I just finished re-reading Donald Miller’s Searching For God Knows What and this time I found the book to be just as good (if not better) than the first time around.  I don’t know what it is but there was something so refreshing about it…like stepping into a room where fresh-baked bread has just been pulled out of the oven.

In a previous post I already shared the idea from the book that the gospel message is relational in nature and not formulaic.  I guess I just like how he breaks this all down and shows how our tendency is to want to be accepted or validated by a "jury of our peers" instead of our heavenly Father who loves us so intimately and wants nothing more than to redeem us and have relationship with us.  Miller calls our desire for validation by earthly standards "lifeboat" thinking and for me he shed a lot of light on how this type of ideology is so contrary to the kingdom of God.

The last thing I’ll say about the book is that I also appreciate how Miller argues that our tendency to want the formulaic and systematic in our relationship with God (and specifically how we interpret the Scriptures) often causes us to miss the point.  Our Lord is calling us to relate with Him intimately–He is offering Himself.  The Bible is a love story…not a cookbook.  Check this out:

"It strikes me, even as I type this, how distant and far out formulaic methodology is from the artful, narrative sort of methodology used to explain God in Scripture.  It makes you wonder whether we can even get to the truth of our theology unless it is presented in the sort of methodology Scripture uses.  It makes you wonder if all our time spent making lists would be better spent painting or writing or singing or learning to speak stories.  Sometimes I feel as though the church has a kind of pity for Scripture, always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms, and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of illiterate hillbillies.  I don’t think they were illiterate hillbillies, and I think the methodology God used to explain His truth is quite superior.

What I mean by this is I feel my life is a story, more than a list; I feel this blood slipping through my veins and these chemicals in my brain telling me I am hungry or lonely, sad or angry, in love or despondent.  And I don’t feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty, all this sun and moon, this smell of coming rain, the beautiful mysteries of women, or the truck-like complexity of men.  It seems nearly heresy to explain the gospel of Jesus, this message an infinitely complex God has delivered to an infinitely complex humanity, in bullet points.  How amazing is it that Christ would explain that to be His followers we must eat His flesh and drink His blood, and that He is the Bridegroom and we are the bride, and that we will be unified with Him in His death, and that we will live forever with Him in glory."