The Love of God in Destruction

Hmmm. So when God says He is going to destroy something in the scriptures does He? Yes and no. God wants to get our attention. He wants us to turn away from our sins and our sinful behaviour and in fact that is the destruction that He is aiming for. However, when we humans and followers of God do not listen and start to worship and idolize other things, and start to act in a evil way towards God and other people, God calls us back to repentance. Unfortunately we do not always want to listen.

As I'm writing this blog I am really hit by what it means to be evil. While I do not think that we were created evil, I do think that sin is prevalent in our lives and as John Calvin suggests, without the work of the Holy Spirit making it possible to choose God, we wouldn't be able to thus making us totally deprived. Yet even knowing this little bit of theology, I realized that there are things that I might say are not as bad as others and yet if they are going against God, these not so bad things are evil also. I wonder if the Ninevites realized before Jonah came and told them that God was going to destroy them in 40 days that their actions were evil? I was once confronted by a friend about my actions not being good. Until that friend had told me I didn't realize that what I was doing was hurtful.

I think that too often we think that people should just know how to act, and yet we assume they have had the same opportunities to learn that we have had and they should know and act like us. I know that I have not had the same opportunities as others and others do not have the same training as myself. When God calls on us to help someone else are we going to go or turn the other way because they should know better. Are we going walk with them or hide ourselves in the water so that we don't have to worry about anybody else? The Ninevites heard God's words and changed, others have heard God's words and gotten worse. It is not for us to decide and condemn.

What's So Amazing about Grace?

That is the title of a Philip Yancey book, but the question is still important. Grace is not about what we can do or have done or will do, yet many people look at it that way. Like the Col. from the movie the Patriot who thought his advancements came because of his victories. How many of us think about salvation as our victories, I have earned it!!! The scary thing is that people who claim to be Christians do not even look towards Jesus or to the Grace that God the Father has poured out through Jesus. They look to their own merits, their own victories, "I did my good deed for the day". Yet the Grace that God is giving us is not measured in how many deeds we do, it isn't even measured by us at all, it is measured against Jesus and from Jesus. Jesus came while there was still sin in the world. We humans hadn't gotten it right by the time that Jesus came. Yet Jesus came because of His love for us. Not to condemn us but to call us away from sin to God the Father. The grace that God gave us was from Himself and not from us, it was for us.

But again, grace is not about what we do, yet God's grace is seen in how our lives have been changed by Jesus. When we receive God's grace, are we happy? Do we realize the cost of God's Grace? Do we see the love of God from our place on Calvary? God's grace, as Dietrich Bonnhoeffer puts it is "Costly grace", we can too easily accept God's grace with out realizing how much it cost and how important it is and treat it like a piece of bread and it becomes "cheap grace" it is there when we need it but it doesn't change our lives. "Cheap Grace" is false grace. As the apostle Paul writes in Romans 6 "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life."

Do we hold fast to the forgiveness of sins, the grace of God that changes lives, or do we think happy thoughts a pray that our actions do not have any consequences. We all know that they do. We need help to heal, and to grow, to change our lives and the world around us. We need God's help, we need God's grace. As the General said to the Colonel in the Patriot, "It is by my good graces that you advance." It is by God's good grace that we are saved.

Seeing Jesus

The interesting thing about the first part of John 1 is that it is not just an introduction to the gospel, but also a mini overview of what John's message is. People did not see their creator walking by, whether they were too busy, or too wrapped up in themselves (something we all need to be careful of, including me.) or even too wrapped up in worshiping God. We might think that we would notice if the Son of God walked into the room. Maybe it would be that magnetic personality, or the love that He has for His people, maybe it would be the miracles that He performed, yet people did not see Him.
Let's think about those who did see Him, John the Baptist, a strange man who ate locusts, dressed in camel hair shorts and had some honey to go with his locusts. His message really wasn't that popular, "repent for the kingdom of God is coming". We could say that he was an ultra spiritualist calling people back to God, I don't think the Pharisees would agree though. Peter, Andrew, James and John, common blue collar workers, not smart enough to follow a rabbi so they followed in their family's trade of fishing. Matthew a hated tax collector, Judas a man who misunderstood and did not fully realize what was going on around him. I could continue but the point is these people when faced with Jesus saw something different. Their expectations of the messiah were not in jeopardy, their theological understanding of themselves or their faith was challenged but they met with that challenge because Jesus started to make more sense than the religion. (Remembering that religion is how we practice our faith). They hadn't put God into a box and weren't as afraid of the possibility of a carpenter from Nazareth being the Messiah instead of some gallant warrior.

I think we need to be careful here because we live in a time when many people are saying that religion does not make sense. Not that faith doesn't make sense, but that the religions don't. If we were to look at each other in our churches could we start to see Jesus, and the work that Jesus is doing in each of us. Can we see Him in the people we pass on the streets. How are we as followers of Jesus going to be the Body of Christ in this world today. Old religious and denominational walls don't mean what they used to. My generation is looking for Jesus not a denomination and I think when we get down to it all people are looking for Jesus, whether they want to admit it or even know it yet. This is not to say that religion is wrong, without it we are missing a part of who we are. However when we idolize the religion we start to miss Jesus.

The divide is coming along theological lines. Where is Jesus in our churches, in His Churches? Do we still hold to the redemptive and life changing power of God or have we let it go to the simple act of pleasing people? When we look at the Gospels we see Jesus meeting people where they were at and changing their lives. It didn't matter whether the illness was physical or spiritual. I wonder if the deeper question is have we taken time to meet with Jesus?

I don't claim to have the answers but I do have some questions and many of the questions I ask are aimed at myself and maybe these questions resonate with where you are at. So what are your thoughts?