God is Life

Have you ever stood atop a mountain, and been stopped by a breath-taking view. Why does this happen? What draws us to gaze at a star-filled sky? What makes it inspiring? Oxford professor, Alister McGrath, suggests the reason we find our hearts drawn beyond ourselves in these situations, is that creation has been designed for this very purpose. “Maybe the spectacle of the night sky is meant to trigger off such patterns of reflection within us.” McGrath further points out that we seem to have been created to ask questions – to try to make sense of what we see around us and how we fit into the greater scheme of things. What if the sense of longing and yearning that is evoked by the night sky is meant to lead us on a voyage of discovery? What if nature is studded with clues to our true meaning and destiny, fingerprinted with the presence of God? Has God planned the heavens to lift our hearts and minds beyond ourselves? Are the mountains there to reflect his majesty, the oceans to model his grandeur?

It comes as a surprise to many that the Bible answers these questions quite plainly, “. . . what may be known about God is plain to them, for God has made it plain. For ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen. They are perceived in the things God has made.” (Romans 1:19,20) The appropriate place to begin relating to God is as our Creator.

The Bible opens with a vivid portrayal of God as our Creator, the author and source of life. In fact, he is the Creator of everything. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

John Dickson reflects on the idea of creation: “While some religious believers attempt to prove that God exists, many Christian philosophers are content simply to affirm that God’s existence explains the universe we live in better than God’s non-existence. How so? A universe that ‘banged’ into existence with sophisticated and elegant laws of physics already in place (as cosmologists remind us) is more likely to be the result of a great ‘Mind’ than a big accident.” Cosmologist Stephen Hawking: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like a Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”

Why would Hawking make a statement like this? Possibly because there are logical difficulties in assuming that something with a random beginning could become inherently ordered. Random causes produce random results. As Edwin Conklin, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University said, “The probability of life being created by accident can be likened to the chance that a set of encyclopaedias would spontaneously form as the result of an explosion in a printing factory.”

Dickson continues, “Add to this the fact that this universe eventually produced beings like us, with minds that can grasp these laws and the accident theory seems even less satisfying. In short we have just the sort of universe you’d expect if there is a creator behind it and the kind of universe you could never expect if there isn’t. This does not prove God’s existence, but it goes some way towards explaining why, without proof, most people throughout history have believed in some sort of God.”

Starting with 'God'

What is God like? How would you describe him (of course, you might not use the pronoun ‘him’, preferring to use ‘her’ or ‘it’ or something else altogether)?

I remember once speaking with a young woman who was an atheist. When she found out I was a Christian she immediately assumed we had nothing to talk about. The conversation went something like this:

“You won’t want to talk to me. I’m an atheist!” she said.

I asked, “Does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

 “That’s right,” she said.

 “Then tell me, what sort of a God don’t you believe in?”

 “What do you mean?”

 I said, “For you not to believe in God you must have some idea of what other people think God is like in order to reject that notion.”

 She worked out what I meant and proceeded to describe what she thought other people thought God was like. When she finished I said to her, “If that’s God, then I’m an atheist too!” The God she described certainly wasn’t anything like the one I believe in, nor that the Bible describes.

 J.B. Phillips once wrote a brilliant little book called Your God is Too Small. It deals with some of the ideas people carry about God. The chapter headings reflect people’s views (which Phillips labels as distortions): the resident policeman, the grand old man.

 Phillips works through a dozen or so misconceptions and clearly implies that one of the biggest hindrances to people finding life and reality in the Christian faith is not unbelief, but that people just don’t bother to find out what God is like, especially sources that claim to be God’s self-revelation.

 No one has an understanding of God that is faultless. John Stott once said, “If you think you have God in a box in your mind, it’s not God in the box.” But God has gone to considerable lengths of self-disclosure and, in the Bible, we have a remarkable account of God’s nature and character.

 According to this account, I would suggest there are three essential things to understand if you wish to grasp God’s self-disclosure:

 1.       God is Life

2.       God is Light

3.       God is Love

So, I'm planning to spend some time pondering these three things over the next few days and seeing what we come up with.

