Limited by Our Context

First, as we consider encountering God, we need to recognize that we are limited by our context. What do I mean by that?

Well, our relationships, for instance. Some of our friends help us to encounter God. But many people that we know, in one way or another, push us away from knowing God.

For instance, some of us have a hard time believing in a Heavenly Father because of how our earthly fathers treated us. Perhaps they were absent, or abusive, or aggressive. Some of us have enjoyed great pastors. Others have experienced spiritual abuse.

So one reason we don't love God is that so many of the people we know don't either.

What I'm saying is that we need to be honest. Even though we want our churches to help us love God, that isn't always the case. In fact, some of you might be coming into this course not having a church home. Or, maybe at your church they are teaching some bad doctrine, and you're concerned about that. Perhaps there is division around politics or race or class that keeps your church from demonstrating the unity that God wants us to have with one another.

There's an even bigger perspective to our context. We are discussing this course in the 21st century — and this time period has unique limits to how we can see God.

The theologian Fred Sanders writes:

Inhabitants of a decadent culture feel themselves to be living among the scraps and fragments of something that must have made sense to a previous generation but which now seem more like a pile of unrelated items. Decadent cultures feel unable to articulate the reasons for connecting things to each other. They spend a lot of time staring at isolated fragments, unable to combine them into meaningful wholes.

We live in a world where we encounter many different lifestyles and belief systems every day. In the proliferation of all these options, it creates an instability about our own choices. It becomes harder to have an absolute and complete commitment to Jesus when we see other people making life commitments to alternative religions and lifestyles. It raises a doubt in the back of our minds: what if I'm wrong? What if another way is better?

So one reason that God is not our First Love is because of our context.