Who is This?

Floundering to find time to write as the basketball season begins, I've come to realize that I've got several posts ready-made from some of my responses to the online C.S. Lewis course I'm leading. If you're in the course - sorry for the repeat material. I just need to get something out there. Here goes. . .

A passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

I like to believe that each year I get closer and closer to truth regarding God and faith. In my mid 20's I probably believed that I had it all figured out and that my growth was done, that the only thing left for me was to share all that I knew with those who hadn't attained the same level of enlightenment. A little more mature now (though perhaps, a very little), I just hope to get to more truth; and I understand much of my journey on this earth is that journey for truth about God and faith. That journey will never end.

Having said that, this quote is a pretty good picture of what I've come to understand in the past year or two. Christ is not the means to an end; He is the end to which we all strive. It sounds catchy and trite and simplistic, but I don't think many people get this. Most days I don't. Ultimately what this is saying is that Christ doesn't exist to make our lives better, we exist to find Him. He is the goal. If we're using faith to live a more successful life or have more successful relationships or to be a better person, we've got it all wrong. God doesn't exist to make us better: He exists so that we might know Him, desire Him, and delight in Him. He is what we aspire to.

I think the purpose of all Bible reading can be answered in a brief phrase found in Mark 4:41 (and in many other places). After the wind and waves obey Christ's admonitions, the disciples turn to each other and ask, "Who is this?" And this is what we must ask with each passage of Scripture and with books like this one: who is this? We shouldn't read the Bible focusing on finding ways to fix our lives; we should focus on finding ways to fix our attention on who God is. We shouldn't look to Jesus to find help with our problems; we should look to Jesus to find Jesus, the All in All.

When we find Him, we get all the rest thrown in. At least the stuff that really matters. We will become better, we will have better relationships, and we will have more success in our ventures. Get God, and you get the rest. Go after God as a way of getting the rest, and the God that you'll have will be a watered-down, Santa Claus deity, seeking to keep a whiny child happy. And there is no joy there.