God Needs To...?

I've caught myself several times recently in prayer starting a request for His assistance with teaching a class, working on a lesson or the like by saying or thinking: "Lord, you need to _____________." I usually stop at that point as I realize how presumptuous that way of addressing God is. Rather than seeking His gracious help, I am essentially ordering Him to do something for me. Consciously I would never say that I am doing that, but my words and thoughts seem to give away my real heart attitude. So I will restart my request with "Lord, I need you to ___________ ." This expresses the fact that God is not the one who has the need, but rather I am the needy one. A minor change in wording, but a major change in attitude and approach to the Lord of the Universe. One much more appropriate for me as a dependent slave of His.

This then started me thinking - what does God need to do? Are there things that God must do, that He is bound to do and cannot do otherwise? As the only self-existing and self-sufficient being in the universe, God has no needs. He is the I AM, who is complete and totally fulfilled within His own self. And He is the only being in the universe with a will that is totally free. As Tozer says, He must be the only totally free being in the universe or He would cease to be the only true God. But is that totally free and sovereign will bound by anything? Obviously not anything external to Him, for then He would fail to be sovereign. If there is anything that in any way limits the free will of God and results in actions that He must do, it has to be internal to Him. In other words, that which determines what God must do is the character and nature of God Himself. For example, God must be holy, for to act in an unholy manner would be contrary to His person and character. God must be loving and gracious and just and merciful and wrathful toward sin, because to be otherwise would be to violate who He is. God's perfect free will is bound by His perfect person and character. In other words, God's will must always act in a manner consistent with His righteous and perfect person.

So the question then becomes: are there things God wants to do that He cannot because of this binding of His will? As Paul might say, may it never be! For God, as the perfect moral being, never has a desire to act or behave in a manner contrary to His perfect character. So in one sense God's will is bound by His character and He needs to act as such. But in reality, His will is perfect so that He is not really restrained by this fact. Again, as Tozer notes, He is the only truly free being in existence.

I guess maybe the passage we've been looking at in 2 Timothy 2:13 has been on my mind, that deals with these subjects: "If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself." God's faithfulness and trustworthiness does not depend on me, but rather on Him and His steadfast and perfect character. For those who have trusted Christ and are in a faith relationship with God, He will be faithful and fulfill His promises to us, for to do otherwise would be to act contrary to His character. As Paul states, it would be to deny Himself. And this is something that God cannot do. He needs to be God at all times and in all His ways.

Isn't that ultimately a very comforting thought?

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

I came across a reference to a study that was done a few years ago and documented in a book named Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. The study interviewed 3,000 young people from a variety of churches and denominations across the country to determine their beliefs and understandings of their faith. The researchers summed up the dominant beliefs of the next generation of the Church with the following points:

• "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."
• "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."
• "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."
• "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."
• "Good people go to heaven when they die."

The researchers, even being secular, recognized that these beliefs are not even close to being Christianity, or any other existing religious system. Hence they coined a new term to describe this current cultural brand of religious belief that exists at large among our nominally-Christian youth: “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” In short, a works-righteousness based belief in a distant and impersonal God that exists only to make our lives better.

Does this bother you? It does me. Perhaps because of my current stint teaching our high-school youth Sunday school class, I am sensitized to this topic. And frankly because I see this kind of pseudo-Christian belief among our own teenagers in that class. I am seeing that most of these young people, even those who have grown up in the church their whole lives and been the recipients of years of ministry and teaching, are unable to define even key terms of Biblical Christianity. For example, I was using the term grace a few weeks ago in class and realized that I was not connecting with them, so I asked for a definition. The responses I got were not encouraging. And if our youth do not have working definitions of the basic language and foundational principles of the gospel like grace, mercy, justification, righteousness, atonement, etc – how can they put these pieces together to make sense of the person and work of Jesus Christ in their own lives, how can they live these truths out, how can they communicate them to others?

So how can this be? With all the variety of youth ministry, programs, conferences, resources, etc that are in place, how can this next generation of the Church be so – well, Biblically clueless? Remember, we are talking here about teenagers that are actively engaged in their churches, not the fringe kids or the pagan youth culture. Is it because they haven’t learned what has been taught them? Or is it because they have learned what has been taught all too well? I can’t say, although I think the latter is more likely, since my guess is that if a similar survey was done in churches across the land asking adults these same questions, we would find that the dominant belief system of my own generation would also be Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. In other words, we are reproducing ourselves in the next generation.

I have also been thinking on these things in light of our current study in 2nd Timothy, where Paul is passing on the baton of the ministry of the gospel to the younger Timothy. He exhorts him to retain the standard of sound words, to guard the trust of the truth of the gospel, and to do so by entrusting these teachings and truth and doctrines to other faithful men. We can only guard the treasure of the Biblical truth of the gospel by passing it on correctly and faithfully and fully to others, and to the next generation. I have to ask - are we doing a good job of passing the torch on?

On a positive note, however, I have seen a few of these young people that are actively seeking to be taught straight Biblical truth and doctrines and have told me so. One of the young men in the class told me, “I really want to be fed and challenged.” So I don’t think it is a lack of desire to work through the hard stuff of Christian theology and doctrine, and that is encouraging. In fact, I have heard stories of churches around the country that have returned to teaching the Bible and doctrine in their youth ministries, and they are packed out with kids that want to learn and grow rather than be further entertained.

I know there are a number of you readers out there that minister to our youth. Do you see these trends, both negatively and positively? What are your thoughts?