Seeing Through Jesus-colored Glasses

Many people think God has ulterior motives and that blessings can’t be free gifts with no strings attached; thinking God doesn’t just give us something unless we have "earned" it or unless he wants something in return. Surely he doesn’t display true kindness, does he?

Because we've given ourselves over to the counterfeit version of kindness, we have redefined the character of God to fit the lie we believe.

God is love. Love is kind. God is kind. Kindness doesn't resort to manipulation.

God is not after forced obedience; he wants to capture your heart, and then our response to Him is motivated by our love for Him. I don't know about you, but I've never felt much love for the people who've manipulated me. Why would God use such tactics (guilt, shame, fear) knowing they wouldn't lead to the kind of relationship with you that he wants to enjoy?

Too many people believe in a manipulative God who has something behind everything he does. So much religious activity that is done in God’s name (evangelism, altar calls, and pleas for offerings) is emotionally manipulative, using guilt, fear and shame to leverage the desired response.

We think God is angry, demanding and cruel, rather than patient and kind.

Where did we get the idea He was all those negative things? From the Bible, the Old Testament (OT). Did God get a makeover after Malachi? Some draw the conclusion from reading the Old Testament that God is angry and violent, while the New Testament (NT) gives them a picture of a God who is gentle and forgiving. How do you reconcile those two seemingly contradictory views?

Does that angry God ever go to the cross for you? Never. Jesus doesn’t fit the Old view of God. God shows up in human form and he is not what they imagined him to be.

What is changing is not God, but our ability to see Him; not with "veiled faces", but with unveiled faces. “Jesus is the express radiance of the image of God."

Religion in our day has gone back to grab OT to feed a sense of fear, a sense of wrath and rule-keeping. The OT better serves religious interests than the NT. Religion has over-hyped the parts of the Bible that show meanness in order to arouse fear, and then use the fear to coerce conformity.

Jesus is the exact representation of the Father’s nature. Whenever I read anything in scripture that doesn’t bear witness to the person of Jesus, then there is something about that scripture that I don’t understand.

Whatever we see in Him, the real Jesus, helps us go back and interpret the OT. When you see the OT through those eyes you see that God is slow to anger, abounding in love and kindness, and jumping past the rules and rituals, (“I’m not about sacrifices.”) seeking to capture our hearts.

In the story of Noah and the flood, there is no anger there. The text reads that God was sorrowful and pained in his heart, grieved that it had come to this... but there is no mention of anger on his part. The flood story becomes a rescue mission to save humanity from itself, rather than the spewing of fury from an angry deity.

Maybe the rules are not the focus of the rule giver! He is not who I thought he was, isn’t focused on the things I thought he was, and hasn’t made a big deal out of the things that I have made the big deal.

Jesus and God are always about reconciliation. He came to seek and save the lost.

Jesus was the fullest demonstration of who God is in our world and when we look at troublesome passages in the OT through that lens we get a very different picture of the heart of God.