God is Out of Control – a Guest Post By Michael Hidalgo

This is an excerpt from Changing Faith: Questions, Doubts and Choices About an Unchanging God, a new book by Michael Hidalgo.

We live each day walking on a thin veneer of certainty. Many of us live with a desire to control things because it gives us security and certainty. We want control so badly we even try to control God. It’s almost as if we place boundaries around him, box him in and create a framework for him. We look for him in all the expected places, thinking he will work within the small world we create for him.

We often live as though our way of thinking and of doing things is also God’s way. We divide over issues, use the Bible to defend our position and claim we are on God’s side. But whenever we reduce the big, massive, expansive, unchanging God to our way of doing things, we are attempting to create God in our image. And when we attempt to make God more like us, there is a good chance we become less like him.

We must remember God does not observe all the dividing lines we have set up. He calls all of us to exist as “one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:14-16). The church has struggled with this since its beginning. In the book of Acts the story of how God moves begins predictably enough. Those who followed Jesus and believed in him received the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem during the feast of Pentecost. This was just the beginning, because God’s Spirit was on the move.

Read the rest of this post at Faithfindings.

Michael Hidalgo is the lead pastor of Denver Community Church, and is the author of Changing Faith: Questions, Doubts and Choices About an Unchanging God and UnLost: Being Found by the One We Are Looking For. He blogs regularly at michael-hidalgo.com. He lives with his wife and children in downtown Denver, CO. Follow him on Twitter @michaelhidalgo.