Spirituality

Do you ever feel that what you read in some Christian books is not really God’s truth at all, but is merely the opinion of the writer, dressed up in the clothing of truth? Such books are merely imposters and are like the fig tree Jesus cursed—they look promising on the outside, but when you get up close, you find that they, like the fig tree, are barren, written for the glory of the writer and his or her ideas, not for the truth of God and his glory.

Unfortunately, many sermons and teachings fall into the same category. One such teaching is that we have to work very hard to please God, because he is just about fed up with us because of all our shortcomings. This is a teaching that is just plain wrong, according to Darin Hufford, and in his book, “The God’s Honest Truth,” he sets out to correct it.

“The God’s Honest Truth” is a great book. Its premise is that knowing God is based on love, because God is love and he loved us first (and continues to love us). Too many conceptions of God, Hufford points out, are based on faulty images of our human fathers that we transfer to our divine father. Thus, we see God as demanding, abusive, absent, or passive-aggressive, because that is how we (sadly) see our human fathers.

But God is not like that; rather, God is love, and to frame his teaching, Hufford uses the pure and true description of love from 1 Corinthians 13 to guide his discussion about God and our relationship with him.

As an example of what this book is really about, Hufford cites the problem of “loving” God more than we love our spouse or our children. God does not compete for our attention, and if we set up our relationship with him in such a way that we must choose between time with God or time with our family, we act as though God is insecure. Instead, Hufford writes, “The only way to love God more than your spouse is to love God through your spouse. Your husband or wife would be the direct recipient of that love” (p. 169).

Hufford’s book is filled with similar true-to-life examples and the corrective truth the Bible offers. The most important thing we can realize and understand is that God loves us purely. By studying what love truly is (in 1 Cor. 13, for example), we can sincerely and simply love God more and more.

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