Why is it 'Good News'?

We live in an age of spiritual ‘hunger’, but people seem unsure where to find spiritual ‘sustenance’. The first time one lady visited our church (her first ever visit to any church) she indicated to me afterwards that she was very interested in spiritual things, but never expected to find any ‘spiritual reality’ in a church! She expected to find ritual, tradition, ceremony, but it caught her completely unawares when she sensed (in her words) a divine presence.

The brilliant French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, once suggested that in every human being there is a ‘God-shaped void’. As long as it exists we are restless and incomplete. We try to fill it: money, power, position, career, even family are squeezed into the space. But none of these satisfy – the hole is God-shaped!

I meet a growing number of people who recognise within themselves a hunger, a longing to discover ‘something more’. Prince Charles once spoke for his belief that, “For all the advances of science, there remains deep in the soul a persistent and unconscious anxiety that something is missing, some ingredient that makes life worth living.” There must be something more! As a convinced atheist, Ernest Hemmingway lived without reference to God. He concluded: “Life is just a dirty trick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness.” In contrast, the 4^th century theologian, Augustine, penned: “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”

This blog will hopefully be a simple series of reflections and questions attempting to explain the Christian faith in a clear and accessible manner. It works on the assumption that there is ‘something more’, which billions of people have discovered as they have encountered ‘God’ as described by the Christian faith. I Intend to investigate a trio of key dimensions in Christian experience: relating to God as a Father, making sense of Jesus Christ and discovering the dynamic power of the Holy Spirit.

Blogging the Gospel

Althought the word 'gospel' is used in a variety of contexts, it carries special meaning within the Christian faith. Literally, the word means 'good news'. Trouble is, many people I talk to seem to think the Christian message is bad news or irrlelvant news or ridiculous news. Even more common is the assumption that the Christian faith can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Create your own version is the order of the day.

So, I'm wondering whether it is possible to blog the heart of the Christian faith. Probably lots have tried before, but I think I'll have a crack at it: just a bit at a time, trying to connect with both Jesus teaching and recognised Christian ideas (often called orthodoxy) to see if it has anything to say to me today.

Stay tuned - hope I can see this through.

The Heart of Things

Charles Bradlaugh, an avowed athiest, once challenged the Rev. H.P. Hughes to a debate. The preacher, who was head of a mission to the homeless in London, accepted the challenge on the condition that he could bring with him 5 men or women who would tell what had happened in their lives since trusting Christ as their Saviour. They would be people who once lived in deep darkness, some having come from poverty-stricken homes usually caused by the vices of their parents. Hughes said they would not only tell of their conversion, but would submit to cross-examination by any who doubted their stories. Furthermore, the minister invited his opponent to bring a group of non-believers who could tell how they had been helped by their secular worldview.

For some reason, Bradlaugh, the famous atheist, withdrew from the debate.

Empty Inside

Lily Allen is a British pop singer who recently visited Brisbane and played at the big day out and various other venues. She’s often in the headlines for her off stage behaviour and eccentricities. A number of social commentators have suggested (and I agree) that she has a rare gift of being able to express western society’s zeitgeist – the collective mood, the spirit of the age. Listen to these words:

I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don't care about clever I don't care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f**kloads of diamonds
I heard people die while they are trying to find them
I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
'Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous
I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror
I'm on the right track yeah I'm on to a winner

Life's about film stars and less about mothers
It's all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn't matter cause I'm packing plastic
and that's what makes my life so f**king fantastic
And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and its not my fault it's how I'm program to function
I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror
I'm on the right track yeah I'm on to a winner

Forget about guns and forget ammunition
Cause I'm killing them all on my own little mission
Now I'm not a saint but I'm not a sinner
Now everything is cool as long as I'm getting thinner
I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
'Cause I'm being taken over by fear

Too many people in our society are chasing those sorts of things: self-interest, money, becoming famous, fast cars, packing plastic – a weapon of massive consumption – but it’s all OK as long as we’re getting thinner. For so many people who live in the units and houses of Toowong – those things are all they have in their lives. They’re trying to make sense out of life using hopelessly inadequate tools and values.

