Careless In The Care of God

Chapter 1

I Don’t Know What Bible You’re Reading

The Sermon on the Mount

You’re blessed when you are at the end of your rope. With less of you, there is more of God and His rule.

When your heart breaks, you will be comforted.

If you’re humble, everything around you will be yours.

You are blessed when you want the right thing. God is the most you could ever imagine.

When you show mercy, you get mercy.

If your heart is right, you will see God.

Try to make peace; God takes great pleasure in that effort.

If you get the shaft because you are doing right… take heart; greater things will come in Heaven.

You will see good blessings too when they try to harm you for having faith in me. Take pleasure and laugh; you are in good company. All people who suggest non-conforming ideas run into the same treatment.

You are the salt of the earth, but if you lose your saltiness, how can the world taste the good flavor? It isn’t worth much then, and it is better not to be used.

I’ll put it to you this way: You are the light of the world. If there is a city on a hill, you can’t possibly hide it. The whole city sticks out. Neither would you light a lamp and stick it in a cupboard. You put it out where it does some good. Your house needs light, doesn’t it? So does the world. God’s colors need to stand out! Let your light be seen so that others can see God’s colors too.

When you pray, don’t be stupid about it. If you want to pray so that people see you, that’s your deal. Standing on the streets or in the synagogues doesn’t do anything for God, but for your own self glorification. Instead, go into a room, close the door, and pray to God who will meet you there. And when you say these prayers, don’t just say things you don’t mean. That does nothing but let you hear your own words. Don’t you think God knows what you need? If you believe that, pray something like this:
“God in Heaven,

You are holy—I am not.

Your world come quickly—and what you want to be done here as it is in heaven, please make it happen.

Give us what we must have to survive, and forgive our hearts that damage others, as you have repaired our hearts for yourself.

Deliver us from all that is evil, evildoing and evildoers. You have everything in control. And we are thankful we do not have to.”

Don’t put all your hope and stock in this place where rust and life can destroy it. Instead, lay up your hope in God, where it is safe. If your hope is there, your heart will be there as well. So, if that is the case, don’t worry so much about your life. What you are going to eat, or what you will drink. Don’t worry about your body and what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and clothing? Look at the birds as your example. They don’t hoard away stuff from the Stuffmart in their nests. Aren’t you more important than the birds? If God has their back, don’t you think He has yours, too?

Have any of you ever grown taller because you worried? No? So, why worry? Look at the flowers—they don’t worry, and yet nothing on earth is as beautiful. They know their place in the story. If God chooses such incredible clothing for something so simple, how much more will He clothe you—the love of His creation.

So, all you have to do is seek God and His Kingdom. Be righteous in your dealings with others so that you can show them the love God already has for them. And the whole blessings of this life and heaven will be given to you. Don’t worry about tomorrow—tomorrow always worries about itself.

When you aren’t consumed with worry, you can ask and God will give it. If you look for Him, you will find all you ever need. If you knock, the door will open. If you ask, you will receive. If you seek, you will find. Who of you, if your child asks for bread, decides to give them a snake instead? Or if they ask for fish, gives them a rock instead? If you know yourself, and you know how even you, in all your struggles, treat your children well, how much more can God offer in His justice and goodness? He always does good things.

I don’t say these things for you to file them away simply as “good information.” This is a way of life. If you listen and act upon them, you are like a wise man who built his house on a rock. Trials come, and still, your house is safe. On the other hand, if you let these words come in one ear and go out the other, you are like the foolish man who decides it would be better to build his home on the sand. When trials come, guess who gets washed up? Root these things in your life, and you will have the wiser heart.

The Message

When it first arrived on the scene in the 1990s, I was enamored with The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language that Eugene Peterson composed. It was an updated transliteration (insert giant eye roll that I know that word) of the New Testament that incorporated contemporary slang and modern vernacular. As with all things new, the Church had its issues with The Message. (See church history about the fork.) It wasn’t a “true translation” of the scriptures. I think this was my first exposure to the disastrous way of thinking that the Church loves to embrace. The Message exposed people to a lively language and the profound story of salvation—and the Church took a giant swing and miss on it because some thought it had the potential to mislead.

During a trip to Israel 20 years ago, I sat in the kibbutz on the shores of Galilee as I read The Message and made Jesus’s words my own. I rewrote the Sermon on the Mount, as you just read. I tried to use words that mattered to the 20-year-old kids I was leading in worship and a biblical faith exploration. Something happened when I sat down and rewrote Jesus’s words. The love of God started to penetrate my thinking. How could the God of the universe actually be saying these things? God couldn’t possibly mean all of it... This needed to be broken apart into verses, right? Where were the numbers that helped me parse scripture into the sentences that helped me justify my self-righteousness? After four years in Bible school and years in the church, this process of translating the Bible into more modern, accessible language was dismantling many of my long-held beliefs. After all, what role could I have in playing judge and jury if God actually felt this way about me and others in humanity?

Then I had the chance to live through the rest of the ‘90s and the first twenty years of the 21st century. The words I wrote all those years ago started to mean more with each day. God seemed to be actually calling into my soul, and it was jarring. At some point during this time, a great mentor of mine discussed with me a book he had read when he was in his early 20s called Love is Now by Peter Gillquist. Gillquist was a Campus Crusade guy who had an amazing passion for evangelism. He also loathed the format and expression of the evangelical Church. (He ended up on a long journey to Orthodoxy later in his life.)

One morning, while I was at school in Canada, I found his book in the library, grabbed it and spent the rest of the day engrossed in the words on the page. I couldn’t put it down. It was like drinking a fresh cup of water—enriching and comforting. The words on the pages spoke to the internal battle I had faced. I knew I wasn’t much of a man. I was filled with failure and struggle. I wasn’t really “religious.” I hated all the pretense and falsity of the Christian experience. I knew most mornings I struggled just to overcome my depression and get out of bed. No amount of immersion in the Bible had fixed that for me. I prayed to empty walls in my basement apartment and heard nothing like the answers my peers said they received. Most of my adult faith has felt as if I were walking through a surreal world after taking an unfathomable dose of crazy pills. All the people around me seemed to have this deep connection with God, and regardless of how I tried to correct myself, nothing changed. I didn’t have transformational conversations with heaven, and no amount of theology was changing that.

Gilquist’s book was revelational to me. His was the first book I had read that spoke genuinely about the love of God in a profound way—like a hammer smashing crystal. His book said that all of the Jesus story was pointing to a God who loved me, who actually took interest in me and wanted the best for me. I realized that my groveling hadn’t saved me, or changed anything in my life. I was murderously depressed, and the thought of a God with “Angry Eyes” watching my ever-escalating failures was enough to pin down the accelerator as I spun out. When I read that God actually cared, and had demonstrated it through the efforts of Jesus in a sacrifice specifically designed for humanity, my whole world flipped on its head. It changed the course of my life in a beautiful way, as I realized that this narrative that humanity had built about a judgmental God was an abject lie.

My favorite concept in the book was a mental picture Gilquist painted depicting the scene at the cross. It was near the end of the crucifixion, and Gilquist sarcastically described humanity, personified at the foot of the cross, busy in an effort to fix itself. As Jesus breathed His last, humanity held up...