The Character of God the Father - Part 2

The following is the second half of a talk I gave at the WYnet Passion conference 2010/11. (See my previous post for part 1). The theme for the week was Character, and I opened the event with this to say about God the Father, with the character of Jesus and the Holy Spirit being expanded on in later evenings.

In the first half, I have mentioned that our ideas of our Heavenly Father are not to be founded on our experiences of our earthly ones. I have also said that God Creates and Judges, and that judgment in the sense I used is the natural result after creation.

Loves

“God Loves you, He Loves me, He Loves everyone!” This side of God is probably so loudly proclaimed and tightly held onto by Christians recently that you can start to glaze over it, or forget that the Love of God is going to be more extreme than our own flimsy ideas about an emotion.

The Character of God the Father - Part 1

The following is the first half of a talk I gave at the WYnet Passion conference 2010/11. The theme for the week was Character, and I opened the event with this to say about God the Father, with the character of Jesus and the Holy Spirit being expanded on in later evenings.

When talking about God the Father, it is useful to warn of an obvious point. The following is not a quote from the Bible:

“In the beginning Dad created the dinner and the dessert.
Now the evening was empty, darkness was over the screen of the telly, and the lasagne dish was soaking in the waters.
And Dad said, "Let there be sex," and there was sex.
Dad saw that the sex was good, and nine months later, he really saw the light!
Dad called his child an embarrassing name, and the nurse a naughty one.
And there was evening, and there was morning- the first day without rest.”

"Fair" is Not Enough

A big word at the centre of many peoples belief system is "Fair." I should be treated equally, you need to play by the rules, life should be Fair. A thesaurus puts the word alongside Just, Honest, Trustworthy, Lawful, Legal, and Good.

The average person believes that fairness, or you could say justice, should be enforced in society. In a perfect world, the average person will be treated justly. The problem, however, is that when people think this, they have forgotten that the average person is not perfect. In fact, all of humanity is imperfect, and the familiar phrase "I'm only human" is one piece of evidence that shows we already know this. It's not news, but neither is it a welcome fact.

We are a broken species; we spend as many days behaving badly as we do behaving well, if not more. If you think this excludes you, then I'll add that even if you don't act on bad thoughts, all of your selfish and overly-proud thoughts are as valid for judegment as any actions. Your actions are, after all, only a symptom of the real character within you.

4 Definitions of Church

The word "Church" has had four different meanings to me so far. These definitions have been a mixture of nouns (names) and verbs (actions), and the latest two replace, for me, the earliest two... Sort of...

These different views on one word seem to stem from what you believe about spirituality, people, and what you believe the Bible says.

Noun 1: Church the Building

This is what most non-believers probably think of. A church is a building, a physical construction, a piece of architecture, maybe even just a historic artefact that is badly in need of repair. This view, of course, misses the fact that the christian church existed before buildings to contain it existed. So the shell has been mistaken for the organism. An easy, and understandable, mistake.

Short Story: What Thaniel Can Do

Travel through the stars, and observe the alien planets. There are two, one the size of our Jupiter, and the other bigger by half again, about to collide. In this universe, they are able to fall into each other because they have not intended to, and rock and debris will fly into space as they destroy each other without malice.

Now back up a few stars in this galaxy, and focus in on the only inhabited planet in this sector of space. Zoom into this blue and red planet to an individual called Thaniel Remington. Thaniel was a man not too different from any man you might know in most ways, and right now he is deeply sad. In fact, deeply sad doesn't quite cover it.

Thaniel is lying face down on a large mat of hay, and crying the tears of a man who has given up, and then found that even giving up isn't an option. His mind wanders through the last few weeks of his life.

Free Will

A relaxing and informal subject, no? This sort of area is one of those that is usually thought of as quite deep, but like a few others, is actually quite foundational to everything else we might believe. So; I present to you one of my foundations.

I believe that we have free will. However, from reasoning I have come to the belief that free will cannot exist as a physical or mental attribute, only as a spiritual one. This is because we understand that our physical world is built on physics, and causality, and also that our mental worlds are built on the foundations of the physical world (e.g. nature and nurture).

The reason for my belief that free will is a spiritual element of ourselves goes like this...

Giving: Africa vs. UK

In African church services, giving money is done very differently to how it's done in English church services.

The African churches I have visited have involved everyone getting off their seats, and dancing joyfully in a line to the front, where they drop their donation into the box or bowl. Music sets the pace, and you really get the sense of joyful giving that the Bible says God wants.

Switch over to a sunday morning in England- and I'm even talking about charismatic churches here- and it's a very different scene. The sung worship in some british services may be similar in style, but instead of the time of giving being a focussed and celebrated event, baskets or boxes are passed covertly along the rows of seats, so that people are distracted as little as possible from their singing.

I Believe Science

I trust science, but I don't trust scientists. I believe in all verified findings, but not necesserily the conclusions drawn from them.

If a man holds a rock in your face and says "This rock keeps albino polar bears away, because the rock is here and albino polar bears are not," would you believe him? He has drawn a cause-effect relationship, after all.

Yes, it's a silly and extreme example. But in real life, the possibile conclusions that can be made from a new finding are often very similarly, but subtly, woven into the discovery, as if the fact and opinion are both a single fact.