Money, Power & The Hunger for Control

So if there is a God, a real and personal God in the universe, wouldn’t it make sense that the most intelligent people in our society would be the ones that find him? God is a funny God, and he’s also full of mercy and grace. God didn’t choose to reveal himself to the smartest, most beautiful, most successful or to all the “good people” on this Earth. The Bible is clear on the fact that God chooses who he reveals himself to, and it’s often the outcasts of this world that God chooses. Why? Could it have something to do with the fact that these people probably are more humble than us who think we are “good people” and “too intelligent” to believe there is a God?

Make no mistake, you can be very intelligent and still become a Christian, but it tends to be harder for the smart, rich and successful in our society to notice God. When you have built a good life for yourself it’s easy to avoid thinking about God. When you find yourself in a prison cell or completely at the end of yourself it’s easy to humble yourself enough to call out to God.

Highly intelligent people like CS Lewis and Timothy Keller came to faith in God through looking at the evidence and using reason. Other people find God when they end up in prison, in a serious drug addiction or something else that makes their whole world fall a part. No story is more important than the other, both the intellectual and the guy in prison are precious to God. What we all have in common is that none of us will be able to accept Christ into our hearts without humility.

The Rockstar Alice Cooper lived a wild life when he was younger but today he is a Christian. My friend Kesavan went to prison for 10 years but today he is a loving father of three and a Christian pastor. CS Lewis was an intelligent atheist Oxford graduate from Belfast, Ireland who is known for writing The Chronicles of Narnia and who also became a Christian. All our stories are very different, but God’s love is the same for the former atheist as for the former criminal or prostitute. We all serve a good, loving and merciful God.

Grace vs. Performance

“When my own personal grasp of the gospel was very weak, my self-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards—in academic work, professional achievement, or relationships—I felt confident but not humble. I was likely to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. When I was not living up to my standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure. I discovered, however, that the gospel contained the resources to build a unique identity. In Christ I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws, but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued and that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone.”

Timothy Keller, in his book “The Reason for God—Belief in an Age of Skepticism”

Religion is to constantly perform, trying your best to live up to a certain standard. All humans are religious beings, you don’t have to join a world religion to be religious. People tend to apply religious behavior to all kinds of things; sports, fitness, dieting, parenting, career, strict devotion to a certain ideology etc. Jesus came to end all religion, to free us from the need to measure up to a certain standard, to free us from the need to prove our worth. Ironically though, many Christians have turned Christianity into a religion too.

Religious behavior says: “to be good enough you must be able to live up to this standard (in your career/parenting/sport/world religion etc.)”. God’s love says: “I know you are deeply flawed and if you would just be willing to admit that fact, my grace is waiting for you. My love for you will never be based on your performance, it is freely given, and every time you mess up my forgiveness is already there waiting for you.” Following Jesus is simply to accept God’s love and grace. When I have accepted God’s grace I am free, I have nothing to prove. I can now be confident yet humble at the same time. I can enjoy living a life of love but when I fail I don’t need to beat myself up because I’m already forgiven. My worth is not defined by my performance, it’s defined by God’s endless love for me.

Why Read the Bible?

Why should I read the Bible? The Bible is more than 2000 years old, how could this book possibly have anything relevant to teach me today? These are some common questions surrounding the Bible. On the other hand, it's quite fascinating that a book that is more than two thousand years old is still a bestseller today. This book is not 100 or 500 years old but 2000 years old, that in itself is pretty incredible to me. Every time I read through one of the books in the Bible I'm surprised by how little has changed over the past 20 centuries. We still have the same problems. Us humans have a tendency to be self-centered and foolish, which leads us to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, century after century.


People in the Bible hurt each other through wars, cheating, stealing, murder etc. and we do the same things today. It's the human condition. When we try to rule the world all by ourselves we quickly get led astray by greed, selfishness and pride. You could say we do a terrible job when we try to take God's role in the universe. We aren't very good at loving each other and getting along. It makes sense I guess. Imagine you let your children live all by themselves without the help and guidance from their parents, they would self-destruct pretty quickly. In the end we are all children in a big universe and on our own we are lost and helpless. Whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not, we need God.


When I read through the whole Bible for the first time I was annoyed by how stupid the people where in my opinion. It's easy to look back at history and see how the people should have done this instead of that and so on. It's a whole different story to make the right choices in your own life. The wonderful thing with the Bible is that it's full of people who made foolish choices and ended up in big trouble as a result of that, but God had mercy on them and as they turned back to God and cried out to him for mercy he saved them and put their broken lives back together.


The good news is that although nothing has changed when it comes to our human problems neither has God changed. Twenty centuries may sound like a long time for us humans but it's not a long time for God. God is still the same today and he offers us the same love, mercy and grace as he offered the people back in Israel many generations ago. When we come to Him he starts to soften our hardened hearts and he starts to heal what's broken inside of us piece by piece.


