What We Believe About God Affects Everything
But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful. (Luke 6:35-36)
Jesus tells us that we are supposed to act like God. Furthermore, He tells us exactly what God is like. He is kind to “unthankful” and “evil” people. If we believed that God was vindictive towards ungrateful people (as most “Christians” are) then we might believe that we have a right to be as well. This is why Jesus labored hard in order to provide us with an understanding of exactly what God is like.
What we think about God effects how we treat our spouses. Paul wrote, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5:25). We are supposed to model our treatment of our spouses after the pattern of Christ towards the church. If we believe that God is abusive towards the church then we may feel justified in mistreating our spouses.
The list can go on. If you believe that God predestines who is saved and who is lost and that He has no love for the lost (as many Calvinists teach) then this can destroy any passion one might otherwise have for sharing the gospel and interceding for them. If we believe that God personally destroys His children when they misbehave then we may feel justified in abusing, destroying, and killing our own children when they offend us.
The most extreme examples of how one’s view of God affects one’s life can be seen among Islam. Most segments of this religion torture and kill without hesitation. Hindus have accepted a caste system of rich and poor and many see no need to help their impoverished because they have been taught that the poor are suffering from sins from a previous life. Jesus taught against such compassionless notions (John 9:1-4).
What we believe about God affects our worship, our prayer life, our relationships, our church attendance, our reverence for Scripture, whether or not we yield to sin or discipline our flesh, how we act towards strangers, spiritual warfare, finances, health, etc. What we believe about God affects everything about us. Even atheists model their lives based on their view of God (and while they claim not to believe in Him, they certainly hold ideas about Him, even if those ideas are wrong).
The primary focus of Vindicating God Ministries is to do away with distorted and warped views of God. Satan has been distorting the truth about God since man’s creation (Gen. 3:1-7). He has continued to successfully portray God in a bad light until this present day and keeps men blinded to the truth about Him (2 Cor. 4:4). Satan has even successfully twisted the very Word of God itself to achieve his ends, just as he attempted to do with Jesus during the wilderness temptation (Matt. 4:6). His success is seen in a Christianity in which cold intellectualism has replaced the warm truth of the gospel, where lack of concern for a lost and dying world is prevalent, and where fatalism has replaced prayer and spiritual warfare.
Since we believe the Bible, which is God’s written revelation to man, has been twisted by Satan to promote warped ideas about the Lord, the books, audio teachings, seminars, and other materials offered by Vindicating God Ministries are designed to help you know your Bible better and to give you a more complete understanding of the character of our loving, holy, righteous, and kind God. We believe that the practical outcome of having embraced the truth about God’s character is that there will be a difference in your evangelistic outreach to the lost, your prayers for a lost world, Your ability to share Christ with a loving passion (because you will have no doubts about His goodness), your fervency to resist negative things in life that you may have accepted as coming from God and war against them, as well as your overall devotion and worship of the Lord. One’s view of God determines everything. It is our mission and passion at Vindicating God ministries to help you to get the correct Biblical view of Him.