SCRIPTURE: What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand. Romans 1:21-23 MSG
THOUGHT: What a frightening passage. I say that because I feel like I’ve watched it happen in people’s lives around me. I feel like I’ve seen the trajectory of it in my own life (read Walking When You’d Rather Fly: Meditations on Faith After the Fall if you want to know more), and grateful that God didn’t leave me to my own illiteracy regarding life. The slope is slippery and the road down the slope wide, and it’s scary to watch someone tumble.
Nobody wants to be wrong about anything, and faith in an invisible God seems embarrassingly naïve. And so, the faith of a child often gets lost as childhood gets lost. The cost of following hard through your teens and 20s is high and it just seems easier to refuse God Worship in exchange for worshiping other things. By simple attrition, you begin to lose sight of God-order and God-goodness and God’s instructions for human flourishing. By the time I hit my 30s, I was illiterate about life, with no sense of direction, and had traded the glory of God’s investment in me for cheap figurines. The path to literacy has been reversing my course back up that slippery slope — hard, muddy, seemingly impossible. But God…
PRAYER: You are, have been, and always will be the God of the impossible. If we refuse you worship, we trivialize ourselves by worshiping what has been made rather than the infinite, incredible God behind it all. Forgive us, oh God. Help us climb again wherever we may have slipped. Help us become literate in the truest sense of the word.
Dear Reader,
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ABOUT ME:
Blogger Amy Clemens is the author of Walking When You’d Rather Fly: Meditations on Faith After the Fall. In it she explores childhood sexual abuse and how it impacted her faith (or lack thereof) for four decades. You’ll find not only her story, but better yet, the Big Story of God.
Check out Walking When You’d Rather Fly, and learn more about the book and Amy’s other ministries. You will also find her devotional work at Words of Hope.
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