Audio Recording
I don’t think that it is any secret that what we
believe about a person, about who they are, will affect our relationship with
them. The same thing holds true for our
beliefs about God. What we believe about
God can profoundly affect our growth in Christ as his disciples. Let me expound on this a bit. When I was a young teen I memorized The
Apostles’ Creed as part of the catechism program for young people to join the
church. I believed the Apostles’ Creed,
but…what I really believed about God was detrimental to my faith.
When I made the confession “I believe in God the
Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth” what I really believed was that God
is this bearded old man Creator and Ruler of the universe who sat on a throne
in some far away place called Heaven watching and judging - the bad go to Hell
when they die and the good go to Heaven.
Other than that he really wasn’t all that involved. It was my responsibility to be good so that I
wouldn’t go to Hell.
I also made the confession “and in Jesus Christ, his
only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he
descended into Hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended
into Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from
thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” But, my true beliefs regarding Jesus? Well, I was fairly properly Sunday Schooled
with the message that Jesus who is God’s Son loves the little children and that
God is like Jesus – loving – but that still wasn’t enough to shake that image of
the bearded old man who judges. I
believed Jesus to be the Son of the old man who became human for a bit to
provide us with a means to forgiveness, basically a way to get out of Hell, if and
only if we believe in him and come to church and be good. After Easter he went back to Heaven to be
Peter’s supervisor at the Pearly Gates and took over the Judge job.
I also confessed the third part of the Creed; “I
believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life
everlasting.” Well, I knew that the Pope
was important as well as taking communion, that the bearded old man probably
forgives the sins of good people who go to church provided they don’t backslide,
and going to Heaven was what resurrection and the life everlasting meant. Yet, I had never really heard anything about
the Holy Spirit other than that’s how Mary got pregnant. In my later teens I began to hear a little
more about the Holy Spirit and figured that he was the domain of Christians who
were paranormal and TV preachers who used the same tricks that psychics used to
turn a buck.
So, as you see even though I confessed The Apostles’
Creed, my personal beliefs about God were far from the Trinitarian direction in
which the Creed takes us. I simply could
not see beyond God being the bearded old judge who demanded I be a good, moral
person or else. Regardless of what the
Gospel has to say about Jesus being God the Son become human to save God’s very
good Creation from the effects of sin and death; and about God the Holy Spirit
being given to us in Christ to make Jesus’ saving work effectual in us that we
may be the living testimony of God’s promise to save his Creation; and all this
because of God the Father’s great love and gracious plan for his Creation and
our role in it as those who bear God’s image and give voice to Creation’s
praise of its Creator…regardless of this biblical revelation of the true God, I
still could not conceive of God other than as the bearded old Judge who
demanded from me the fearful duty, the obligation, to be morally good, come to
church, and believe pseudo-christian beliefs or else fear him and his threat of
Hell.
The bearded old Judge is not the Christian God. He is rather the god of our culture and our belief
in and service of him that is based not in grace but in our own ability and
desire simply to be moral is a, if not the, primary factor in how and why the
Christian Church in Western culture is dwindling. If the Scripture holds true that says we
become like the idols we worship (Ps. 135:18), then the church that worships
and serves the bearded old Judge, persists as bearded old judges. That being the case, why would the true God,
the Trinity, want an institution that worships and serves a pseudo-version of
himself to persist? Our belief in this
bearded old Judge has lead the churches of Western culture to be either overly focused
on societal morality or being reactive to itself and going to the other extreme
of being overly morally permissive.
We Christians need to get our God right if we are
going to thrive into the future rather than perish. The Church that will emerge and persist in the
very near future will know and worship God the Trinity and be led by the Spirit
to participate in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ to the glory of the Father. We must seek to abide in the mystery of knowing
God as the heavenly and almighty Father whom Isaiah found himself in the
presence of, and as Jesus of Nazareth, God the Son who has become human flesh
so that we might be born from above, born anew; and as the Holy Spirit who
unites us to God in Christ and works in us the re-creation which the Son came
to accomplish for us. This is what Paul
calls adoption. God the Father Son and
Holy Spirit find their unity, their being in giving themselves so completely to
one another in mutual love that they are the One Triune God who reaches out to
us in unconditional grace to build a community of people that loves as he does
and therefore looks like him.
We are beloved children of God. The Trinity’s acceptance of us is not based
on how good and morally upright we can be.
His acceptance of us comes solely from his own decision to adopt us as
his own and to infuse us with his very self, his very own DNA if I might make
that analogy. The Holy Spirit is at work
in us putting to death our sinful nature.
Our work is not to focus on being good and morally upright in fear of
losing God’s favour. Our work is to
cooperate with the Holy Spirit. We must
focus on being led by the Spirit and this is our work together as a community
of God’s children.
AA is about the best example of this I can think of. We should not call AA an organization. It is an association of groups that exist for
the purpose of helping the still suffering alcoholic. These groups are unconditional in their acceptance
of alcoholics (who incidentally are so often judged by churches) for they all
know “there but for the grace of God go I”.
Judgement does happen in AA but it is a self-judgement, self-diagnosis
brought about by hearing the stories of others who have been there, done that,
and caused themselves and others to suffer dearly. AA is a spiritual program not just a group of
people helping each other abstain from substance abuse. Its admitting powerlessness over alcohol and
turning one’s life over to the will and care of God. It’s coming to grips with
yourself and confessing to another. It’s forgiving and seeking to be forgiven. Its participating in a group and helping each
other and new comers. Its having a sponsor,
studying the Big Book, and fostering a prayer life. They have a saying, “Keep coming back” because
in simply coming to the group God works and changes a person. Somewhere and some point in the process sometimes
sooner sometimes later God takes away the compulsion to drink. If you want to meet some really outstanding
examples of what it is to be a human being, go to an open meeting of AA and
talk to some people and hear their passion and compassion for each other.
Friends, this is the way the Church is supposed to
be. We are all broken. We all suffer an –ism. We’ve no right to judge another person for it
is true, “there but for the grace of God go I.”
All we can do is share our own stories and how God has been faithful. The Holy Spirit is at work in us often in
spite of us making us to be more Jesus-like.
We need to read the Bible, foster our prayer lives, and mentor one
another. We need to come together and
share our struggles. We need to diagnose
our sins and confess them to someone so that we know what it is to have our
sins born away. Most of all, we simply
need to keep coming back and at some point in all this maybe sooner or maybe
later we ourselves no matter our age or backgrounds will experience the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit and be made new. Amen.
