Twenty Questions God Is Not Afraid to Ask You

There is a way of believing in God that saves us from ever having to meet Him, and it looks nothing like unbelief. It looks like fluency. Twenty lines below, none in the order the book gives them, each one built to stop you before you nod past it.

"There is a way of believing in God that saves us from ever having to meet Him."

"The tragedy is not that these words are false. The tragedy is that truth itself can be used to avoid the God who is true."

"An idea asks only to be remembered. The living God asks to be obeyed."

"It gives the conscience a place to rest without giving the self a place to die."

"God is not an object before the mind. He is the One before whom the mind itself becomes an object of judgment."

"The living God is therefore not satisfying to the false self. He is devastating to it."

"The most dangerous distance from God is the distance that has learned how to behave like nearness."

"We are not usually deceived by lies that look like lies. We are deceived by truths arranged in a way that leaves the self unjudged."

"Not everything that reaches upward has left the self behind."

"We wanted a God near enough to be felt, but not near enough to interfere."

"Zeal becomes holy only when it has survived the judgment of light. Until then, intensity may simply be error with more energy."

"A gift reveals generosity in the Giver, not completeness in the vessel."

"The word is not fully preached until it has first found the preacher."

"We often ask God to direct a life whose destination we have forbidden Him to change."

"A person may be biblically informed and spiritually unavailable."

"The prayer to be searched is more dangerous than the prayer to be blessed."

"Usefulness is not intimacy, and impact is not permission to stop being known."

"A calling that cannot survive obscurity may only be ambition with a prophecy over it."

"God does not ask us to arrive impressive. He asks us to arrive."

"The distance that looked like nearness can only end when nearness becomes more desirable than the self it will expose."

The Introduction and Chapter One of When God Became a Satisfying Idea go on to name this distance in far more detail. Free to listen to the moment you become a member.