We learn at church that God is in control. We are taught that we just have to have faith and God will take care of the rest. But I do not believe that this is true. In Psalm 116 it says: “O LORD, I am your servant; I am your servant, the child of your serving girl. You have loosed my bonds.” It does not say God tore off those bonds.
I believe in and try to live out a participatory faith. A faith that says the bonds are loose but it is up to me to throw them off. That feels right, to be in a faith relationship with God. But it is also a bit frightening. You mean it is up to me to choose?! But I prefer a faith that says God will take care of it all. We will never have a full and complete relationship with God if we leave it all up to God.
The scriptures say we are to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. But do we really want to do that? That means we have to have some “skin in the game “. It means we cannot live out our faith on autopilot. But come on if I have to do something doesn’t that fly in the face of the verse that says “by grace you are saved not by works”? This verse is always taken out of context. The verse moves on to say we are created “in Christ Jesus for good works.
Maybe the true joy of the Christian life is that we get to partner with the Living God. It sets our faith apart from others. We are participants with God not loyal subjects. The loyal subjects view is from 500 years ago in England and Western Europe. We are not at the mercy of a benevolent King, we are partners with a loving friend.
Being a partner means we are in a Divine dance with our dearest friend. How about we just let our partner lead and we dance joyously.
TMM