A few weeks ago I went up to a sort of seminar thingy at a friend’s church in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. At the seminar, we were privileged to have Phil Drysdale as the guest speaker/facilitator for a whole day of discussion about the new things God is doing in these days.
Something I heard repeatedly in that session was this: “Once you have seen this, you can’t unsee it”. And that has been true for me these last few years.
The life-changing revelation that actually God is not mega-pissed with you as some people would like you to believe, but, in fact, that He loves you – and indeed likes you! – more than you know, and just as you are. He’s not looking for you to change before He will come and walk by your side.
He doesn’t stand far away from you because of how bad you might feel about yourself, maybe because of what others have told you. He’s not a right radgy miserable old grump up in the clouds clutching a handful of thunderbolts; no, in fact He is just like Jesus. For in Jesus Christ, everything about God lives in a human body, and in Him we too have been given everything we ever needed (Col 2:9-10). This is the completely one-sided, unfair, unearned, shocking, life-changing truth of the Gospel – which really is Good News. All of it.
Here’s the truth: if the god that people have told you about does not look just like Jesus, then it’s not the true God they have told you about. Period.