Have you ever had the experience of needing to hammer a nail into a wall and you don’t have a hammer? What can I use? Spoon (not heavy enough), slip off your shoe (nail just digs straight into the heel), mobile phone (no). It’s torture. The tools our society has placed in people’s hands and with which people are trying to live will never allow them to successfully find meaning and value and worth.

David Tacey is a professor at Latrobe University and a recognised commentator on Australian spirituality. I quote: “There's a massive spiritual hunger in the Australian community that's grown out of disillusionment with the Christian churches. So many people are walking around saying 'There's a hole in my life. You know, there's just something missing.'"

Despite living in one of the most defined religious societies in history, people in Jesus day were starving for spiritual reality. They desperately wanted to connect with the living God in living ways. And in Jesus' teaching and in his person, they saw the chance to do this.

In the fourth century, Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Blaise Pascal, the brilliant 17th century French mathematician whilst working on the theoretical mathematics associated with the concept of a vacuum, made the spiritual proposition that perhaps we all have within us a God-shaped vacuum or void. And we are never satisfied until God is filling that void. We try to fill it with all sorts of other things: Lily Allen named many of them in her song – we even try to fill it with religious practice – but none of those things fit because it is a God-shaped void and only God will fit into a God-shaped void!

When people listened to Jesus’ teaching and related to his person, they found their God-shaped void being authentically filled for the first time ever. That’s why such large crowds flocked to him. It's probably still why people come to him today.

Love: Feelings and Choices

The second law of thermodynamic implies (with apologies to scientists for a crude layman’s definition): that any closed system left to itself tends towards greater randomness. That is, it tends to break down, unless energy is inserted into the system to create order. Whilst this law was intended to describe physical systems such as a chemical reaction in a test tube, I believe it applies to other realities. Our garden at home illustrates it well. If we leave our garden to its own devices, there’s no way it will remain ordered. In no time, the leaves fall, the plants wither, the weeds grow, the edges of the garden bed disappear. A beautiful thing is spoilt through neglect. To maintain the order of our garden energy has to be spent.

This applies to human systems as well. I get the sense that a lot of people assume that as long as they do nothing destructive or detrimental, that their friendships and relationships will simply look after themselves.

That’s just not the case!

I often say to couples when I conduct weddings, as they look dreamily into one another’s eyes, I have no doubt that during and after their honeymoon, the two of them will have no problems communicating and relating to one another. But to remember that becoming immersed once again in mundane life, as the days roll into weeks and the weeks become years and decades, loving one another may become something that needs to work at in a disciplined and systematic way.

And that shocks them. 'Surely if we’re in love,' they think, 'things will always just happen naturally, it will be spontaneous.' Well some couples are blessed with a natural inclination to relate easily, but not all. Good communication, caring action, attentive understanding are skills, like any others, which develop with time and practice. Some couples need to learn to garden, some need to learn to budget, some couples need to learn to communicate, others need to learn to love one another. It requires work and effort.

A man who had been happily married for 40 years once said, "It's easy to look for love outside your marriage and think that the grass is always greener of the other side of the fence. Actually, the grass is greenest where you water it."

All this implies that love is not so much a feeling as a choice. Bearing one another in agape (one of the words translated 'love' from the New Testament). William Barclay defines that type of love in these terms: it means that nothing another person can do will make us seek anything but their highest good. That of course means that Christian love, agape, is not a feeling. If Christian love means loving those who are not lovely, then it must be more than a feeling. It is a resolution, a decision. Don Francisco penned it well:

“Jesus didn’t die for you because it was fun.
He hung there for love because it had to be done.
And in spite of the anguish, his word was fulfilled.
For love is not a feeling it is an act of your will.”