Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go. Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea...Isaiah 48:17-18
Faith is a gift, given to us - not forced on us. One can say they believe all day long, but without a faithful heart it means nothing. Faith isn't a one and done event, where we can lay low the rest of the time. It is a daily commitment to believe not only in God, but God Himself. It's hard, it is impossible for us to do so without Him because we need Him to reveal Himself to us for our faith to grow. And we must, in turn, reveal our own hearts to Him in order to have a real relationship. Every step of the way, though, it is all a choice.
True love never forces one's own way.
We were never meant to use our faith as a means to force or manipulate others into believing. But for generations many have bought the lie that we are human doers who must forcibly get people to say they believe. There are signs of it all throughout our society. People are manipulated into confessing Jesus before we will accept them, into our churches, homes and social gatherings. They are denied love until they confess something they do not believe in. That's not the way of God.
Father, forgive us.
So much of Christian culture has interpreted the message of Jesus as a call to bully its way through societies, using fear and bullying tactics to get others to agree to the same morality and faith and, y'all, it has to stop. We're not the Israelites - we haven't been told to eliminate non believers from our nations, but to witness to them with love, using our very lives to tell about Jesus.
It's not about compliance with God, but faith.
Yes, obedience is important. It is a product of true faith. Compliance, however, is done out of duty, not desire. He wants our hearts. That means His ways must become more important in our hearts than our own.
God looks at the heart.
He cares more about what's on the inside of us than outside. And He always hears unspoken unbelief louder than the words we use to cover it up. The heart is never changed by force, but by the love of Jesus in the smallest and grandest of ways.
We have to start with ourselves before God.
If we're going to make any nation a Christian nation, it has to start with each of us individually - deep down inside. It has to start between us and God, where we let Him clean our hearts and give us proper insight into our own hearts. We spend so much time finger-pointing that we miss our very own hearts. It is there, examining our own hearts that we have the best, most effective influence on everyone else. It is there, in that place, where we exercise our own choice well and avoid the idea that we have to steal everyone else's to set things right.
We can stand up for what is right without being self-righteous.
We are called to get our own hearts right before God, not everyone else's. A relationship with Him has taught me that I don't have to force a thing; the best works happen when I just do what I am told to do - follow Jesus and let Him use and grow me.
You see, Christianity's best hope for growth is in good boundaries, where we know where we end and another begins, what we're called to fix and what we're not. We are not God. But one thing is for certain, if He doesn't force Himself on us, how dare we think we can do it to others.
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