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Remodeling Your House and Playing Jenga

What is one of the worst things you can do to your home besides making it a hoarder house? Demo it without doing proper research. For example, you might decide to widen the entry from your living room to your kitchen by removing a wall and not realize it is load bearing.

BuyersAsk website has this to say: “Removing a load bearing wall may create structural problems in a home, including sagging ceilings, unleveled floors, drywall cracks, and sticking doors. . . . Even removing just a portion of a load bearing wall to create a wider door or window opening can be a problem if not done correctly. Removal of load bearing walls without properly supporting the load they’re carrying may occasionally result in a structural collapse and even injury [italics mine].

So, removing a wall or post in your house before doing your homework may cause the floor to sag or even to collapse onto your head. Any engineer will tell you to be aware of the “load path” that starts at the roof and runs all the way down to the footings of a house.

Have you ever played the game Jenga? This game, originally called “Blocks from Takoradi” by its inventor, Leslie Scott, is played by removing small wooden beams from an eighteen-row tower and then placing them on the upper floor of the tower. Play continues until someone pulls out a beam that causes the entire structure to collapse.

Just like in the demoing of a house, those who play Jenga must be careful not to remove a beam that is holding up the whole tower.

Besides those who remove walls as they remodel their homes and remove small beams when they play Jenga, there are those who deconstruct their faith in God by removing certain structural pieces. Designer Therapy for Life has several posts discussing such a deconstruction (blog posts 19 and 46). The goal of this post is to discuss when it is advisable and even wise to remove walls and beams from your faith tower and when such choices might lead to a total collapse of your belief in God.

When it is Advisable Not to Demo

The following are reasons you might wish to deconstruct your faith, but such an action is not wise:

1. God’s commandments run counter to the passions of your flesh, and you decide to pursue your passions. Like a person having an affair, you must make God look bad (judgmental, unloving, unimaginably unfair) in order to make your fleshly desire seem tolerantly okay and even justifiable. Call your lust love, or your addiction an affection, or your idol a need. No matter what, God must be removed as a load bearing wall (the Lord of your life) in order to keep your “precious” as Gollum in the LOTR coveted his precious ring.
2. Related to the thought above, demo your relationship with God to reduce the dissonance that occurs when you love God but love something else equally or even more. Here we see the concept of giving into temptation and practicing sin.
3. Kill God because He makes you feel guilty.
4. You feel bored by your Christianity and begin to believe that it is either false or unfulfilling.
5. The pleasure of sin seems so immediate, savory, and explosively satisfying in the moment you immerse yourself in it that you desire it more than the invisible God.
6. You feel like Jesus is not with you, not present, not near.
7. Life is very difficult for you, and you hear a voice in your head saying that if God is loving, He would not allow you to suffer like you are.
8. You see the evil in the world and begin to believe that either God is not strong enough to prevent it or that He is not loving enough to protect you from it. But you who doubt God in the presence of evil, always remember Jesus’ response outside Lazarus’ tomb. He was moved deeply in spirit—twice. Commentators believe that Jesus was divinely enraged at the presence and power of sin and death. Days later, He would break the curse of death by His own death. Revelation 1:18 says, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.”
9. Demolish your relationship with God because you believe He has left you. You are not aware that you are transferring the rejection you experienced after your parent’s divorce or your mother’s death or your father’s emotional absence onto God and then abandoning Him because it feels like He has abandoned you. In fact, you have burned the bridge between you and Him.
10. Satan does what he does, namely, he lies to you possibly working through one of the reasons above and convinces you to not trust your loving Father.
11. You sin and experience condemnation from Satan and your own fallen self and project it onto God. You see Jesus as the author of condemning shame instead of godly sorrow and choose to distance from Him.
12. You believe the subjective “truth” of the relativistic culture and deconstruct the absolute, timeless truth of God’s word.
13. Excommunicate the habit of going to church because it is inconvenient, unnecessary, or cuts into your sleep and leisure time.
14. If you do go to church, you are quick to see what is wrong with it instead of being thankful for a spiritual family that might walk with you through the darkness of life.
15. You prefer the world of the material, the physically seen, the tangible versus the unseen plane of reality.
16. No one tells you what to do. A strong part of you remains a rebel who will bow to no authority.

