Introduction

A few decades ago C. S. Lewis wrote a pretty radical book called, “Mere Christianity.” In it, he makes a very good point. That it’s not about Christianity and vegetarianism or Christianity and submersion baptism, etc. it’s just about Christ.

The Apostle Paul, who is perhaps our major source for explaining what is and is not Christian, made an ironically similar comment. In Corinthians 2:2 he wrote, “I came unto you determined to know nothing, but Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.” The purpose of this site is to strip away the walls of denominationalism, or culture and let people of radically differing ideas rest a bit. I’m going to invite a few friends to post here with the intention opening it up as a moderated forum in a few weeks. Our goal is to inspire each other and the occasional visitor with pure, simple intimacy with God.

These are my belief statements, there is only 2 in keeping with the theme of this site.

My belief statements:

  1. That everyone sins and falls short of what God intended for them.
  2. That Jesus Christ is the son of God, born human, and though he lived without sin he died to pay the price for our sin.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

The Beginning of Wisdom

The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.

What are we to do with that? I mean really. I spent much of my life terrified of an angry God, or rebelling against Him on the grounds that exercising my free choice meant loosing salvation.

I didn't make any headway in my faith walk until I began to accept that God loved me. That He viewed my darkest sins the way a father views a toddler learning how to walk. In fact the only blessing I've been able to impart to other Christians came from sharing this radical revelation with them.

So what am I to do with this troublesome verse about fearing God? Or any of the other verses about it? It's not like the theme only comes up once.

Well, God shared this much with me. While yet in sin, we desperately hunger for the presence of God in our lives while at the same time fearing the design God had in mind for us.

When we accept Christ into our hearts we instantly feel that missing piece of ourselves rejoined. Now of course that first love stage begins to fade, mainly because we try to earn what was freely given to us, or we make it about following biblical rules.

But regardless, the problem is fixed whether we choose to live from that reality or while away our time with guilt.We do forget about the second need though. We forget about that base fear of the design of God in ourselves. What we do is stop looking at God to see who He is, and start start accepting some biblical description that is
filtered through our own understanding.

Our perspective is flawed though. We come up with this view of God that is really an idealized version of ourselves, and since we don't like ourselves is it any wonder that we can't imagine God liking us? Plus, how could anyone who doesn't have the flaws I hate about me be cool with me--when I've still got the flaws?

In short, our opinion of God is poisoned by our self loathing and we won't conquer one problem until we deal with the other. We can't treat sinful low self esteem without also addressing our image of God and vise versa.

It only makes sense when you realize that we are made in God's image. How can we believe better things about God if we can't imagine a better us?

It's that wildness of God we fear. The piece that doesn't fit in the box we have for God. But try as we might God is wild and the closer we draw to Him the more obvious it becomes. We desperately crave to know God intimatelyand be known by God but if we only embrace a view of ourselves that involves our fallen nature we will continue
tell God who He can or can't be.

So the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of our embracing the wildness He intended for us. The first part of fearing God is letting Him be something beyond our own reason and being willing to accept that the perfection He conceived us in means we reflect that wildness.
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