After all, suits don't have feelings

“My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,

     the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns,

     broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

Jeremiah 2:13

I believe that to a lot of people in the world today, Jesus is just an idea. He’s an abstract figure who represents some crazy religion where people stand on street corners with signs commanding everyone to repent. Going even more broad, to a lot of people God is just an idea, too. God, if you even believe he exists, is someone we so often see portrayed as a storybook figure way up there in the sky who is ready with a lightning bolt for when you fail.

To a lot of people, there really is no personal connection there.

And it makes God, as an idea, as a set of beliefs, as a philosophy, really easy to write off and reject.

If you’ve seen the movie You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, there’s a scene where their two characters are meeting at a coffee shop...I’ll give you a bit of a backstory real quick, just in case you haven’t seen it (though it is a great movie and you should definitely watch it). Meg Ryan’s character, Kathleen, is the owner of a cozy little bookstore in New York City. Tom Hanks’ character, Joe, has just opened a mega-bookstore nearby called Fox Books that quickly put her generational little shop out of business. Needless to say, she is not his biggest fan. But the whole premise of the scene is that she’s waiting there to meet another guy who never shows up; much to her dismay, Joe shows up and sits with her instead. 

Their conversation goes awry as Kathleen becomes more angry with him. This is the dialogue that I wanted to hone in on:

Joe: I think you’d discover a lot of things if you really knew me.

Kathleen: If I really knew you, I know what I would find. Instead of a brain, a cash register. Instead of a heart, a bottom line...you are nothing but a suit.

First off, ouch. But really, think about it; she is saying to him what we so often do to God. We depersonalize him. We don’t see him as having a heart. We see him as having a rule book, maybe a cashing-in system, maybe as someone or something preoccupied with what he or it can get from us.

And it makes it a million times easier to reject him.

It is way easier to reject an idea than a person. In that scene, Kathleen is completely writing him off. And it’s easy for her to do so, because she has depersonalized him. To her, he was his company, not a person. She is able to reject him because it is not personal. After all, suits don’t have feelings.

In the Jeremiah verse mentioned in the beginning, the words God is telling Jeremiah to go and proclaim to his people who have strayed from him are, “They have forsaken me.”

He does not say, “They have forsaken Christianity.” And it’s because they have not forsaken an idea, not even a religion. They have forsaken God. Can you sense God’s heartbreak in those words? It’s like in Revelation, when he says to the Church in Ephesus that they have forsaken their first love. Are you sensing it now? This isn’t about rules; it’s about love. When we walk away from God and when we forsake him, we aren’t just walking away from a philosophy or an idea or a figure; we’re walking away from a Father. Our Father. 

At times, we absolutely break God’s heart. I get that these are heavy words; it is difficult to swallow for me as well. But I say them to challenge you today to look at the areas you have depersonalized God, the areas where it is so much easier to write him off. And I dare you to instead embrace the personal nature of God. And in embracing the fact that we at times break His heart, get excited about the fact that He has a heart! God is not just a suit; He is alive and real! And if God has a heart, it means all those verses about His wild and passionate and sweet love for you are true.

Friends, know today that God has a heart and it breaks for us. And know that to God you are not just a number, not just a suit. And you are not what you’ve done. You are a person. Even more accurately, you are a child, and a dearly loved one at that.