When to Deconstruct Religion

The following are a few reasons it might be healthy to deconstruct your current religion or view of God since these things may very well drive you away from Him:

1. You see God through the lens of your experiences with an unfaithful, angry, shaming, unpredictable parent, teacher, pastor, etc. By all means, yank this unhealthy beam from your Jenga (Jesus) tower because it is contaminating your view of Jesus. Identify and demolish all transference from human relationships onto God.
2. God is a legalistic religion for you, not a relationship. He is associated with laws, rules, “shoulds,” dos and don’ts, mere morality, and the fear of hell or punishment. Please do remove this wall from your faith house. Open space for Jesus to meet you with grace instead of basing your relationship on your law-abiding performance. Such an approach to faith is a religion, i.e., your attempts to reach God instead of receiving His mercy through Jesus. You will come to hate Jesus because you can never be good enough for Him in your eyes.
3. Identify the lies of Satan and deconstruct these with a vengeance. Remember 2 Corinthians 10:3-5: “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ . . .” Remember that the enemy of your soul wants to steal, kill, and destroy you and your faith. He wants you to doubt God, to forget Him, to slowly distance from His Presence until you are closer to darkness instead of to light.
4. Deconstruct your sin instead of the loving One who came to deliver you from slavery to sin.
5. Identify how you project onto God your own anger and condemnation toward Him and anything that convicts you of sin. See how you then experience God as angry and condemning when it is actually your attributes that you are placing into His character. Projection is critical to be aware of since it is the tap root of most evil.
6. Some people, in their misguided attempt to crucify the flesh to please God, kill too much of themselves. They not only seek to eradicate their sinful desires, but they put to death any inkling of desire (Stoicism, severe asceticism) because they view it as opposed to God’s will. They also kill their gifts because it is sinful to take delight in the practice of such God-given talents. This practice of crucifying who God made you to be must be deconstructed because eventually you will perceive God as suffocating or as a divine vise who seeks to crush and confine instead of to open and broaden life. He becomes a jailor, not the One who came to set the prisoner free (Luke 4:18).

Open Your Eyes to the Battle for Your Eternal Heart

In summary, do not demo the load bearing wall or the sin bearing Savior. Do not remove the beam that holds up the Jenga tower of your faith in Jesus. Do not reject the Cornerstone who is the foundation of everything good and joyful. Instead, destroy anything that robs you of an intimate relationship with your best friend and your divine Dad.

Hear the sound of battle. Don’t you know there is a war for your soul? Your faith in Jesus will be opposed—fiercely. Resist the temptation to deconstruct Jesus. Instead, open your eyes and see that there is an enemy who wants to distance, distract, and divorce you from your Creator. Tear down all darkness that is dying to seduce you with sparkly tinfoil wrapped around piranhas. Sell all that you have and buy the field where the Treasure of treasures is to be found. Seek Him with all your heart. Lukewarm won’t cut it.

Don’t settle for anything less. Please, please, don’t settle for less.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” ~ Ephesians 2:19-22

“Has a nation changed its gods,
even though they are no gods?
But my people have changed their glory
for that which does not profit.
Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the LORD,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me [deconstruction of the divine],
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water. . .
Your evil will chastise you,
and your apostasy will reprove you.
Know and see that it is evil and bitter
for you to forsake the LORD your God;
the fear of me is not in you,
declares the Lord GOD of hosts. For long ago I broke your yoke
and burst your bonds;
but you said, ‘I will not serve’” ~ Jeremiah 2:11-13, 19-20.

O child, you who can drift so easily from the God who designed you, run to Him.

He is calling you to come.