Well, I’m so excited that you are joining me for this. I hardly hardly stand it. Um, we’re, we’re launching a series of times together over the next several weeks. I don’t even know exactly how long it’ll go. It’s called passage to wisdom and I’m gonna look each day. We’ll post it in the mornings Monday through Friday at a passage, from a book that has been deeply influential in my own mind, my own life, my own thinking to be able to think great thoughts is, uh, terribly important to be able to live a great life. And there are wonderful thoughts from great books that I wanna share with you. And then we’ll find God together in them. If you’re watching this and it looks a little dark, that’s exactly the way that it’s supposed to look. So don’t try to make it look any brighter. Uh, I’m always going through some skin treatment or another, because I have fair Scandinavian skin that was burned so much when I was a kid.
And I’m in the middle of something where you put cream on your face and, uh, it looks like a pizza. So it’s a little bit dark right here, but that’s okay. It’s all on purpose. If you’re listening and not looking at all, that’s even better. And what I want to do uh, today and for the next week actually is to look at a book called my God and I by loose Meads. Um, writing is a wonderful thing. I’m so grateful. I had this past month a chance to write and it involved a lot of what we talked together in Alin series. If you are a part of that, I’ll tell you more about that coming up. But, uh, books have a way of being able to speak to us in very deep places. Loose Meads was a teacher and then a friend. He was an ethicist.
He taught at fuller theological seminary for many years, wrote many wonderful books. And the final one, uh, is called a spiritual memoir. My God and I is the title. And when Lou finished it, literally as he finished this book, he died at the age of 81. This is how he begins. As I neared retirement almost a decade ago, I had just one project in mind for myself getting the fundamentals of my faith in clearer focus is he writes, there are some things about God that were I to stop believing them. My world would change color. My hope would turn sour. The meaning of my life would be yanked inside out. But I believe other things about God that were I to stop believing them would not undermine my faith would not dim. My hope would not change the meaning of my life. So I set out to separate the theological opinions that I hold or that I doubt from the faith that I live by.
And I want to invite you and me into that project that Lou engages in this book to separate out theological opinions that I, uh, hold or that I might doubt from the faith that I live by. Here’s why this is so important. We all live at the mercy of our ideas. We all have what Dallas Willard used to call a mental map about the way that things are. And we cannot live in contradiction to that. Now it actually ends up being quite tricky sometimes to discern what are the things that I really believe cuz my feelings about them can fluctuate. Dallas used to say, uh, to believe something is to be prepared to act as though it were true. So sometimes there will be people, sometimes people of faith, sometimes people in churches that will say about the Bible. I believe the Bible is true.
I believe that it is the inherent inspired word of God. And they’re quite sincere when they say this, but I, I think about a guy in one of the first churches where I served, who was like a big proponent for believing in the Bible. However, he was not a generous person. And so when Jesus says, as Paul quotes him in the Bible, it’s better to give than to receive this guy clearly did not believe that he treated women really badly in very important ways. So when Jesus says, love your neighbors and stuff, he didn’t believe it. He thought he believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God. But when you would look at how he actually lived his life, he was not prepared to live as though what the Bible taught were true. Now, part of what this means is it’s possible that somebody might think of themselves as an atheist and yet they’re quite a generous person.
Their mental map is that it is more blessed to give them to receive their mental map is that they do love their neighbor as their self it’s possible for someone to think of themselves as an atheist and yet to have more of the mental map that Jesus had than somebody who considers themselves a believer. So how about me? How about you? What are the opinions that I simply hold or doubt as opposed to what is the faith that I actually live by and the most important part of pursuing that and what Lou does so well in this book, by the end of it will come to this. By the end of this week, he talks about the two basic convictions that grip him that hold him. And they’re so powerful. So man, stay with us through this journey. But what Lee does, Lou does amazingly well is he’s an incredibly honest person.
