Rob Witham

“I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God….”

“Everything you love for its own sake, outside of God alone, blinds your intellect and destroys your judgment of moral values. It vitiates your choices so that you cannot clearly distinguish good from evil and you do not truly know God’s will.” (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)

This is an interesting observation and one we all could benefit from meditating on. Most of us, if honest, could probably come up with a pretty long list of things we hold higher than God. It is interesting that as we read the Scriptures God regularly challenged people on that. Consider the testing of Abraham - God tested him to see if Abraham would choose Isaac over Yahweh. Jesus routinely told people to choose between family, homes, possessions, etc. and following him.

I think Christianity as a system has gotten far too comfortable with justifying things and not relying on the Spirit of God to direct us in what needs to change. We, like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, have created complex religious and theological systems to protect us from having to make some of these hard choices. Our theology tells us we don’t have to make the choices that the Scriptures tells us we do.