Does the “open door policy” for determining God’s will work?

I used to think that you look for where God is opening doors, where he’s already working, and you can see what God’s will is. I think now that this method is too simple. Somethings seem to have a lot of open doors and then they shut.

I’m looking for the direction of where God is leading our church, and I see a lot of doors opening and I am inclined to think God is working in a positive direction… but then again I’m not so sure… because I’ve seen the open door policy fail in the past.

This post is part of a series of posts. Be sure not to miss part 1, part 2, part 3, part4 and part 5.

Thank you everybody for participating in the discussion.

“The medium is the message.” What that means is that the content of a particular medium is not necessarily the most important thing. TV influences and changes our lives much more than the actual content of what comes through the TV. Thus the medium through which the content is presented, is just as important as the content itself.

Of course truth remains truth no matter what way it’s presented. But we’re talking about communication here. I don’t know how this conversation got sidetracked. The presentation doesn’t change the truth, but it changes “the truth that is being conveyed” or the message. And it can change it in a way that it becomes an untruth that is being conveyed. The message is no longer true.

Check this out. What does that communicate? If anything it communicates “God may not really be love because Daniel isn’t saying it like he really believes it.” If I communicate “God is love” in a really boring way, it doesn’t change the truth, but it does distort it. You might say, “truth speaks for itself.” “A boring sermon is still good as long as it speaks the truth.” These statements have NO meaning. A message depends on a speaker and a listener. If the speaker says one thing, and it is interpreted by the listener as something else, no message has been communicated. There is a breakdown in communication. No truth has been communicated. That is basic communication theory. There is a speaker, a medium and a listener. Every part of this equation is important to communication.

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This post is part of a series of posts. Be sure not to miss part 1, part 2, part 3, part4 and part 5.

Augustine said, “All Truth is God’s Truth.” If this in fact is the case, is all beauty God’s beauty?

Should we use God’s beauty to attract seekers to God? What is God’s beauty?

In philosophy, the quest for truth and the quest for beauty are both highly regarded quests. In society today, it seems like the quest for beauty is more highly regarded than the quest for truth. In some circles, there is no such thing as truth, but there is such thing as beauty.

The bible seems to emphasize truth over beauty. Did God value truth far and away above beauty? After all, Jesus “…had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the father but through me” but he did not mention beauty. And if we’re to look to Christ in order to see God more fully, physical beauty is not to be valued very highly. Yet at the same time we are to “gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and seek him in his temple.” God is beautiful and majestic, yet Jesus “had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him” Isn’t that strange?

So practically when we are looking at the true spirituality of a church and how to reach unbelievers, it seems like we should not emphasize God’s beauty and majesty because for some reason God himself did not emphasize it with Jesus. Why? Why is it that God didn’t want us to see Jesus as so beautiful and majestic that we couldn’t help but drawn to him? God is not about physical beauty, because it’s not the core of who he is? But he made so many things physically beautiful in his creation. I don’t believe humanity’s appreciation of beauty is a result of sin. Rather humanity’s appreciation of beauty reflects our desire for God. Obviously, God is about physical beauty in some sense… but maybe it’s not the essence of who he is. Does that mean that his majesty is not the essence of who he is either?

This post is part of a series of posts. Be sure not to miss part 1, part 2, part 3, part4 and part 5.

I suppose it’s not so much repackaging God as it is finally presenting him in his TRUE light. I’ve heard it said, just preach the word, preach it directly and people will see God, and be attracted to that. I’ve heard it said, you don’t need any of that “cool” stuff like fancy music or whatever, you just need true spirituality. Can we trust that people will be attracted to true spirituality? And what is true spirituality?

Which is more reflective of God and his glory? A powerful sermon, or a boring sermon? A good worship band or a bad worship band? Seems like a boring sermon distorts God as much as some atheists do.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that anything attractive in this world comes from God. We are corrupt and therefore often we will be attracted to corrupt things. We don’t want to bring corrupt things into the church in order to attract people.

Can we trust human beings to be attracted to God? If so, the question is how can we more fully reveal God in church. Do boring sermons actually reveal God to people? What about an awesome worship team? What about an artist painting a beautiful picture?

This post is part of a series of posts. Be sure not to miss part 1, part 2, part 3, part4 and part 5.

When Philip asked Jesus “Show us the Father” in John 14, Jesus told Philip to look at himself. “Don’t you know me?” he asked Philip.

I find it interesting that God wants us to look at him through Jesus. When we think about God, we’re not supposed to think about what Isaiah saw. We’re not supposed to think of him high up in heaven with angels surrounding him. That is an incorrect view of God according to Jesus. The correct view of God is Jesus himself.

Now, why do you think God wanted us to look at him through Jesus? Why did God choose to relate to us in human form?

Another question, why did God specifically create humans? We know he created us for his pleasure and for us to worship, but he created angels and animals for his pleasure and for them to worship also. We need to be able to answer that question very specifically, otherwise we’ll never know how to worship God. We also won’t know the answer to why God chose to relate to us in human form.

This post is part of a series of posts. Be sure not to miss part 1, part 2, part 3, part4 and part 5.

People need God.

In order for people to encounter God, they must either go to him, or he must go to them.

Jesus came to us. So what does that mean?

