With God 1

Skye Jethani is one of those younger Christian voices who, like Eugene Peterson, has an eye out for consumerist takeovers of the church; he also has drunk deeply from the depths of the spiritual formation masters; and he’s always had a stubborn Bible-first approach to pastoral theology.

Yet one more dimension of Skye’s thinking: he has an eye for how the Christian life is framed in modern culture so that he sees its faults. In his newest book, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God, Skye zeroes in on how various prepositions express an inadequate spirituality and how one preposition gets us to the heart of what it’s all about. This is one of those books that is not easy to blog about because it’s more to be experienced through reading than summarizing ideas.

Examine Skye’s prepositions below, knowing they are not totally false but instead capable of distorting how we are to live, and reflect for us on how these prepositions deserve more attention today. Where are you seeing “from” and “over” and “for” and “under”?

Skye’s book reminds me of a classic from my era: JB Phillips’ Your God is Too Small, wherein he explained bad ideas of God to set them up for good ideas about God. In this book Skye sets up some bad ideas about how we are to live so he can explain a life with God.

But the central idea can be expressed very clearly, in that too many Christians see the Christian life as:

Life “from” God: we want God to pour out his blessings on us or we treat God as the source of blessings.
Life “over” God: we figure out how things work, we control, we manage, we develop a life-over-God posture.
Life “for” God: we drive ourselves to serve God and see our lives as something for God. We seek to accomplish great things for God.
Life “under” God: we do things “by the Book.” If we follow the Bible, God blesses; we see ourselves primarily as the obedient ones; we seek to stay under the guidelines.

Skye’s proposal is that we are to have a Life WITH God. (More on that in our next post.)