Discipleship, church as family.

Ross Parsley. Messy Church. pg. 20-21..

In a family we learn how to work hard, sort out injustice with siblings, and wrestle through disappointment with our parents. We learn expressions of love, humor, manners, and humility, all within the family context.

The family analogy is the best picture of what a healthy and vibrant church community is supposed to look like. If you think about it, families are perfectly designed for discipleship: constant access, consistent modeling, demonstration, teaching and training, conflict management and resolution, failure, follow-up and feedback. And this should all happen in an attitude and atmosphere of love. Children are raised, parents are matured, and grandparents are valued all at the same time. 

This is God’s design.

But our churches don’t tend to have the characteristics of families anymore. Instead, we are more often full of consumers looking for our next God product, bingeing and purging Sunday to Sunday with a steady diet of fast-food TV preachers. We don’t often learn how to fight fair with loving correction and guidance but instead appear to be recruiting culture warriors to fight against an unholy society—or worse, against a perceived political opponent. We all hate religion but love our spiritual individualism with such passion that we may be creating a generation of dechurched orphans who have no authentic spiritual family or heritage.

.. The big C Church is on the verge of a massive shift philosophically and generationally. We are addicted to instant gratification. Microwave Christianity has replaced cooking the family meal. Instead of filming a movie classic, we’re capturing YouTube videos. Instead of taking long, leisurely walks, we’re making mad dashes to the mall. Instead of saving for our children’s inheritance, we’re buying lottery tickets. Our picture of who we are as the church is woefully inadequate and tragically shortsighted.

The Sinners Prayer reconstructed Campus Crusade like prayer for a friend. 

Dear God in heaven, I appeal to Your throne in the name of Jesus. I acknowledge that I am a sinner, and I am remorseful for my sins.  I repent of the life that I have lived; I need your forgiveness and grace to enter into my life. 

I believe that Jesus, conceived of by the Holy Spirit, willingly gave his life on the cross for my sins, and the sin of the world.  You said in Your Holy Word, Romans 10:9 that if we confess the Lord our God and believe in our hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead, we shall be saved. 

With my heart, I believe that the Spirit of God raised Jesus from the dead. I confess Jesus as Lord, the incarnate Son of God, after dying on a cross and being raise, He has ascended to a place of authority over heaven and earth; His kingdom I desire to enter, and His reign I want to live under. In saying that I commit my life to following Jesus, and to living in communion with other followers of Christ Jesus. This very moment I proclaim Jesus Christ as my Lord, and Lord of all, thus according to His Word all who call on His name shall be saved, so in faith and hope I know that in accordance to Your will I can be saved.

Thank you Jesus for your unlimited grace which has saved me from my sins. I thank you Jesus that your grace never leads to license to sin, but rather it always leads to repentance. Therefore Lord Jesus transform my life so that I may bring glory and honor to you alone and not to myself. 

Thank you Jesus for dying for me and giving me eternal life.
Amen.

Glory of God - size?

I don't think it can be expressed in size as if God can easily be conformed to our imagination. To even begin to consider the bigness of God in terms of greatness is to first look at the vastness of the universe. Some have tried this method, and while I think it is fascinating and helpful, this only begins to express God's glory.

Imagine a standard grid used to plot numbers.

               --- Us
<---------------------------> God


We are limited by depth of field to the visible portion of the line, yet the line representing God is beyond finite, so we cannot plot God as anything limited to the grid.

God's glory is also expressed by His goodness and holiness. A fuller understanding of the term 'holiness' removes God from the grid and then makes Him author of the grid and your line. The paradox to God not being on the grid is that God is still active on the grid, multi-directional, yet separate from the grid. If we were to speak of God as the grid, then everything becomes divine, polytheistic, and worthy of worship. God's glory sets Him apart as the only thing worthy of worship.

"The God of the Bible is not an ontological black hole, so to speak, but rather a "white hole" of infinitely dense and concentrated reality that can spew forth a universe at the moment of the big bang creation.  Neutron stars, stars that have collapsed catastrophically but that have not yet reached the black hole state, are said to have such a dense concentration of neutrons at the core that all the molecules in Mount Everest could be concentrated in a space the size of a teaspoon.  The image of an intensely and densely concentrated star suggests the analogy of God as an "neutron star" of being - more intensely and densely real than anything in our ordinary human imagination and experience."

John Jefferson Davis.  Worship and the Reality of God.  pp. 50