“If my religion is true, it will stand up to all my questioning; there is no need to fear. But if it is not true, if it is man imposing strictures on God . . . then I want to be open to God, not to what man says about God. I want to be open to revelation, to new life, to new birth, to new light.”
Madeline L’Engle
Key words: there is no need to fear. Is God not able to keep our souls as we pursue him with all of our hearts? From personal experience I can say that those who refuse to dialogue or be open to any other ideas than what they have been taught to believe are living in fear. The truth is that God is faithful and able to keep our souls, he is not afraid of our questions. His passion is our sanctification. He is less concerned about WHAT we know and he’s more concerned with making us like himself… this is not to say that good teaching is unnecessary. It just means that if my religion causes me to be mean spirited, divisive, inflexible, unable to dialogue or entertain any other ideas than my own, than I have yet to discover the freedom from fear that Christ longs for me to have… he came to enable us to serve him “without fear, in holiness and righteousness all of our days…” Life with Christ is a journey, there is no one person or church who has every piece of the puzzle. The more we learn the more we discover we have more to learn… as the apostle said, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
“Now, we are often taught that it is unfaithful to question traditional religious beliefs, but believe that we must question them continually—not God, not Christ, who are at the center of our lives as believers and creators—but what human beings say about God and about Christ; otherwise, like those of the church establishment of Galileo’s day, we truly become God’s frozen people. Galileo’s discoveries did nothing whatsoever to change the nature of God; they threatened only man’s rigid ideas of the nature of God. We must constantly be open to new revelation, which is another way of hearing God, with loving obedience.”
Madeline L’Engle
Openness does not make us more prone to false teachings. On the contrary, it actually makes less likely to settle into ideas that hinder us from growth. Openness, in the spirit of humility and a desire to be closer to our Savior, will always result in healthy spiritual growth. We’re never in danger of being swept away when we are hidden in the shelter of his wings. We only get off track if, when we discover an element of truth we’ve never discovered before, we refuse to embrace and walk in it.
