Lately, I have been doing a fair amount of reading. Over the course of the summer I managed to read the entire Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series and Harry Potter series. I just finished rereading Searching For God Knows What by Don Miller and am about to reread the author’s other book Blue Like Jazz. I read this book about a year ago and probably did not get much out of it at the time. However, this time the book really spoke volumes about what I have been thinking about lately.

The premise of the book is to show that true Christianity is all about relationships.

The book starts with the author going to a writers seminar in which he was basically told that he could write a successful book using a simple formula. After attending this seminar he began to try to read these formulas into the Bible to find a formula to improve the readers life of his books. Yet, as he read the Bible he could not find any formulas that worked and made sense. The author realized that formulas and theology do not satisfactorily answer the deepest longing of our heart.

Mr. Miller realized that after the Fall in the Garden of Eden something deep inside of us disappeared. This something was our relationship with God. Mr. Miller proposed that before the Fall humanity received its sense of self worthy from God and that after the Fall when we were separated from God we lost our sense of self worth. He went on to say that since we lost our connection to God we try comparing ourselves to other to try and fulfill our need for self worth. Yet, this attempt to fulfill a need that only God can meet is futile. This idea makes so much sense in my opinion. What if the pain we feel? The trying to compare ourselves to others, the obsession with who has the bigger house, the better car, the best clothes? All that goes back to the Fall in which our sense of self worth and the need to be loved were met completely by God and that by sinning against God God no longer was able to associate himself with us and fulfill these needs.

After, the Fall God did not abandon us or destroy us. He continued to pursue us. He desired to continue to have a relationship with us. He provided the first sacrifice to make clothing for Adam and Eve, He provided the law to show us our problem and He provided a sacrificial system to allow the Israelites to relate with him. Yet, all these things failed not because they are evil but because they are formulas to get to God and don’t fix the relationship problem with God. Enter Jesus the solution to our relationship problem with God. Jesus who was both God and Human lived a perfect life and die to save us and give us access to God. Jesus is our access to God, who can provide us all the love and self worth we need.

A relationship with God who can meet all my needs makes more sense and better than rules and formula to get to God. Do you desire a relationship with God? Do you wish to be intimate with God? I do.