Oprah's Best Life: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Oprah started 2009 with a series called "Oprah’s Best Life." It covered five aspects of life that she believes are key to living the best life possible. One of the topics, spirituality, piqued my attention. Last Wednesday, Oprah offered a live webcast on the topic of spirituality, where she took questions from people that called/wrote in. I watched the webcast (available in her archives by clicking here) and was struck by several things which I’ll call the good, the bad and the ugly.

Going in reverse order, I’ll mention "The Ugly" first. I was discouraged by the poor Biblical scholarship of the so-called experts. Particularly Rev. Ed Bacon, an Episcopal priest, who should have had the most Biblical training. The comment that stood out to me was when he was discussing the notion that the Bible is not the only authority in your life; that you should listen to your inner voice as one of your authorities. He went on to claim that Jesus himself set aside parts of scripture "when they were not in alignment with the compassionate God he knew." The truth is, Jesus frequently talked about the judgmentmental aspect of God (see Matthew 25:31-46 for one of many examples). True, God is a a compassionate God, but He is also a just (and therefore judging) God.

This brings me to "The Bad." Oprah talked quite a bit about how it is impossible for God to be both condemning and loving at the same time. Honestly, I don’t see a contradiction here. It’s actually quite simple: 

Loving: God creates the world and creates us in His image. He designs a paradise where we can live in constant relationship with Him.

Condemning: Adam and Eve sin. The rest of humanity follows suit. God banishes Adam and Eve from the garden, and sets the penalty of sin: death and eternal separation from God.

Loving: Because God loves us so much, he creates an incredible pathway back to Him through Jesus. In fact, he’s even willing to allow Jesus to die so that we would be saved from the death that we deserve!

Condemning: Anyone who does not accept the free gift of Jesus will spend eternity separated from God.

Loving: Anyone who does accept the free gift of Jesus will spent eternity with the God who loves us.

Finally, "The Good." Throughout the whole webcast, the overall feeling I got from both Oprah and the experts was love. These people truly wanted to help everyone who called/wrote in asking for help. They truly wanted humanity to live a better life. The problem was, their desire to be all-inclusive left them unable to dispense advice that reflected God’s actual representation of Himself through the Bible. Unfortunately, we were left with positive, yet shallow insights from well-meaning but misguided advisors. Nonetheless, I think Christians can stand to learn a lot from the loving approach these folks demonstrated. Using a theme from the webcast, let’s let God do the judging and condemning; our job is to lovingly demonstrate, and point people to, Jesus.