What We Think About GodНамуна

WHAT THE CHURCH THINKS ABOUT GOD

Yes, Scripture is clear: we are the sent ones. But do we, God’s people, have a proper view of God? Ask any Christian what he or she perceives God to be like and you will get as many answers as there are people: 

· God is holy.

· God is righteous.

· God is full of grace.

· God is full of truth.

· God is merciful.

· God is just.

· God is omniscient.

· God is omnipresent.

· God is good.

· God is wise.

Yes, yes, yes, to all. When describing the attributes of God, Father Ron Rolheiser once wrote, in part,

God is not a God who demands perfection from us, but a God who asks for a contrite heart when we can’t measure up. God is not a God who gives us only one chance, but a God who gives us infinite chances. God is not a God who waits for us to come to our senses after we have fallen, but a God who comes searching for us, full of understanding and care. God is not a God who is calculating and parsimonious in his gifts, but a prodigal God who sows seeds everywhere without regard for waste or worthiness. God is not a God who is powerless before evil and death, but a God who can raise dead bodies to life and redeem what is evil and hopeless.

God is not a God who is arbitrary and fickle, but a God is utterly reliable in his promise and goodness. God is not a God who is dumb and unable to deal with our complexity, but a God who fashioned the depth of the universe and the deepest recesses of the human psyche. Ultimately, God is not a God who cannot protect us, but is a God in whose hands and in whose promise we are far safer than when we rely upon ourselves. 

What Rolheiser is doing is countering how many people see God with the truths we find in scripture. What we see in his list and in the list of attributes often given in description of God is one umbrella feature, and one that many in the church have lost: God is love (1 John 4:16). And God loves (John 3:16). 

Artist and missionary to the people of Algers, Lilias Trotter once said, 

For if the Sun of Righteousness has risen upon our hearts, there is an ocean of grace and love and power lying all around us, an ocean to which all earthly light is but a drop, and it is ready to transfigure, as the sunshine transfigured the dandelion, and on the same condition – that we stand full face to God.

In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis writes, “A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” 

What we have lost in our busyness and distractions of life is the all-consuming truth that God loves his world, his creation, his people. His love begins at one point—the point of the cross—and circles the globe in perpetuity, into every nook and cranny, throughout all generations. 

The enormity of this must not be lost on us, for it guides the very way we see our world. 

When we have lost the love of God as the bedrock of our understanding of God and our understanding of our mission, we can no longer call out the beauty in our world, and more importantly, the beauty in others, as we must. 

When we take an honest assessment of the question Who do we believe God is, and what do we believe he is like? do we begin with an understanding of God to be so in love with his world that he “desires all to come to a knowledge of himself?” 

Tozer states it this way: “God has charged Himself with full responsibility for our eternal happiness and stands ready to take over the management of our lives the moment we turn in faith to Him.”[i]

This is love, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). God’s love was (and is) demonstrated through the sacrificial act of atonement and service. Romans 5:8 says, “But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

Here we see that the power of God’s love knows no bounds. Any thought we have of Only here, and no further is anathema when it comes to our own replication of God’s demonstration of love for his world. 

This true understanding of how deep and wide and high is the love of Christ (Eph. 3:18) is the catalyst for a witness that changes lives and cultures today. And only this. 

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. What does it mean to you that God loves?

2. Read I Corinthians 13. How have you observed the church reflecting these tangible demonstrations of love? Where have you noticed the church falling short?

3. Have there been moments in your own life when it’s been hard to love others as God calls us to love?

4. Are there times when the phrase “God is love” can be misused or taken out of contexts? When have you observed this to be the case?

[i]Ibid, 63.