Lately I have been thinking about the way I think about stuff.  Do you ever do that?  Sounds funny, but it is very serious stuff.  Do you ever think about how the filter you look thru might change your view?  When we lived in Mississippi, we had a wonderful wildlife show daily, in our backyard, just outside of the window by the breakfast table.  Knowing this, the kids and I were prone to looking out the window often – partly because it was so green and lush, with all the grass and trees, and partly because we never knew what we might miss if we weren’t looking!  We had nutria, rabbits, hummingbirds, cardinals, squirrels, bluebirds and more; there was always something going on, right outside the window.

So it was not surprising one morning that my sweet boy had this revelation while looking out of the window:  “Hey Mom!  You know when I look through the screen everything out there looks different.  I can see so much better out of the part of the window with no screen!”  The screen was on the lower half of the window and the upper part was all window, no screen.  This gave me a great teachable moment.  Often our teaching to our kids is also the teaching of the Heavenly Father to us.

So here is what I told him in a nutshell: The screen on the window does change the way things look outside of the window.  Looking through a screen prevents us from observing things clearly.  It doesn’t always make a difference, but sometimes it can make you miss little details or may make you misunderstand exactly what you are seeing.  In the same way, we all have “screens” on our “windows” – we have things that prevent us from seeing life accurately.  We tend to see things according to our own limited understanding and because of our own experiences.  We call this “screen” a bias, or a prejudice, or a filter (like a camera filter) because it changes the way we view life.

And make no mistake, we all have something that we look through when we examine our world, our experiences and the other people around us.  Then I had an epiphany about all this filtering.  I realized that so many of us take our own filters and apply them to the Word.  Without thinking, we can take our preconceptions about God’s character, or about Jesus’ message, or about our own purpose here on Earth and we hunt for the things that support those thoughts.  We discard the parts that are unsavory or don’t explain life the way we understand it, and we twist some parts to fit us.  There are three problems here (more, but three is all I can manage today!).

First, reading the Word with a filter on gives us a skewed view of God’s character, diminishing Him into something more familiar, but keeping us from knowing the real Him.  Think of this…you can choose to accept Jehovah God, the I AM, as Who He Is and Who you see in His Word, or you can remake Him in the way that you prefer to see Him.  One of my favorite verses is this:  The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Psalm 103:8).  Yet if we see only the “loving” side of Him, we diminish Him into something small and warm and fuzzy…but not quite this warm: The LORD will cause men to hear his majestic voice and will make them see his arm coming down with raging anger and consuming fire, with cloudburst, thunderstorm and hail (Is 30:30). And not quite this “loving”: I am the Lord, and there is no other.  I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things (Is 45:6-7).

People also love to sing “I am a friend of God, He calls me friend” (I love this song too!).  And while this is true, LORD Jehovah says “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16).  When we see God primarily as a friend, we forget He is Soveriegn and our relationship can get too familiar, too casual: But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” (Rom 9:20).  People on the more legalistic end of the spectrum can do the opposite, seeing all fire and brimstone and no mercy or compassion – in either case, if we are not careful, we can tend to look for the aspects of God’s character that support our preconceived notion of Him.  This leads us to away from knowing who He really is, and keeps us from deep relationship with God.

The second problem with using our man-made filter to read the Word is this is the opposite of what we should be doing!  The Word is supposed to transform us, and we are to transform into the likeness of Him.  We are not to use filter, which transforms the Word.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:2).  Transformation accomplished when we confront the Word of God, and it confronts us.  For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account (Hebrews 4:12-13).  The Word is transformational.  But our hearts must be willing to hear the Truth, with no filter.  When we filter the Word, we make it into something we want and we see God as we want to see Him, rather than as Who He is.

Finally this leads to our third problem, the breaking of the Ten Commandments.  Ok.  I know the “Big 10” have fallen out of favor with some, who think that Jesus replaced the law and that we Christians are completely above the law.  In one sense this is true – because we know that (1) we can not hope to keep the law even a little a bit without the help of the Holy Spirit and also that (2) we rely on Jesus’ righteousness and His sacrifice as to keeping the Law, rather than anything we could do on our own. Grace is this – that our freedom from sin, and from being found guilty under the law, was purchased by Jesus who kept the Law perfectly, yet died in our place.  However, we must never forget that the Law is a picture of what God finds lovely; because in order to know what is pleasing to Him, we first start by understanding what is offensive to Him.  Of course we should always want to please those we truly love. Keeping the Law is a complicated issue, but the best understanding of it comes from studying the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says that His standard is actually much higher than the standard previously set by the Law and that He did not come to abolish the Law. Suffice it to say that obedience to Jesus results in obedience to the Law, and He does desire our obedience to Him.

Sorry for the detour, but I wanted to be sure you saw the connection – the importance of our seeing God accurately goes beyond just knowing Him, it it critical to our obedience to Him.  Our pastor in Mississippi did a wonderful sermon series on the 10 Commandments and shared this idea that I would like to share with you: When we re-make God in our image, deciding that He thinks like we (humans) do and acts like we (humans) do, we are worshipping an idol – something we have created – rather than Yahweh, Who is accurately described in the Bible.  God has forbidden us to worship anything other than Him, and He is accurately described for us when we consider the whole of His Word.  We must keep in mind that He is infinite, but we are finite.  He is holy, but on our own, we are not.  He is all powerful, we are weak.  He is faithful, we are fickle.  We are not capable of completely knowing Him, because we are limited by our human-ness, He is unlike anyone else we have ever met.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Is 55:8-9)

This is why the Word is such an amazing gift – it presents Him from many different angles.  To study the Word is to learn about God’s character, to learn to know Him better and when we know Him we understand our role in the relationship better.  So when we come to the Word, we must shed our opinions and filters.  We must be a blank slate and let the Word be written on our hearts, accurately.  We want to be sure that our experiences and beliefs do not interfere… Once we have poured the Word into our hearts, we can let the Word become our filter instead, so we may see our experiences, and our world and the people in it, through His eyes.  The Word is filter that cleans.  The Truth is a great clarifier.

justAgirl