trust in God, not intellect

As I have been home the past couple of weeks, I've been struggling to uphold and justify my version of faith versus some friends and family.

This has been wildly unsuccessful. My intellectual strivings towards God in trying to disprove a theology next to mine does not put my dependence on him, but on reason, logic and articles. Not that engaging your mind is bad. By no means! But relying on intellectual knowledge completely is harmful to one's faith.

Even apologist Ravi Zacharias thinks so. Every once in awhile, I listen to his podcast, "Let my people think" (you can download it for free on itunes). I listened to his most recent message on the account of Daniel, and he made a good point which I will butcher in my paraphrase: Human knowledge is often shortsighted and leans on the judgment of people. We must be a people who intellectually engages, but ultimately trusts and depends on God's wisdom.


Last night, I watched a pretty c-level movie "License to Wed" which was so bad it was hard to sit through. But I did get something out of it (akin to my spiritual enlightenment from the very bad "Evan Almighty"). John Krasinki's character did not trust the priest(Robin Williams) who was giving him and his fiance (Mandy Moore) an extreme marriage counseling course. He was so caught off guard by the priest's apparently devious and outrageous methods, that he committed himself to investigate for the priest's weak spot to bring it to his fiance, who did in fact trust the priest. He was so busy investigating that he did not even write his wedding vows in time.

And that actually convicted me. I've been so busy trying to disprove certain movements I've been skeptical about that I have not even spent any real time alone with God to receive his love and devote my vows to him and I have not been loving my friends and family well, because I've been more dependent on my skeptical logic than on God to heal me in a time I need him most.

I've been trying to be a leader when I need to be a child first (following this order: child- disciple- servant- leader). I need to focus on my own faith and my own healing before I become too caught up in changing everyone else.