When we Credit God for Everything Good and Nothing Bad

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God, I have noticed that we often say, "God is Good all the time, and all the time God is Good." Honestly this confuses me because there is a lot that happens to me and others that is really not good at all. Are we pretending? Are we lying to ourselves? Are we confused about the definition of good? Please help me understand you better. Thanks, Tom

Musings

 I follow Jesus, and I think we Christians are pretty funny. One funny thing we believe is:

• Any time something good happens, God gets all the credit.
• Any time something bad happens, we never blame God

It’s a pretty fine deal God has with us. I am pretty jealous because I have been trying to work the same deal with family for many years. Similarly we love to over emphasize the silver lining. If someone gets their leg run over the right thing to say is, “Praise Jesus it was only one leg!”  careful not to blame Jesus for failing to protect their hurt leg.  This is a form of confirmation bias, which causes us to notice that which supports our pre existing beliefs and ignores that which challenges. When we credit God for everything good and blame him for nothing bad, we imagine it’s easy to love, serve, and respect God.

As Christian’s we learn to keep on praying for things we need.  God has his prerogative to answer when and if he wants. However, we Christians selectively report the positive results and not the negative giving the appearance that God answers prayers beneficially more often than actual.

So what’s the problem with all this? The problem is that it sets people up for a fall and it harms our ability to show Jesus to others.

Church is a place that is most comfortable for those getting their prayers answered. Those without praise reports to give can  eventually fade away, feeling out of place thinking they are the only ones not receiving Gods help. This attrition gives a false sense in the remaining church that everyone is getting their prayers answered.

Let’s use social media as a metaphor to investigate this. One of the significant factors in teenage depression is their tendency to compare their life to the lives of their friends as presented on social media. Of course the friends post the best parts of their lives rather than the challenges. Other kids compare their actual lives to the “perfect” lives of others leading to depression. When the Christian community does the same thing by presenting that God is always good and always answering their prayers, other Christians compare themselves to those people “God loves best”. No one wants to be God’s red haired step child but people can feel that way. Eventually those feelings can cause people to walk away from the faith completely frustrated by the bait and switch.  In church one of the favorites things for pastors to do is to ask each person to turn to their neighbor and tell them the good thing God is doing in their life. I have had that happen when I did  feel like God was doing anything good in my life at the time. But I put on a smile and provided a trite phrase that would get me out of a sticky situation; while inside though I had abandoned authenticity.

When we abandon authenticity, we can not engender the trust of others outside the church. If we can not be trusted, we will never be spreading any good news. So if we care about people outside the church and about Jesus reputation, we need to change our ways.

We should commit to an authentic relationship with Jesus that rejoices and laments with equal energy. This should be true in our private life and our public life. Let us as a community get away from the unwritten rule that we should always be rejoicing and create an authentic community that tells the truth, one that others outside would like to be a part of.