The Goodness of God

In my last post I talked about how Brandt Jean’s embrace of his brother’s killer glorified God because it demonstrated His goodness. Like the detonation of a neutron bomb, the atmosphere of that Dallas courtroom exploded with the fragrance of God’s goodness the moment Amber Guyger received love and grace instead of vitriolic hatred and unforgiveness.

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God’s glory revealed in a Dallas courtroom

I don’t usually talk about current events but what happened last week was so remarkable that we shouldn’t let its lesson to us slip into the past so easily. Brandt Jean’s embrace of his brother’s killer, former Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, was the “Hug heard ’round the world.”  But the most significant thing was what his actions said about God.

Peter Hitchens on Justice and God

I’m taking a brief excursion from my normal subject matter to bring  up a point about justice that I’ve made in the past, and one that Peter Hitchens makes in the following video clip. For those of you who don’t know, Peter Hitchens is the brother of the notorious atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens, one of the so-dubbed, “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.”  

Leaving narcissistic Christianity to follow Christ

Before I begin, I’m not using “narcissistic” here to refer to the personality disorder, but to living according to an image instead of authentically. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was cursed by Echo, making him so obsessed with his own image in a pool of water that it led to his demise. We all have a bit of narcissism in us; we desire to project a positive image of ourselves to the public mind (just peruse Facebook!)

Putting yourself in the best light is not necessarily a bad thing, but when it comes to following Jesus, this image mindset can be detrimental.

Spiritual revelation is given to children

The paradoxical truth about mature spirituality is that we must become childlike. Actually, nothing is revealed to us about true heavenly realities until we do. I’m not talking about being childish or staying gullibly ignorant, but having the disposition that children possess that graciously receives transcendent mystery with an open heart and that even thrives in its wonder.

Worship

There’s been a great outpouring of worship music over the last few decades that has significantly impacted our Christian experience in so many positive ways. But there’s also a potential problem. When we mainly associate worship with music we risk worshiping music instead of God. One way we may know this is by asking who or what the focus is actually on when we worship.

What if we returned to the ancient faith?

There’s a quiet revolution going on within the body of Christ; one that’s recovering ancient Christological truths that are setting us free from the powerless, humanistic, and deistic philosophies that have dominated Western theology since the Enlightenment. We’re recovering the truth that following Christ is not transactional but relational, as this video interview brings out so well.