Obsession

By Fred Pruitt

A artist obsessed with his art, a musician hearing only his music, a writer possessed by the things he writes — we call them geniuses, savants, prodigies. They may make us uncomfortable, but we like to be close enough to them to let some of it rub off on us, since we often see them as a notch above or beyond the rest of us. We imaginate ourselves into their arts, their music, their writings.

A person obsessed with God, however, often threatens us because we think he might make us confront ourselves and upset our fragile thin veneer of self-satisfaction, which we often defend with great righteous indignation, should we become for even a moment suspicious that someone is trying to get into our precious self-citadel. No applecarts upset here, thank you very much!

So we would rather shut the crazy person of God down, good riddance, off to the looney bin. “He’s too this!” … “He’s not enough that!” … “He doesn’t do this!” … “He does too much of that!” we shout — “No one like that could be really a person who knows God.”

We want a nice god. A fair god. A cool god. One who thinks like we do. So we shop around for one of those kinds of gods like shopping for a computer, looking for the features and benefits we like, and when we find the one we like, we take him home for a while and try him out. And if we don’t find one out there shopping in all the god-shopping places, we might try to make our own, fashion a god for ourselves of our own making, who is nice to us, accepts us, says what we want it to say, does we want it to do. This nice god doesn’t make us confront ourselves, doesn’t upset our applecarts, and lets us stay to our hearts’ content in anything that satisfies us. He always tells us, “All is well.”

That’s why we are offended with those who come to us with a God who demands something else of us. Who demands Truth. Who demands Righteousness. Who demands Real Love — which is self-sacrificing-without-regard-for-self love — from us. Too upsetting is that God, because if we look at ourselves as we truly are, we might find out we are really none of those things. Like the man who won’t go to the doctor because he’s afraid he’ll find out he has cancer, we’d rather not know we are not really those things. We are not really truth. We are not really righteous. We are not really True Love. Perhaps we’d like to be, but honesty might just come up with a different answer than what we’d like to think.

So we throw out God’s prophet, call him crazy, a lunatic, a fanatic. We’re glad to be rid of him, so we can continue on in our self-made comfort. We’ll just “hope for the best,” and leave it at that.

But we don’t have to. The Word goes out into all the world. God calls each of us, and to respond, we have to be willing to let go of ourselves, to quit being our own judges of things, and accept a higher judgment — whatever it might be.

Jesus is that Word, and when we discover Him as that True Word, we are not ashamed of Him. He eventually becomes everything to us, in us, and then finally as us. There is no other. But one cannot ever know that intellectually, because it cannot ever be known by our natural thinking mind. One only knows by letting go of himself, and plunging in. When we plunge in, the Spirit reveals the True God.

We become obsessed then, with only God. God in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself through His Cross. Because His love is so true and so real, even though we killed Him because we didn’t want him upsetting our self-applecarts, He has redeemed us by the same death we dealt to Him. He rose out of death, bodily and truly, that we might know that when we lose what we think is ourselves in Him, let go finally of what we fight so hard and vehemently to defend and keep, when we lose that into Him, He rises in what we have lost in Him and becomes one with us inside ourselves, so that His Truth is now our truth, His Righteousness is now our righteousness, and His love becomes our love. We realize, for the first time, everything before was upside down and askew. Now through Him, everything becomes right side up, and we surprisingly say, “I never knew! O how wonderful!”

And such an obsession we have inherited: For we say, with Paul, “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which lie behind, and reaching forth unto those things which lie before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

When we are there, we are out of other options. We are obsessed with the right obsession. It eats us up! And the prize isn’t some heavenly mansion, or crowns and gold on high, but the lives of our brothers and sisters who are pulled to safety out of the fires of destruction. We care for nothing else.