Title: Trust and Love
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: 1 John 3:16-24
We readily talk about God's love. We quote John 3:16. We repeat Jesus' commands to love our neighbors and our enemies. We read in First John that "God is love." We sing songs about loving God and God loving us. "Jesus Loves Me" is one of the first songs many of us learned to sing, right along with "Jesus Loves the Little Children." Even so, all too many people claiming to be Christians do not seem to trust God or place God's love front and center in their understanding of God. We may make that our foremost message to children, yet when we turn our attention to teens and adults, that focus seems to change. Is God worthy of our trust and our love? If not, is God even worthy of our attention?
There is lot of really awful theology out there. Some of it creeps into our lives in unexpected ways. We hear it on the radio. We hear it on TV. We come across it in movies, books, newspapers, and in the mouths of people in our communities. Some of it we have carried with us from childhood, perhaps without ever reflecting on it. Often, we have uncritically accepted portrayals of the Hebrew Scriptures as portraying Yahweh as very different from Jesus. We rarely stop to consider that Jesus tells us those same Scriptures point to him, not to some competing deity. We seldom pause to consider the implications of Jesus' summary of the Scriptures as commands to love God and one another in terms of reading those Hebrew Scriptures.
Publicly, we see many portrayals of God as angry, vindictive, and waiting for an excuse to strike us down with a lightning bolt. We repeatedly encounter claims that God was somehow forced to make Jesus suffer horribly in order that God might be able to love us while really only seeing Jesus instead of who we truly are. Who is imposing such a rule upon God? Is Jesus not God? Is Jesus' presentation of the Father completely inaccurate? Is our sin so repugnant to God that he needed to ...
Author: Christopher Harbin
Text: 1 John 3:16-24
We readily talk about God's love. We quote John 3:16. We repeat Jesus' commands to love our neighbors and our enemies. We read in First John that "God is love." We sing songs about loving God and God loving us. "Jesus Loves Me" is one of the first songs many of us learned to sing, right along with "Jesus Loves the Little Children." Even so, all too many people claiming to be Christians do not seem to trust God or place God's love front and center in their understanding of God. We may make that our foremost message to children, yet when we turn our attention to teens and adults, that focus seems to change. Is God worthy of our trust and our love? If not, is God even worthy of our attention?
There is lot of really awful theology out there. Some of it creeps into our lives in unexpected ways. We hear it on the radio. We hear it on TV. We come across it in movies, books, newspapers, and in the mouths of people in our communities. Some of it we have carried with us from childhood, perhaps without ever reflecting on it. Often, we have uncritically accepted portrayals of the Hebrew Scriptures as portraying Yahweh as very different from Jesus. We rarely stop to consider that Jesus tells us those same Scriptures point to him, not to some competing deity. We seldom pause to consider the implications of Jesus' summary of the Scriptures as commands to love God and one another in terms of reading those Hebrew Scriptures.
Publicly, we see many portrayals of God as angry, vindictive, and waiting for an excuse to strike us down with a lightning bolt. We repeatedly encounter claims that God was somehow forced to make Jesus suffer horribly in order that God might be able to love us while really only seeing Jesus instead of who we truly are. Who is imposing such a rule upon God? Is Jesus not God? Is Jesus' presentation of the Father completely inaccurate? Is our sin so repugnant to God that he needed to ...
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