Saturday, October 14, 2006

Christ's Sacrifice

I often find myself returning to the foot of the cross, fraught with wonder and awe that God would so humble Himself to come in the form of man and redeem us. Is it not amazing that He could love us with such love? Who is man that God is mindful of him?

The dilemma for many is belief. Believing in Christ is not saying a prayer and walking to the front in a church (unfortunately it has become such a ritual in our day), nor is it going to church or reading the bible, or being a good person. Paul says that he has fought the good fight, he has kept the faith, and he has finished the course. The goal of a follower of Christ is so much more than ritual, it is a return to the foot of the cross, and building a relationship with a Person, with our King.

If you find that this does not make sense to you, ask yourself if you want to understand it. If you do, then it is not by might, nor by power, but by the His spirit. Ask him to show you. I had to overcome that huge hurdle after I came to college and then committed myself to Christ. I love knowledge, and intellect, and I really believed that everything had to be logically proven before it could be true. But this is not the case, for there is a Logic that exists above our logic, and Reason above our reason. If we only subscribed to what we comprehensively understand then we would have a lot explain, would we not?

Oh the wonderfull Cross
Oh the wonderfull Cross
Bids me come and die and find that I may truly live
Oh the wonderfull Cross
Oh the wonderfull Cross
All who gather here by grace draw near and bless Your name



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree more.

One of the things that the Holy Spirit has been challenging me on is making the journey from my mind to my heart. To have, so you say, a personnal relationship with God rather than an intellectual one.

I believe 'thinking independantly' is a stronghold thatn the enemy can get a foothold in if we are not careful. For a long time In have been recieving the Word into my head and not my heart. i've been coming to the bible with the aim of thinking about it rather than recieving something from it; being taught by the Holy Spirit rather than examining it myself.

You make the point of God's ways being higher than our ways. I love Psalm 92:5 - "...how profound your thoughts!" (NIV).

I agree that some things have become ritualistic i.e. if you don't go to the alter call then Jesus won't heal you etc. Although I would say that prayer is an integral part of being a christian (perhaps you could define what you mean by 'prayer'?), since its how we can not only commune with God but bring his Kingdom to earth by making his will be done.

But I fully agree that building a relationship with God is our goal in life. The question is whether Jesus will turn around to us on judgement day and say "I know you" or whether he'll say "I do not know you". To understand this is to understand life and what it means.

But for those of us who are used to thinking rationally and logically, to be told we need to operate from the heart is scary! The heart and love itself does not work according to rational, step-by-step process. So Jesus' call to have a relationship with him is, for some, one of the greatest challenges in life. But I suppose once it get's kick started then its fun!

Tichius said...

I agree so much with your points.
Thanks for stopping by! And sorry, I haven't checked for a while.

The key is knowing Christ

ML said...

Hey...

I praise God because somehow I've been led to this very site to find some answers that I've been earnestly searching for...

It's amazing because this topic was posted a year ago, but it's still so relevant to me...

I've been asking God to show me how I can make Christ's sacrifice REAL in my life...

Like you, I like to think of things using intellect and logic...Now I see it's more a matter of the heart...

Thanks! God bless ;o)

Luis Cayetano said...

"One of the things that the Holy Spirit has been challenging me on is making the journey from my mind to my heart. To have, so you say, a personal relationship with God rather than an intellectual one."

Schizophrenia, in other words. It's no wonder God is "challenging" you to have a "personal" relationship with him rather than an intellectual one. If you had the latter, you'd quickly realise you were having a relationship with a non-existent being, hence the need to switch over to the heart where no thinking occurs! Appeals to emotion can make people lose all perspective, which I suspect is what's happening here. All this talk about Jesus wanting this and that of us, and of where we'll be on Judgement Day, is just self-congratulatory bullshit, and it reeks of arrogance. Frankly, if the sorts of people who shall be saved on that momentous day are the ones who dupe themselves into being led by their hearts at the total expense of their heads, then I'll be glad to be rejected.

As Richard Dawkins says in "The God Delusion": If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, instead of condemning future generations of Jews to pogroms and the Holocaust on the basis that they're "Christ-killers"? Religion is wanky, self-righteous and arrogant. It breeds a mentality by which people in the group (fellow Christians or Muslims or whatever) are "saved" and everyone else is screwed, just for the minor "sin" of disbelief. It's morally bankrupt and hypocritical to say that you love someone, and at the same to think that they are somehow worthy of an eternity in Hell. It's emotional blackmail to use the threat of torture and agony as a motivation to believe, and it's putrid to think that morality can come from such a tyrannical being - a being so "great" that he gets offended when glorified primates don't feed his ego. But it isn't surprising that religion utilises these fantasies, because how else is it going to spread? Through reason and logic? Not likely; predictions about nature based upon holy texts almost invariably turn out to be wrong. No wonder we "must go beyond science and reason" to "get at a greater truth". So when science shows us the answer, the religious try to rescue their bankrupt texts by saying, "But this is only SYMBOLIC". Yeah, right. Get used to it: religion was wrong, science was right. It really is that simple.
God this and God that is no more impressive or compelling than Allah this and Allah that. It's all the same scam, just with different fairies and holidays.