James Harmer

Man, it is so cold today that my head hurt on the way to my last class. Walking across Campus for less than a minute and literally… my head really hurt… like it was being crushed. And my loungs hurt from the cold air so much that even a half hour into the class it still hurt to breath. But being inside… is so much better than being outside, insulation is a wonderfull idea, and so is heat. The only reason I would go outside other than to learn, would be to bring others inside to protect them from the cold. There is spiritual application there.. some of you can see it.

Now, about the title… don’t worry, I’m not a heretic. I just figured that title would catch some peoples eye(or maybe even both of their eyes.) I think many of us often think these types of thoughts, and then we get scared of offending God so we put them away… and avoid them so we won’t have to answer the question. An agnostic told me once, “I’m not going to bow down and worship a God who is so self-centered that He created an entire race of people just to have them surround Him for eternity and worship Him. And He has us go around to reach other people just so He will have more people to surround Him for eternity telling Him how great He is… and that is our purpose? We are supposed to be happy about that? I don’t think so. When I see this ‘God’ I will give Him a piece of my mind!!”

Well, I don’t think He needs a piece of this agnostics mind because He made his mind. I’m sure He has a blue-print somewhere and maybe even a box of spare parts incase the agnostic loses his mind or something. But what he said, he does have a point, and at the time I didn’t know how to answer him and simply avoided the question and replaced it with common Christian Cliche’s like “God is Love”, “Christianity isn’t a religion it’s a relationship”… you know, those things we say, but really forget what they mean. They’re so cool when we first hear them and we run around telling our non-Christian friends and make shirts and write songs and think we’re smart. Maybe we are, I don’t know. But this agnostic made me examine all of those things and line these things up with the Bible. It was interesting what I found.

First off, I had to decide that regardless, I will worship God because He is worthy, and He did send His son for me. But did He only send His son so that I could worship Him for ever? Doesn’t that sound “Self-Centered”? It’s scary to ask those kind of questions because we feel like we are disrespecting God, so when they come to mind we seem to push them away and pretend we didn’t think them. Want to know a little secret? God already knows that we thought them, and He can handle us asking Him. It’s also foolish to wait untill we see Him face to face to “give Him a piece of our mind”. But hey, at least this agnostic was honest.

A worship leader once said in the midst of leading worship, “This is why we were created… we were created for worship. What a privilage!!” I was like “Yeah, that’s true.” but then I thought “Wait… isn’t that awful self-centered of God?” And then I said to myself “Bad James!! Shutup and just worship Him! He is worthy!!” But about two months ago I really just decided to ask God this question, and I found myself in the book of Genesis where He first created us. Why did He do it? What did He say? I could post the whole first two chapters of Genesis up here, but that would make this entry even longer than it already is. Read it yourself if you want here, but I’ll just summarise very briefly. After He had created all of the animals and the earth itself, He said “Let us create man in our own image, in our likeness.” When He talked to Adam, He never said “Worship me, cause I’m so great!” He simply gave Him dominion over the entire earth. And you know, Adam didn’t have a religion, He really had a relationship with God. He walked with God in the garden… isn’t that crazy? Walking with God? Like you walk with a friend?

You know, I think sometimes in Christianity the impression is given that when God decided to make us His thought process was something like this: “Man, I’m really awesome… in fact, I’m so awesome that I need to make a bunch of people to surround me forever to tell me how awesome I am!! In fact, I’ll make it so that when people refer to me as “him” they have to capitalize the H!!! Ha ha!! Man I’m good… Oh yeah, who’s the man? Oh excuse me, Who’s the GOD!!” Well biblically, that’s not quite how it happened. When you think of the fact that “God is Love”, and that “Love is selfless”, and “considers others above/before itself”, that does not make sense… He would not do it for that reason. So why did He create us?

Were we really created to Worship God and go recruit a bunch of other people to Worship Him? No, we were created to know God. You see, God is so Good, and so Loving that He wanted someone to give His Love(Or rather, Himself) to. I don’t know if anyone noticed this before, but Adam did not worship God until after He sinned. Before He sinned, it was all relationship, no ceremonies… nothing between us and God. The Religious parts of Judaism and Christianity are all the result of Sin. Now God is worthy of Worship, and because of that reason alone we should Worship Him. Get that straight first. But that is not why He created us, He created us to give Himself to us… to bless us in a way we can not comprehend.

If you want to think of a scenerio that we as Humans could understand, think of it this way. Love needs an object of affection, or it is not Love. God is Love, so we are His object of affection. He wants to know and have relationship with each and every one of us… not a religious system where we recruit converts to recruit more converts to recruit… etc. Worship is a response to the fact that, even after we turned our back on Him, He gave Himself completely(literally) just so He could be with us!! You see, He is not just Love, He is also Holy. Because He is Holy He can not dwell with sin, He can not have a true relationship with a sinfull fallen being. So what did He do? He gave Himself completely to redeem us and bring us back to the condition that He created us in origionally… His image, His likeness.

You know, Evangelism is not a religious tradition either. And it is not simply a command. It is simply the natural response to becoming more like Him, we want to reach out to others and give ourselfs to others. We don’t want to get points with God for winning Him converts, we want to give to others what has been given to us… if we are really becoming Christ-like, that will become our hearts desire.

You see, everything God asks us to do now… worship, evangelism. It’s all just the result of His origional desire to be with us. The more He restores us to His image, the more we realize how amazing He is and want to worship Him. The more we become loving people as He is a Loving God, the less self-centered we become and the more we want to share His Love with others. He really is a Love beyond all reason… like that song that we have been singing lately, it’s really the heart of God. I want to give God praise in everything I do, my praise goes out to Him, because He’s worth it, He gave more than I could ever give back. He is not self-centered, if anything His Love is centered on us. Each and every one of us.

Don’t misunderstand God. He did create us so we could tell Him how great He is forever, and He didn’t die for us so He wouldn’t have to make another race to do that for Him. He created us to be with us forever and give Himself to us, and He redeemed us because we fell and He cares about us too much not to pick us back up.

So no Mr. Agnostic, God is not self-centered.

-James’