Magical Thinking

God’s concern is always about LOVE, always about loving relationship, always about building up and not harming. It is not about the mere fulfillment of obligations, of following religious rules, behaviors, rituals, practices or morality. In fact, these often are substituted for love, out of a desire to please or control God, to impose one’s will on others, or because the challenge of love is too great. “Following the rules” replaces love. But true love transcends the rules and gives us freedom from them.

So Christ has really set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ cannot help you. I’ll say it again. If you are trying to find favor with God by being circumcised, you must obey all of the regulations in the whole Law of Moses. For if you are trying to make yourselves right with God by keeping the law, you have been cut off from Christ! You have fallen away from God's grace. But we who live by the Spirit eagerly wait to receive everything promised to us who are right with God through faith. For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, it makes no difference to God whether we are circumcised or not circumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love. (Galatians 5:1-6, NLT First Edition.)

Circumcision was one of many ritual practices and traditions used to show that people were obedient to the Law. Paul uses it here to illustrate how we mistakenly try to make ourselves right with God by following the Law.

Yet obedience to religious tradition—whether the Law of Moses or any other regulations a church has about worship, tradition or conformity to doctrine and belief—is something we hear taught in church, usually in ways that seem to contradict what Paul says. That is, we believe that doing things a certain way, perhaps even “in good order,” is necessary to please God, to gain His approval, His response, even His love.

It’s confusing, isn’t it? So we need to spend some time trying to understand this more deeply.

I am not suggesting we simply toss out all the rules, and neither is Paul. Many of them serve us well as a community, help enforce boundaries and safety, and tell us what to reasonably expect and how to treat each other. These are helpful, even a blessing.

God does NOT tell us that if we do things in just a certain way, He will approve of us, and if we do other things—like pray, or cook, or weave, or baptize, or take Communion—in just a certain way, He will act as we want Him to. This is a false view of God and couldn’t be less helpful.

We have a sovereign God who is present, and who acts. When we pray, when we lay hands, when we bless, we are not managing spiritual forces. We are inviting God’s presence. He acts, not our “magic” or ritual or method. God is present and He moves, touches and changes things, as He wills—not as we direct.

There are churches where this is the rule, the law: If you walk across the front of the sanctuary, past the altar, you must bow to the cross every single time. I’m not suggesting that bowing is wrong, but that we can turn something that is a sign of praise and thanksgiving into a regulation—and when we do that, it can be gutted of its meaning. More, it can become a distraction: We get so focused on “doing it right” that we lose our true sense of purpose, which is a deepening of our relationship with God.

I want to be clear here that in the way we worship—whether it includes page-turning by acolytes, or hands in the air, or a circle of neighbors simply holding hands each week and praying—there is nothing intrinsically wrong with many of those things. It’s an order of worship, and when it happens consistently, it gives us stability. It’s not a bad thing, and can be helpful.

What I want to caution all of us about is “magical thinking”—the idea that if we are stiffly obedient to rules and to ritual, this will gain us God’s favor, it will assure His love for us, and perhaps even ensure our salvation. Or, that when we fail to follow the same rules, He gets mad and withdraws. This is not what the Bible teaches. It’s not what Jesus teaches, it’s not what Paul teaches, and it is not God’s message to us.

It is clear, then, that God’s promise to give the whole earth to Abraham and  his descendants was not based on obedience to God’s law, but on the new  relationship with God that comes by faith. (Romans 4:13, JLT First Edition)

The word “faith” here means literally to trust. The new relationship with God comes about not because we are obedient to the law and earn our way into His favor, but because we trust Him and His love for us.

And that’s the point; that’s what it’s about. God is always about relationship; He is always about trust and love. When Jesus sums up the whole law and the prophets, He does it by saying,

The first of all the commandments is: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.  (Mark 12:29-31, NKJV)

God is always about acting in love.

The command to love is greater than any other law, rule, regulation, concept, doctrine, ritual, behavior, order, process, tradition, canon or guideline.

God does not trade our obedience for His help for our wishes. That is, we can’t use “obedience” to manipulate God to do our will. This seems obvious when said plainly like this, but the hard truth is that we act, in countless different superstitious (but “holy”-looking) ways, as if our actions will allow us to control God.

In Christ,

Pastor George