I came across this quote the other day by Francis Chan: “The irony is that while God doesn’t need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don’t really want Him most of the time.”
When you get to the heart of the matter God, according to the Christian Gospel, is a God of relationship. he exists in relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and he created us to have a relationship with him and him with us. God’s greatest desire is to love us and to have us love him in return, hence the great commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. We, in turn, have a God shaped hole in our heart. We may not comprehend it, we may not recognise it, but it is there. Hence the spiritual seekers that look for fulfillment through all sorts of channels. You see them on Facebook quoting Native Americans one day, Buddhist writings the next and occasionally even the Gospel. There is a desire, a yearning, yet it is totally unfocused as they are turned off by traditional religion and so do not investigate the Gospel long or deeply enough to really allow the truth to mold their thinking. They allow the “traditions of man,” to quote Jesus, interfere with the spirit of God.
Their other issue is often that they need God but they do not want God in God’s entirety. They want the love, but not the judgment. They want the acceptance but not the discipline, they will speak of compassion while being focused only on this world.
We have to preach the full Gospel of Christ. We have to live the full Gospel of Christ. if we are going to help those who need Jesus to actually want Jesus we need to be living ambassadors of the whole Gospel of God and that means even the difficult bits, the messy bits, the bits that seem so unattractive because unless we do, we paint an incomplete picture, do God a disservice and run the danger of failing to give those who need God the picture of God they need to find and to want him.