One of the largest objections to God we hear from our students comes from their perception of God’s character or nature. Human nature has a bad habit of forming opinions about God and people based off of unrelated events or assumptions, before getting to know them! It is so much easier to assume we know the intentions of someone, and usually they are negative, based on our own insecurities or previous experiences.
As a teacher, I constantly need to check my intentions and judgments of new students when they enroll at our school. They can appear disinterested, angry, or lazy, and before I realize it, I place them inside of that box, and then they need to “earn” the right to break out of it.
I believe this all comes from our tendency to do this with God.
The only way I can know a person is how they reveal themselves to me. Everything else I think I know about them must come from my own judgments. Thankfully, God has revealed Himself to us very clearly in two main ways (even if we may not experience clarity on occasions): 1. In the person of Jesus on Earth and 2. Through the inspired word of God, speaking to us through the Holy Spirit.
So when we engage with students on their perceptions of God, we need to take them on the same journey that we’ve personally gone on to discover how God has revealed Himself to humanity. As Dane Ortlund argues in his book, Gentle and Lowly, perhaps the best reveal of God’s nature is Jesus’ statement in Matthew 11 that he is “gentle and lowly in heart.” As Ortlund says,
In the one place in the Bible where the Son of God pulls back the veil and lets us peer way down into the core of who he is, we are not told that he is “austere and demanding in heart.” We are not told that he is “exalted and dignified in heart.” We are not even told that he is “joyful and generous in heart.” Letting Jesus set the terms, his surprising claim is that he is “gentle and lowly in heart.
What’s shocking for me is that even when I try to communicate with our students that God is actually like this, I find God asking me, “Do YOU truly know this, Tyler? Will you believe that I am primarily gentle towards you?”
Embracing this has shown me that the more I get this for myself, the larger impact on the students that has. My words might not be any different, but the way I live and treat them communicates that very idea. As I experience the gentleness and lowliness of God in Jesus, that will overflow to my students, and they, in turn, experience Jesus too.