And if you read his books, uh, Lou was, uh, such a scarred and wounded person in his own life that he cannot be anything but brutally honest. So his fourth chapter in here is called the sour hour of prayer. If you’ve ever struggled with prayer, you will love this chapter. There’s no song, sweet hour of prayer. Um, that’s not Lou’s experience. And he begins by talking about when he was a very, very little boy, his father died and um, his mom was left and this is before there was any kinda welfare net, uh, no social security to try to raise 500 children with no money. And uh, when they carry his father’s body out of the room, he writes his mom rock slowly, back and forth in a rocking chair with their face, buried in her hands and moaned over and over God is zoo sewer and Dutch.
God is so sour. Lou writes the sweet hour of prayer was never sweet at our house. Not for me. And he rights for going to church to prayer meetings. When his mom, uh, when she would stand up would just weep and he wanted to ball with her and he said, I wanted to get away from there and never go to a prayer meeting again, though I have since then gone to a lot of prayer meetings. I cannot remember one to which I went gladly and he talks about the limitations of his own prayer life. This is somebody who I got to know and people would go to his classes just to hear Lou pray. There was kind of an honesty when he would address God, there was kind of an openness when he would talk to God that made others of us who were with him, just want to sit in the presence of Lou praying.
But when Lou talked about it, never, never went to a prayer meeting that I wanted to go to. And he writes in the book about how he really feels like he never figured the prayer thing out, but there was a deep honesty to him. Can I be honest with God? What are the opinions that I’m really hold? What’s the truth about the faith that I live by? One of the reasons Lou became a friend, although I had him for a teacher, many years later, I was pastoring and he knew I was at a church and called me up. And he had a daughter Cathy that had not been the church for well over a decade and wanted to know what I tried to see if she would come to church cuz she needed God. And I knew that would never work. That kind of thing never works.
But I said, okay, I would try. And I call Kathy up. And she came and she started going to our church and she got into a small group with Nancy. I mean, we love that. And Kathy like her dad was just brutally honest with God. And with us, she was kind of a magnet for guys that were just disasters. And after one relationship that had just been a train wreck, she was saying in our group, I just, I hope this guy dies. I hope God kills him. There was another woman in our group who actually was a, uh, charismatic Pentecostal preacher. She would do these holy ghost explosion revivals. She could not take this. She said to Kathy, no, no, no. You don’t mean that. You hope that God saves him. You hope that God redeems him. You hope that God heals him. Kathy said, no, I don’t. I hope God kills him. I wanted to die. Well, there’s a lot of times when I’m not nearly that honest with God, but here’s the truth about me often. I’m also not really honest with myself.
There is a passage in the Bible when Paul’s writing to the church at Corinth. And I was just reading this today, uh, in the third chapter of second Corinthians where Paul says, now, are we commending ourselves to you? Do we need, uh, letters of recommendation? He says, no, you are the letter written on our hearts written by the spirit of God. And uh, just like, there are superficial opinions that I think I might hold, but then there’s a faith that I might live by. There’s also a way the world works. Um, can I prove myself, can I get letters of recommendation? Can I build up a resume? And then there’s the person that I become that is not visible to anybody. What he talks about is a letter written on our heart. And I thought when I read those words today, how often have I, even in the churches that I’ve served, just wanted to say words or to write words that would sound impressive to people as opposed to becoming somebody who loves people in their heart and helps people change in their heart. And I have such a long way to go.
And so I come back to my friend, Lou and those wonderful words. What are the opinions that I’m merely holded out? And what is the faith that I live by? Sometimes we’ll talk about living up to our beliefs, but the reality is we always live up to our beliefs. We live at the mercy of our ideas about how things are. And so as we walk together through lose books, it’s not gonna be a book report. You don’t have to read the book. I’ll just look at a few different passages, but I want to think about and invite you to think today about what’s the faith that I actually live by and be really honest. And today look for God as you walk through your real life and be honest with him, whatever it is, you think, whatever it is, you feel be honest with him and let’s go on this journey together. This journey that Lou calls my God and I, I will see you tomorrow.