Monthly Archive for July, 2008Page 2 of 2

Seeing bigger

Published
by
Graeme
on July 15, 2008
in Faith and My Pilgrimage
. 1 Comment

The other evening Zoe & I were sat up talking and at one point we were talking about God and how small some people’s image of God is. As we talked I got the memory of a song that I remember being sung by a guy who I really respected about 20 years ago. I have no idea whether it was a song written by him, or by someone else, but it was called ‘God in a Box’. I can’t even remember how the song goes, but the title has stuck with me ever since.

There really is a sense in which we have tried to stick God in a box in our faith. The size of the box varies from person to person and the contents vary on the basis of our theological and political worldview, but on the whole many of us have God stuck into a box like so much screwed up newspaper. I guess that this is some sort of defence mechanism in many ways simply because God is too big for us to understand.

If, by dint of some relevation we have managed to get God out of the box, many of us still manage to restrict our view of Him. We tend to look out of a set of windows that surround us and can see aspects of God. So some will look out at Him through the window of Wesleyan Holiness, others through the window of Pentecostalism, still others through the windows of Roman Catholism. To these we can add windows of conservatism, liberalism, progressiveism etc. But our view is still limited! It’s still an attempt for us to constrain a God that trancends constraining.

It reminds me of the Dougie Dug Dug song, “Have we made our God too small?”

The other day Zoe blogged on a quote from Bill Hybels that talks about being a Prayer Warrior! Hybels said this:

A ‘prayer warrior’ is a person who is convinced that God is omnipotent - that God has the power to do anything, to change anyone and to intervene in any circumstance.

We believe in the omnipotence of God, but subconciously I think we’re terrified by it. It is simply too big for us to comprehend and consequently our minds retreat into a safety net of boxing God in, or looking at Him through from the safety of a window.

What would our faith look like if, instead of trying to understand God from our point of view, we were simply to allow God to speak to us? Instead of us trying to fit God into a nice little box that suited our own ideas or looking at Him through the windows of our own liking, what would happen if we entered a dialogue with Him, with a totally open mind, that allowed Him to shape our views?

Up and working

Published
by
Graeme
on July 13, 2008
in Blog stuff
. 0 Comments

Back up and blogging again after losing my old computer and having to buy a cheap new one!

Computer problems

Published
by
Graeme
on July 8, 2008
in Blog stuff
. 0 Comments

I’m afraid I won’t be posting for a few days because my laptop is in the repair shop as it won’t start on either the main power or battery! Hopefully I’ll get it back on either Friday or Saturday so I don’t have to write another post like this on my iPod Touch!

Choosing the life

Published
by
Graeme
on July 4, 2008
in discipleship
. 3 Comments

Last night I finished reading Choose the Life by Bill Hull a book on discipleship, very much in the same sort of role as David Watson’s classic text Discipleship. It’s taken me virtually a month to read through this as there is something challenging on almost every page, but it’s been well worth the effort.

Early on in the book he says:

The average group of professing Christian’s would agree that we all should love and obey God, that the Great Commandment and the Great Commission are our main purposes, and that we should share our faith and give sacrificially of our time and resources. The problem is that while we say these are what should define Christian character, Christians themselves do not exhibit these qualities.

Whilst he writes from a North American perspective, this situation is evident across the church here in the UK as well. There are many good Christian people who are experiencing only a pale imitation of the life that Jesus offers us as abundant life, what Hull calls ‘nondiscipleship Christians’.

In his opinion, the main reasons for this is the lack of accountability that Christians really have and our general unwillingness to train more disciples. We have a church leader/pastor/officer who has spiritual oversight of us but rarely do we ever submit ourselves to them to such a degree that we allow them to ask the really searching questions of our relationship with God. Those self same people who we don’t truly submit ourselves to are the same people we expect to do all the training of new disciples.

Of course the real blame lies in the fact that the Church has pretty much sold out to the ‘cinema model’ of church. We go to church to get something for ourselves, rather than to offer something to God. We expect to entertained, although we probably don’t realise that this is even the case, and so we are faced with the situation where the person teaching on a Sunday is looking out over a morose group of people, few of whom ever react in anyway to what the teacher/preacher is saying.

Real discipleship is costly! Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks of the ‘Cost of Discipleship’ and James, the book I’m reading at the moment, speaks in depth about what this cost is. It’s costly in terms of attitudes, actions and discipline, but the rewards for that sort of living at greater than we can even imagine.