How The Dance Went Wrong: Book 2 in the series "A Slow Dance With God"

Can God do anything He wants to? No, because He can’t make you love Him. In this second book Don Moore looks at what went wrong in paradise and the deceptions about God and the identity of the human race that grew out of it. God loves you because He chooses to. Love exists only when a person is free to choose to love or not to love. Choices define our lives and real choices have real consequences. God created humans with the freedom to choose to love and obey Him or to go their own way. Each choice has consequences, whether we see them or not. Before sin in this world there was relationship, loving relationship between Father and His children. God’s children had everything they needed. There was no disease, no death, no sin in their world, yet they were free to live in that paradise or to try to do better on their own. When Adam and Eve chose to do their will rather than God’s will, sin and death entered the world. God has given to us humans His authority to rule over the whole world. We don’t believe that, but the first Adam’s sin resulted in human estrangement from the rest of creation. The world has suffered rather than prosper under our leadership or, more pointedly, our failure of leadership. We humans are offered a relationship with God who loves us, but refuses to control us. We are also offered a relationship with Satan, our spiritual enemy, who offers freedom to do anything we want to. This offer of fulfilling our every desire is the lure, but the hook in the lure is the deception that freedom from God has no negative consequences. Sin is not God’s will for us and death is not God’s punishment for our sin. Sin is the result of human freedom to ignore God and death is the consequence of that ignorance. God’s love is the only answer to human sin and to the death that follows. God loves every human being, but love given is nullified unless it becomes love received. God has been pictured for centuries as a wrathful, controlling God who is responsible for the woes of the world. The truth is that He has given to us the authority and power to shape this world according to our desires. The disease-filled, war-ravaged world we live in is the home that we have constructed out of the paradise that God gave us. When it became clear to God that we no longer understood His heart or who we are created to be, He became one of us in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is God’s statement that He refuses to give up on us. Jesus became a human being in order to demonstrate how to live a fully human life as one of God’s children. He said, “Follow Me” as an invitation to learn how to live in the authority and power of God in this world. Jesus is God’s offer of restoring the relationship that existed before sin and that can override the present sin in our lives. Moore shares how a relationship with Jesus resulted in him overcoming a lifetime of depression. He believes that parts of the deception that we live under are (a) we have no control over depression and other maladies that afflict us; (b) there are no demons that can influence our thoughts and actions. If you’ve struggled with depression or with addictive behaviors, this is a short read that might lead to freedom to discover the power of God’s love in your life.