Does God owe you a Return on Investment?

We challenge the fear-based version of Christianity and make room to explore faith without guilt. We also wrestle with a practical question: if we invest in prayer and seeking God, what should we expect to come from it? 

• the Guilt Free Faith pillars and why freedom matters 
• how guilt and fear get installed by church culture and family expectations 
• permission to explore ideas and interpretations without panic 
• a utilitarian approach to Christianity and the “return on investment” question 
• why humans look to God for practical help in a difficult world 
• what prayer looks like when you expect real outcomes 
• how help can arrive through ordinary people and everyday circumstances 

Let me know what you're thinking in the comments. 

Transcript

Welcome To Guilt Free Faith

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to today's episode of Guilt Free Faith. I am your host, Frank Legons, and today I'm going to challenge you by first starting with a warning. The whole Guilt Free Faith movement is based on several pillars, one of the most important of which is the freedom to explore variety of ideas and perspectives and approaches to your Christian walk and your life more broadly, without that sense of guilt and fear that you're going to be damned to hell or that you have to confess, or now God's going to be mad at you and all the roadblocks installed in your mind, perhaps by your church, perhaps you know, by your parents. So today I just want to give you permission to blame it on me. Take a listen. You're always free to agree or disagree or come up with your own interpretation. And I would love to hear from you in the comments. The new book I'm working on for you is about what I would consider my own philosophy towards a utilitarian approach to Christianity. And in this book, I introduce this controversial idea of whatever your spiritual walk is, it needs to offer a return on investment. I know those are shocking terms to even dare to combine financial terms with faith and salvation. Just seems like sacrilege, like right off the bat. And I can't argue with that. Does sound pretty wild. Growing up in a Christian household, that's not a leap that I would have made or I would have felt comfortable with exploring. But the fact is that we need religion or we need God or we need Jesus. There needs to be a tangible, real, objective reason for that faith, for that effort of faith that we put in, for that seeking, for going on that journey, for investing our time in that strategy in life, because it very well may be beyond anything earthly, right? And I'm not denying that. But while we're living on this earth, being practical, my position is I think just to be honest as human beings, we need to agree that living in the world is difficult. We need help to get by and get through our challenges. And throughout the course of human history, religion or mythology and spirituality, the supernatural aspect of the human psyche has relied on these tools to bring about practical results like praying to this God so that it rains, praying to that God for fertility, praying to another God to win the war. And in the modern day, as Christians, we may pray to God for salvation. We pray to God for healing. We pray to God for help in all kinds of situations. And we pray because we need that help, right? We actually have a dire need of help. And that help may come in some supernatural, miraculous way. Oftentimes it comes through mundane and but sometimes surprising ways. We have people that come in and out of our lives, some of whom are real blessings to us. You know, we may have jobs, mentors, or friends. The help that we receive can take many forms, but we need something to come out of it. I want something and expect something to come out of my prayers. I want something and expect something to come out of me spending time with God or reading the word. So to have that type of expectation and to even entertain that idea that in exchange for what we give God, even if it's just our hope that he exists or our optimism to dare to believe that he exists and that he created us and he has a good plan for us, and we have something to look forward to in the afterlife. We should be able to explore that idea of what the give and take is or what we can expect. We will talk more about this next time. Let me know what you're thinking in the comments.