All About Relationships

A Good Sermon

This past weekend, I attended services at Hope Fellowship Church in Frisco, TX. They are currently in the middle of a message series called Island. The premise of the series is the following:

If you were stranded on an island inhabited by a group of people who had never heard of your God or your faith, what would you tell them?

Considering my search for answers related to the true nature, purpose, and goals of Christianity in its purest form, this was the perfect message for me to hear. In that, I must give credit to God here for a prayer actually answered, so the reader of this blog can know for sure that God does indeed answer fervent prayer, as I prayed before I made the selection of what church to attend that the message would be relevant to me right now.

Relationships

The sermon centered on the fact that to truly understand God, one must understand relationships, and the concept of The Trinity itself is actually an unfolding and evolution of the relationship between God and man over time. The Trinity was explained this way:

• God the Father–This form and identity of God was known primarily in the Old Testament and is associated with the names Jehovah, Adonai, and Elohim. Elohim, specifically is interesting here, because it is grammatically plural, indicating that God is indeed more than one person–even in the Old Testament context. The Old Testament “God” has the relationship position of “father” exclusively with man. God is Lord.
• Jesus Christ–When Jesus arrived, He introduced another identity of God previously unknown and not understood. The words for God used in this context are Kyrios (which also means “Lord”), Yeshua, and Messiah. In this context, God is our savior and redeemer as a relationship.
• The Holy Spirit–This is the least understood context, as it applies more to us than to those in biblical times. It is also, the form most likely referred to by religions other than Christianity, which I find interesting and will further investigate. The linked Wikipedia article is a good reference on that. In this context, God is a partner and guide for us on a daily basis in our lives. This is the form of God we communicate with all the time.

Our understanding of these relationships is key to our understanding of Christianity and how to apply it for real in our daily lives.

The Nature of Man and Understanding

Earthly concepts mirror spiritual concepts. We were created in the image of God, and the world is constructed to mirror the spiritual world. A book I am reading, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, by N.T. Wright makes the following point:

The ancient biblical creation story offers a powerful and pregnant picture for all this: humans, it says, are made in God’s image. At first sight, that doesn’t help much, since we don’t know very much about God and thus can’t deduce very much about who we are supposed to be. Nor (it seems) do we know as much as we might like about who we are, and so we can’t deduce very much about God either. But the point being made is probably a different one. In the ancient world, as indeed in some parts of the modern one, great rulers would often set up statues of themselves in prominent places, not so much in their home territory (where everyone knew who they were and recognized that they were in charge), but in their foreign or far-flung dominions.

He continues later:

In the early stories, the point was that the Creator loved the world that he had made, and wanted to look after it in the best possible way. To that end, he placed within his world a looking-after creature, a creature who would demonstrate to the creation who he, the Creator, really was, and who would set to work developing the creation and making it flourish and fulfill its purpose. This looking-after creature (or rather, this family of creatures: the human race) would model and embody that interrelatedness, that mutual and fruitful knowing, trusting and loving, which was the Creator’s intention.

In essence, we are built for a relationship with God, and if we don’t have that, our lives cannot possibly function properly to the ends intended by our very nature and design. The result of not having that relationship has to, by definition, affect every other relationship we have–with friends, family, lovers, wives, everyone. The physical and earthly will imitate the spiritual.

Sin and Karma

When we are not maintaining a proper relationship with God, we sin. All religions have some form of the notion of “karma,” which as a spiritual law, dictates that every sin must be accounted for one way or another. I am reading another book at the same time by Eric Butterworth called Discover the Power Within You: A Guide to the Unexplored Depths Within. This book provides a view of how to discover the divinity within man that has always been there–and the Christ came to earth to try to show us how to release. One of the biggest perceived contradictions in the story of Christianity is the notion of repentance from sin, forgiveness, Christ’s sacrifice, and resolving all that against the universally accepted Law of Karma. He explains the resolution of this contradiction:

We might say that that man was earth-bound by the law of karma. Then Jesus made his great discovery of the Divinity of Man. He discovered that man was one with the transcendent Spirit of God and thus, by knowing the Truth of his spiritual unity, man could remove the mountains of human suffering and find abundant life here and now. At this point, you may object, ‘Ah, now you have a contradiction. First you insisted that you can’t get something for nothing, that all sin is punished, that consequence always follows cause. Now you say there is a way to be free from the punishment, that you don’t really have to pay your debt.’ The answer to the apparent contradiction is this: Every sin must be atoned for, all karmic debt must be paid. However, the choice is ours whether we work it out in the cycle of retribution, through prolonged suffering in the ‘furnace of affliction’ or whether our payment of debt is through the discipline of rising above the consciousness from which the act was committed into the freedom of spiritual understanding where we go forth and ‘sin no more.’ This is what Jesus called ‘forgiveness.’

It was Christ’s mission to show us the way out of the cycle and re-establish our relationship with God. This is a concept that does indeed seem unique to Christianity, and it would seem to result from a complete understanding of the entire evolution of the relationship between God and man–not just the end result, which is based on exclusively the Holy Spirit form as in religions other than Christianity.

Conclusion

Today’s conclusion is that I have indeed resolved a couple of the pieces of the puzzle–especially as it relates to how to think of Christianity in real terms as compared to other religions and systems of thought (New Age thought, metaphysics, etc.) and the unique value that a purely Christian worldview provides that complements and does not necessarily have to be in conflict with these other systems. All thoughts are welcome as comments.