Put God in a Square Box

The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Christians (2)
Put God in a Square Box
Cardiff Heights
9 January 2000

Tonight we come to the second in our series on the seven habits
of highly ineffective Christians. Some of you are perhaps
concerned by the topics we are looking at since your desire is for a
deeper, more real relationship with the creator God. Well let me
assure you by pointing out that being ineffective is one of the few
things I can actually 100% practice what I preach, so these
messages will also be ineffective and you will probably be more
motivated towards discipleship and being effective in you’re walk
with God than before.

The second habit of a highly ineffective Christian is that they “Put
God in a Square Box”.

http://www.geocities.com/dreamingisdangerous/GodBox.bmp

Your concept of God has a great deal to do
with the way you live your life. This is why you must limit God, or
put him in a square box. So how do you put God in a box? Well
firstly you need a very big box. Maybe one from a fridge or
something. No of course that wouldn’t work. Who ever heard of a
square fridge. Perhaps we better make our box to be a symbolic
one but a square nonetheless.

The way that you limit God is that you believe that God will behave
in certain predictable ways and that you in fact can have control
over God’s behaviour by doing certain things. God is not given any
choice, no room to act in any way he pleases but must respond in
the correct way if you pull the right strings.

There are two ways in which we can relate to any person even
God. One way is to see them as objects, to see them for what
function they serve for us. The best example I can think of is the
way we view automatic teller machines at the bank. We see them
for their function, giving us our money. And we have no regard for
how the ATM feels about the transaction. It is an object with a
function of serving us. When we treat people this way, we do a
great deal of damage to them.

Have you ever stood in MacDonalds and become frustrated with
the other lines moving more quickly than yours? The quiet rage
you feel within at the slowness of the girl serving your queue is the
same detached frustration we usually reserve for machines. Now
we feel that irritation towards a living human being. It’s as if you’re
seeing her as having no value other than to fulfill her function to
serve us.

In order to be highly ineffective in the way you relate to God you
need to treat God in the same way. By doing so you dare to
suggest that we can use God, to push the right heavenly buttons
so that he will come good with whatever we happen to want or
need. In other words, we can bribe him with pious actions or
flattering words. In doing so we make God an object, someone we
can use. If we want to have an effective Christian walk we need to
meet God, not manipulate him.

God’s interest in us is to meet us, not to make use of us for his
own benefit. There is nothing in it for him other than the basic
satisfaction of having secured for the people he loves a more
enriched, more fulfilled way of living. This is truly foolishness in a
world grown used to manipulation and coercion.

The truth is that we can treat God like on object, but God cannot
be manipulated, there are no buttons to press. We just wish there
were. It would make things