God's love for each one of us is the most beautiful thing we can experience during a lifetime on this Earth, no love is greater than this. No matter what we have done or where we have been we are never too broken or too far gone for God. Our Father in heaven loves each one of us with an unfailing unconditional love. He can restore anything that is broken and redeem anything that was once lost. Having seen these sentences become true in their own lives is what makes people raise their hands and sing really loud in churches all around the world.

How to approach God

Harrison Conley preaches a sermon about how we can approach God when we feel unworthy of his love. When we have been running away from God for a long time and done many things wrong we sometimes feel like we can't approach God. We feel guilt and shame over what we have done and believe that after all our mistakes God could never love or forgive us. The first thing we need to understand about God is that no human ever receives God's love or mercy because he/she has been so good, there is not even one perfect person on this Earth, we have all sinned against God. We all receive God's mercy, grace and love because of how good He is, not because we are so good people.

The second thing we need to know is that we come to God in humility. As long as we come to God blaming someone else for our mistakes or trying to justify what we have done wrong God can't forgive us. We receive God's mercy when we take responsibility for what we have done wrong and come to him with a humble heart.

The third thing we need to know is that we come to God in faith. If we don't believe that God will forgive us we won't come to him. If we believe that God couldn't love us after what we have done we will run away from God every time we mess up rather than run towards him. When we have enough faith to believe that God's love, mercy and grace will never fail we can come to him in confidence.

We also won't come to God for help if we don't believe that God can change us, so instead we try to hide our mistakes from God and other people. The more we get to know God's character the more we will understand that no mess is too big for God to help us out of. There are limits to what man can do, but with God nothing is impossible.

Undeserved Love

I’ve been a Christian for almost nine years now and at this point in my spiritual journey I’m starting to have some favorite chapters in the Bible. One of my favorites is Titus 3:

“Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone. 

At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit”

Titus 3: 1-5 (NIV)

One of the most counter-cultural themes in the Bible is that God loves us although we do not deserve his love. Our societies are built based on a “you get what you deserve”-mentality. We realize that you don’t always get what you deserve in life. Sometimes you do all the hard work and someone else still gets the promotion, but we like the idea of getting what we deserve. We also love the idea of others getting what they deserve, especially when they have done something wrong. Forgiveness and grace is something we don’t like very much when it comes to other people, but we do expect others to forgive us.

One huge difference between Christianity and all other world religions is that Christianity is not about getting what we deserve. God does not love us because we have earned his love or because we are such good people. God sees all our thoughts and actions, he sees our messy lives and he loves us anyway. Most of us have only experienced the kind of love that humans can give us, so we learn early on to hide our messes and only show the beautiful side of ourselves. The sad truth is that we have learned that people won’t always love us if we show them our real selves. God on the other hand, knows every single mistake we have ever done and loves us despite all that. There is nothing we could ever do in this life to loose God’s love for us. God doesn’t love the way humans love, God’s love is perfect and never fails.

God doesn’t invite us into his family because we have done so many good deeds. We can never earn our way to heaven, it’s a free gift. We receive this gift by “opening the door to our hearts” and letting God in. It’s our faith that saves us, not our long lists of good deeds. One of the most encouraging things about the gospel is that we don’t change ourselves so that God can love and accept us. God loves and accepts us just the way we are, and then He starts to transform us from the inside out through the Holy Spirit. The only thing we do is decide if we will open up to God when he knocks on the door of our hearts or if we will slam the door shut in his face. God has given us free choice, we can choose to embrace his love or we can choose to reject him.

Why Did Jesus Die?

The idea that Jesus died on a cross so that our sins could be forgiven can be hard to grasp or accept. Most of us like to think of ourselves as good people. We notice that there is a lot of evil around us and we long for justice when others have done something wrong. On the other hand, when we ourselves have done something wrong, we are less interested in justice. We think that others should be able to forgive us, but we aren't as quick to forgive those who have hurt us.


We don't want to do the wrong thing, but there's something in us that make us do what we don't want to do and that makes it hard to do what is right, The Bible calls this our sinful nature. Before Jesus was born every time God's people sinned they would have to sacrifice something (traditionally a lamb) to get forgiveness from God. Imagine if every time we did something evil we would have to pay a fine, most of us would run out of money pretty quickly. You steal something, you pay. You lied, you pay. You cheated, you pay. When Jesus died on the cross he payed the price for all our wrongs. Jesus volunteered to pay for all the wrongs humanity had done in the past, the present and would do in the future.


The moment we realize that it isn't only other people around us who do evil things, but that sin is in all of us, we become very thankful to God that he removed what we sometimes call karma and replaced it with grace. Grace means that we can make huge mistakes in life and still be forgiven by God, God won't stop loving us even though we've done things that hurt others and ourselves.


The day we decide to surrender our lives to God all our mistakes and wrongs are forgiven, every single one of them. From that day on, when God looks at us he no longer sees our mistakes, he sees a new person. That is why Jesus died on the cross, to make us spotless in front of God. The thankfulness and awe that comes from being saved is what will propel us into wanting to serve God wholeheartedly through loving God, loving ourselves and loving others. Karma means that each person gets what he deserves. Grace means that Jesus got what we deserved.