Believing in God...

For about 6 months now I have been chewing on a collection of thoughts, and I have not yet been able to draw a whole lot of answers or conclusions from them. But I would still like to share these ponderings. I think the best way to convey my thoughts to you is to share a "journal" entry I made during Christmas Conference this year. I used the term journal in quotes because I really do not have a legitimate journal, but every once in a while when I have a lot of thoughts in my head I like to try to sit down and put them down on paper and get a clearer picture of what exactly is going on in my head. So here it is:

....I feel like the root of all my troubles in my walk with the Lord is that part of me must doubt his existence [a bold statement, but keep reading]. Because I know, at least basically, who God claims to be. I know most of the stories God has given [us in the Bible], or I at least have heard most of them. But I feel now that I am confused about what it means to believe these things. I have written down these questions before but I still feel they are important to write down. If God really is who he says he is, and he really cares for us as much as he says, and he really personified his self to us to exemplify Himself to us perfectly and he really bore the penalty of my sin, wouldn't anyone who really believes these things be literally insane with joy? I would think that someone who truly believes this would only find sleep in pure exhaustion due to their relentless and whole hearted proclamation of the gospel. How can people who honestly call themselves Christians blend in so well with the rest of the world? If these truths that God has given us are really true, how can we Christians live lives that have any normalcy? Why are we not utterly transformed by these basic beliefs into souls that can think of nothing but proclaiming the gospel? How can we even fathom something as crazy as a selfish thing? How does this enormous disconnect between reality and the seemingly necessary reality come to be?

Whoa! These are challenging thoughts! And not only that, but they are kind of disturbing too because how many Christians do any of us know who exhibit as deep a passion for the gospel as was described above? Does this mean that the rest of us are in some sense doubting that the God of the Bible exists? I honestly believe that if you believe fully in the God of the Bible, then you have no option but to be completely consumed by your belief. So if we are not utterly consumed in our belief, doesn't this suggest that we are in some sense doubting God to be the God as described in the Bible? This isn't to say that we doubt God's existence completely (making us agnostics), but that our own personal God must be a very limited and small God compared to the God described in the Bible. There seems to be absolutely no room for compromising your belief, you are either all-out for the God of the Bible or this God must not exist. So why is it that seemingly about 99% of Christians sit on the fence with this question. Very few of us are consumed by our belief in the God of the Bible... it is not what drives us day in and day out. Some of us spend time with him daily and read his word often but if you looked at the subject of our thoughts throughout a normal day, God would not be there most of the time. Why? As I have elaborated with some of my friends, we are sitting on the most amazing news we could ever conceive! The story of God in the Bible is more dramatic than any soap opera we have ever watched, and yet we some how come to view this as a mundane story. It should blow our minds whenever we reflect on our basic beliefs! I want to come back to the series of questions above: how do we as Christians manage to live pretty normal lives? How can we take our minds off of something so amazing and pursue so many other insignificant things? Why are we not insane with joy to believe in something so incredible? The only thing I can come up with is that our God is a very small God... And the other thing that baffles me is that when we come to sit and reflect on these things, about how great our God actually is, that we will soon be marginalizing him again. I am struggling to understand why we choose to think about anything else.