My friends, when we focus too much of our attention on any person of the Godhead, the Trinity, and too little on any other, it’s not God who will end up performing less than optimally; it’s us. It’s us as individuals, and it’s us in community. It’s time for us to give due attention to God’s Holy Spirit.
I hope, I PRAY, that you will cut out the clutter and get back to the basics, the essentials, of who God is and how God works in the world. God is relational and craves relationship with you. God is loving and good. God creates and causes the goodness. God is loving, graceful, and forgiving…all the way to the end of time. And God calls you to know and enjoy the very best in life.
Even though we should, we MUST, check the Bible against other sources of authority to make sure we’re not abusing it, to make sure we’re actually receiving revelation from God through the scriptures instead of revelation from ourselves, the Bible should STILL be our primary source of revelation…but only for the kinds of things God reveals in the scriptures… I think, I fear, we’ve let the Bible slip as a source of authority because we’ve sought revelation from the Bible about things God does not reveal through the Bible.
When you get down to it, this new AGE, this new ERA of Jesus, an era that’s not too unlike the era of Abraham, it’s a lot more freeing than the era of the law. It really is. But it also places a TON more responsibility upon us all. Remember when I said that it was sad that people chose against God? I bet you lament that choice of Adam and Eve just about every day. But, here’s the thing: God has been giving us a chance to re-make that decision ever since. That’s what the Bible is about.
Y’all, we might disagree about some things from time to time. Indeed, we DO disagree about some things from time to time. But, as followers of Jesus the Christ, we absolutely, positively, MUST be able to set those disagreements aside and live and breathe and follow God together as ONE.
So, please, the next time you wonder whether or not God’s grace, whether or not salvation, whether or not Easter is for one person or another, look to God for an answer, look to God’s scriptural acts of grace to the most UNworthy of people for an answer.
Which gets me wondering: how are we, FCCGJ, doing when it comes to seeing the rules of our faith through the lens of loving and helping other people? Do we spend more time telling other people what to believe and how to live or more time shining the light of our love in the their lives? Do we spend more resources on ourselves or on others? In other words, are we following the rules made by people, even US, to help us feel comfortable and good about what we have, or are we doing everything we can to follow God’s rules?
Y’all, I don’t know whether or not this stuff was meant to be taken literally. But I DO believe it conveys a very important message that in my opinion we have lost over the generations. And the message is quite simply this: if we don’t figure out a way to remember God’s story, not just once a week on Sunday morning but in the day-to-day motions of our lives, we WILL forget. Actually, we HAVE forgotten.
But the good news is that it’s not too late. We’re all still alive. We can all make the kind of change God communicated through Moses to those people so many generations ago. We can all add some rituals of remembrance to our lives.