God Attachment: Why You Believe, Act, and Feel the Way You Do About God by Tim Clinton & Joshua Straub

Author:Tim Clinton & Joshua Straub [Clinton, Tim & Straub, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Spirituality, Social Science, General, Biblical Studies, Bible Study Guides
ISBN: 9781439186831
Google: pg1IFIKDONMC
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

What Does This Have to Do with Pleasure and Reward?

That’s a great question. The answer lies in what or whom we turn to for life. If you’re a believer, start by honestly asking yourself why you gave your life to God. If you’re a seeker, ask yourself why you haven’t.

Our hunch is this: if you are truly honest with yourself (and there is initially nothing wrong with this, by the way), the pure motivation for believing or not believing in God stems from a selfish desire to seek pleasure and reward, and to avoid pain. If you’ve heard the story of Jesus and made the choice not to believe (which we have heard from a countless number of clients and friends), perhaps it is because doing so would require you to give up the things of this life that give you pleasure and make you feel good now.

Many believers, on the other hand, believe in God initially out of a desire to not go to hell. We take the “ticket” Elton John sings about and choose heaven, not because God really matters to us so much as knowing he is going to keep us from going to hell, burning in the fiery pit forever. The difference in motives is slim. Beneath the surface is a drive to escape pain and seek pleasure.

St. John of the Cross, a Christian mystic who lived in the sixteenth century, wrote that when seekers become believers, the first stage of spiritual development they experience is a love of God for pleasure’s sake. In likening it to the infant-mother attachment, he wrote:

It must be known, then, that the soul, after it has been definitely converted to the service of God, is, as a rule, spiritually nurtured and caressed by God, even as is the tender child by its loving mother. . . . The loving mother is like the grace of God, for, as soon as the soul is regenerated by its new warmth and fervor for the service of God, He treats it in the same way; He makes it to find spiritual milk, sweet and delectable, in all things of God, without any labor of its own, and also great pleasure in spiritual exercises, for here God is giving to it the breast of his tender love, even as to a tender child.12

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