Apologetics

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A lot of people I know believe in a God who doesn't really care how you live your life. As long as you try to be a good person and do your best not to hurt other people, what does it really matter? Why would a God who is all-loving be so strict about the things I do with my own life?

I'd like to answer those questions with an illustration. Picture yourself driving through traffic. The streets are busy; cars are going everywhere, yet everything is calm. Why? Everyone is following the directions. They stop on red lights, yield at yield signs, let people merge, and do all the things that the driver's ed manual says you should do. Now picture another scenario. It's the same city, the same traffic, but this time it's different. Cars blast through red lights, narrowly missing cars who are legally going through the intersection. Other drivers ignore stop signs, making other people swerve to avoid them. Still others realize that cars are bigger than pedestrians and pay no attention to crosswalks, casually bumping people out of their way. Which of those sounds more appealing (not amusing) for you to drive in?

That's the difference between doing life God's way and doing life your way. What made the second city so chaotic? Everyone was doing whatever they wanted to do. And notice who pays for it - not the person who behaves irresponsibly, in general, but other people. How many times has someone else been talking on their cellphone, or cut you off, or done something stupid without paying attention, forcing you to act fast to fix their mess? That's the effect of people driving, or living, selfishly. It's what happens whenever people do whatever they want to do and think it's okay.

There are two reasons why God cares about the way we live. The first is that he loves us and he wants the best for us. Living selfishly hurts us, even if we don't think it does, and it hurts other people around us. I say that it hurts us because we don't know what's truly best for us. God does. He made us from scratch; he knows us literally better than we know ourselves. He knows what will make each of us happy, satisfy us at the deepest level, and bring us true enjoyment out of life. He's working to bring us those things. But we, headstrong self-sufficient children that we are, thwart his efforts by ignoring him and doing it our own way instead.

The second answer is that, if we live selfishly, we screw up God's creation, and he doesn't appreciate that. He created the world to run a certain way, and by trying to do things our own way, we're jacking with his system. We're the wrench in the works. We're what's wrong with the world. I could even make it personal and say that you, specifically, are part of the problem. It's not just you, of course; it's everyone who lives selfishly and ignores God, but it starts with you because you're the only person that you can do anything about.

God talks about how he wants the world to run. He talks about loving everybody unconditionally, about forgiving people who wrong us rather than taking revenge, about being patient, about letting God guide and direct us. He talks about loving other people so much that we would sell what we own to help someone else who is in trouble. Do you see how different that is from the way we so often view the world, through the lens of ourselves? Do you understand that life is bigger than us and our own pleasure?

What would you think about a person who said hurtful things to people? About a person who took advantage of others, used them for his or her own gain, and ignored them when they were hurting? You are that person, and so am I. That's how we live our lives if we're not following God's plan. And that is why God says that some things are right and some things are wrong. That's why he cares how you and I live our lives.

The best thing about it is that he doesn't just tell us how to live and then sit back to watch us fail. He invites us into a relationship with him, and once we accept, he invades our heart and begins to change us from the inside. We don't have to do a thing except for let him change us! If you don't already have a relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, if you're not already living your life God's way, I'd like to talk to you about how you can begin that relationship.

He cares about you. He wants you to be fulfilled, and he wants to help you make the world a better place by following his way of living. Please, think about what's guiding your life. If it's not God, you can fix that today.

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