#4 God Likes People Who Want to Reason With Him
When God said through Isaiah, “Come, let us reason together” (Is 1:18), He was speaking about getting together with the Children of Israel and thinking through what He had told them. He wanted to have a reasoned discussion with them.
God has never demanded unquestioning obedience. Yes, He wants us to obey, but to obey as a result of our relationship with Him not because we HAVE to obey Him. He is love, not a totalitarian ruler. But, because of the Roman/Latin influence over our languages, societies, and Bibles, many are convinced that God runs a heavenly court of law, thus the Kingdom of God is seen more from the perspective of the Roman legal system than a family headed up by a loving and kind Father who wants to teach His children to think and live like He does.
Jesus said He is the truth. If we are unaware that some of our foundational beliefs are not what Jesus believed, then we will not be aware that something is wrong with our foundations. Yet, the evidence that something is wrong is stark. Modern believers’ lives are void of the power, joy, and fruit that was the everyday experience of early believers. Something must be wrong. Today, common explanations are, what early believers experienced was only to get the Church started, believers just need to pray more, believe more, or do something else more, or we need to stop backsliding. There are many more.
Confessing Jesus as Lord doesn’t mean that everything we believed suddenly was the truth. That confession is just the door into being able to live in God’s truth. God’s plan is for us to grow in the knowledge of the truth. Even after being born again, all of us have clung to some beliefs that are not true, though we didn’t know it. Thankfully, God knows what we believe that isn’t true and is seeking to persuade us to change our minds. But, the problem is, all of us have been convinced that we already know the truth. This is a very subtle device of Satan, which causes us to fail to question whether or not our religions and studies of the Bible are the truth. We live with the assumption that what WE believe IS the truth. Yet, we have no explanation for why our faith in God does not produce the types of lives that were common among First Century believers. But, God has an answer for us. In fact, it is right in front of our eyes, yet, we keep looking past it for a different answer.