We have this argument about that act all the time. Was it God’s way because he chose to come to us? Or was it man’s way because Jesus became a man and related to men?

Obviously it was God’s way, but the confusion comes when we try to imitate Jesus. Do we have to repackage the bible in order for people to read it? The Message is a repackaged version of the bible that some people celebrate, and others disdain. Some people quote scripture without saying it’s scripture. Is that bad? Just because we don’t say “John 3:16″ after reading it, does that mean it’s not scripture? Are we watering down the gospel? By repackaging the gospel in a way that is more relevant to today’s culture, are we repackaging God? Are we changing God so that he’ll be more palatable to humans? Is that what God did? Is Jesus a repackaged version of God that was more palatable to humans?

I’m trying to prepare a Sunday school on Jacob, Leah and Rachel.  I keep thinking about it, and its really different than a didactic New Testament epistle.  One of the tendencies I have with studying the bible is to 1) find the principle 2) apply it to my life.  I mean, that’s what the OIA method of bible study teaches isn’t it?  The problem is, I couldn’t come up with anything new.  These are the lessons I came away with…

Lessons from Jacob’s story:

Don’t practice polygamy.

Don’t show favoritism

Don’t be deceptive… it will bite you in the back.

All of these lessons were very, well… lame to me.  Nothing new.  Nothing interesting.  So I got to thinking, if God only wanted to teach us lessons and princples, he would have written the entire book in that format.  The entire bible would be epistles or proverbs or something like that.  He didn’t write the story of Jacob in a story format for nothing.

Why stories?

I realized that we tell stories of our past in order to see where we’ve come from.  Native Americans told stories to explain natural phenomenon.  We tell stories and histories to explain the phenomenon of our own lives.  We want to know where we came from.  We want to be connected to a bigger community that transcends time and space.

Truth: Principles or Stories?

Where is truth is found?  Is it in principles or narratives?  Sometimes when authors write novels, they write them in order to communicate certain principles they have already laid out.  Other authors write about what they’ve seen in life and the incidences that connected to them, and allowed their readers to draw their own interpretations.  So which came first for the bible?  Well neither.  God came first and God isn’t a principle or a story.  But the point is that we need both in our lives. God doesn’t want us to just follow his will.  He wants us to struggle with and truly be transformed by it.  I truly believe that a conquered sin is better than a sin never committed in God’s eyes.

Divine Connection

God wants us to feel a connection to the people in the stories.  He wants us to see how they struggled with his word and how they failed and how they succeeded.  He doesn’t just want us to ”live the right life.”  He wants us to be connected to him through community with the biblical patriarchs.  He wants us to be connected to him through community with one another.  He wants us to be connected to him in every way.  This includes living a holy life, but it also means tracing our history and heritage back to God.  It means finding our purpose in Him.  It means seeing that we are a part of a bigger community and plan.

Narrative connects us to God.  The narrative of Jacob connects us to God and his blessing.  Seeing Jacob’s struggles and sin is one part of knowing God.  Understanding Rachel’s jealousy and Leah’s one desire in life is part of communing with God.  We don’t need to draw lessons and applications out of narratives.  The lessons and applications are never the same.  What we need to do is to situate ourselves within God’s huge plan and rich history and know that we are a vital part of it.

On Pride Benjamin Franklin in “The Autobiography” writes these lines:

“Most people dislike vanity in others whatever share they have of it themselves, but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the posssessor and to others that are within his sphere of action.”

So Franklin thinks that vanity is a good thing.  I think that often the issue of pride is an interesting one.  In Christian thinking we believe that “pride comes before the fall.”  Yet in the eyes of many secular people, pride is an appropriate thing if it can be backed up. See Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice.  Neitzsche believed that pride was a positive quality, and only became a negative quality when those who had nothing to be proud of were resentful of those who did have something to be proud of.

So what about pride makes it a negative quality?  I suppose it comes from a definition of the word pride.  There are a few definitions of pride.

1. A sense of one’s own proper dignity or value; self-respect.
2. Pleasure or satisfaction taken in an achievement, possession, or association: parental pride. 
3. Arrogant or disdainful conduct or treatment; haughtiness.
4. An excessively high opinion of oneself; conceit. 

The first definition of pride, I think nobody would object to.  As Christians, we are supposed to recognize our own value.  We are children of God.  That is our boast.

The second definition most seculars would not object to.  I think most Christians would not object to it either.  Should we however be “proud” of ourselves?  Christians are supposed to give credit to God for any of our accomplishments.  We are not supposed to take credit for it for ourselves.  What can we accomplish without God?

The third definition is the most troublesome.  Some non Christians may say that if a person IS better, they have the right to act better.  Again in Christianity nobody is better than anybody else.  God values us equally.  Someone may achieve something but it is not their achievement, it is God’s.  Actually some non-Christians may agree with this also. No achievement is actually due to inherent qualities that one person has over another. More on this in another entry.

The fourth definition, everyone agrees upon.  Nobody wants to have an excessively high opinion of oneself. We want to evaluate ourselves in a correct light.  However, I think this form of pride is the one that the bible talks about most often.  For a non-Christian it is probably very difficult to identify when we have crossed the line into excessive value of oneself.  It is difficult for Christians.  This is the most dangerous form of pride, and the one that I personally struggle with the most.