we have suffered. But, does that give us license to listen to those nagging thoughts that pepper our minds and hearts about the goodness of God when we suffer loss? Are those nagging little thoughts, (you know, the ones that encourage us to essentially judge God for not doing something that we needed at the time), are those thoughts the spiritual form of gossip? Are we listening to some type of gossip about God at that point? I’d say that we are. It does seem pretty close.
Gossip does one thing very well. It assaults its target with a tarnished reputation. From the looks of how culture and people in general view God, I’d say that it’s time to recognize that God is the most maligned Being in existence.
As Christians, one of the difficulties we face is that we have the knowledge of God to one extent or another. We have been shown Who He is and yet we struggle daily with our own fears and perceptions of God, often directly related to what we believe His actions in our lives may or may not mean. We are often on the path of incorrect assumptions when we do this. There is no doubt that we suffer and have experienced great tragedies. I am not making light of these realities nor am I suggesting that we act as if bad things don’t happen. That will never be the answer.
I am stating that we are not telling the truth about God if we aren’t informed in our views of God by God Himself. Life is far too hard sometimes and we are often overcome by our pain. When we see how many caricatures of God exist in popular culture, it seems to me to be no wonder that people aren’t listening to God when they don’t take the time to cultivate a correct perspective of Him and His character, and we will find these things revealed both in the text of scripture and in daily prayer times with Him and Him alone.
Earlier I stated that the solutions to knowing the truth about God even as we suffer must lie outside of our academic arguments to solve the questions surrounding this issue. I believe that we must hear from God Himself, deep in our very hearts, if we are to know that He is good. We can’t just gamble that He is good. That is not satisfactory to our hearts. We can’t just assume that He is good. When we do that, we are taking the easy way out of this and not addressing the question correctly.
We must learn how to be on our knees, in prayer and sometimes in silence, listening, and coming to the place where the Holy Spirit is shaping our perceptions of Who God is, and giving us the faith that helps us to see Who He is correctly. God, in His greatness can use and has used any number of avenues to help us know Him. Daily time in prayer, from a heart convinced that it must seek Him and no other, is the answer. It is in the prayer time that He starts to reveal Himself, and showing Himself to be the answer to whatever the question may be. It somehow all starts and ends with Him. The portrait of Himself that HE paints is the Truth, and when we see that, we agree with our entire being. We are often overwhelmed at the revelation of Who He is, but that is worth it. So is the time invested in pursuing God daily.
It is by learning to walk with Him daily that we grow into who He intended us to become. With Him we find peace and healing from our struggles. Going to Him daily becomes a lifestyle wherein we learn to live through Him. In doing so, the Truth becomes clear and plain, and purely exciting!
We have listened to the lies and gossip about God long enough. It’s time that we, His people, remember our First Love and come back to God with a newfound passion for the truth, for repentance and for revival. He will meet us there, and we will fellowship with Him and we will find what we have been looking for.
It all starts there, on our knees, with Him.
This is the Way.
Original writing by REVIVALin2020©