do we 'really' understand?
It is Tuesday, thought with being off yesterday it throws me for a loop.
I managed to make it up to Greeley for church on Sunday. Thankfully, I had a great prayer time on the way up. It is amazing, more than not I end up turning off the radio and just spend time in prayer.
Shane’s sermon was on “Understanding the Gospel”. Which you might be thinking, oh we all know what that means. Well honestly, I have been going to St. Patrick for about 3 years and before that Christ Community in Franklin for 6 years prior to that and it hasn’t been until just recently that I have some sense of a grasp of what the Gospel truly is about.
Luke 15:11-31 is the story of the two brothers. It is a representative of the two spectrums of sin. The youngest son was the one who had asked for his inheritance early and went and squandered it. It reflects on us today, when we go to other things or addictions for life instead of God. The addiction controls you, you are constantly needing it in order to get life, but the thing is, it is like beating your head against a brick wall, it isn’t fulfilling you or giving you life at all.
The eldest brother was the one who followed the rules and found his identity in his own self-righteousness. Who was he following the rules for? The answer is himself. He wanted his reward for staying with his father.
The problem is most of us live here. We don’t see ourselves ‘following the rules’ as the same as the youngest son. However, if we are going to anything other than God for life, then we are sinning.
Any sin rooted in the inordinate lust for something that we believe can deliver us from your basic alienation from the Father. The Gospel says we have been restored to complete relationship with the Father because of what our Savior Jesus has accomplished for us. Therefore, in sin we are always “forgetting’ what God has done for us in Christ and instead we are being moved by an idol that promised the same thing. Martin Luther said that to fail to believe God accept us fully in Christ and to look to something else is a failure to keep the first commandment-love God with all the heart. Thus beneath ANY particular sin is the general sin of rejecting CHRIST-salvation and indulging in SELF-salvation or in other words, being our own Gods.
God’s love is what we are looking for in everything. God loves us so much that He was willing to lose Himself in order to give us life.
So..basically, the Gospel is realizing that God loves us beyond our own comprehension. That HE is what we need to get life. We can not find life in rules or in our addictions, but in the realization that God loves us so much, that He did lose Himself for us.
I managed to make it up to Greeley for church on Sunday. Thankfully, I had a great prayer time on the way up. It is amazing, more than not I end up turning off the radio and just spend time in prayer.
Shane’s sermon was on “Understanding the Gospel”. Which you might be thinking, oh we all know what that means. Well honestly, I have been going to St. Patrick for about 3 years and before that Christ Community in Franklin for 6 years prior to that and it hasn’t been until just recently that I have some sense of a grasp of what the Gospel truly is about.
Luke 15:11-31 is the story of the two brothers. It is a representative of the two spectrums of sin. The youngest son was the one who had asked for his inheritance early and went and squandered it. It reflects on us today, when we go to other things or addictions for life instead of God. The addiction controls you, you are constantly needing it in order to get life, but the thing is, it is like beating your head against a brick wall, it isn’t fulfilling you or giving you life at all.
The eldest brother was the one who followed the rules and found his identity in his own self-righteousness. Who was he following the rules for? The answer is himself. He wanted his reward for staying with his father.
The problem is most of us live here. We don’t see ourselves ‘following the rules’ as the same as the youngest son. However, if we are going to anything other than God for life, then we are sinning.
Any sin rooted in the inordinate lust for something that we believe can deliver us from your basic alienation from the Father. The Gospel says we have been restored to complete relationship with the Father because of what our Savior Jesus has accomplished for us. Therefore, in sin we are always “forgetting’ what God has done for us in Christ and instead we are being moved by an idol that promised the same thing. Martin Luther said that to fail to believe God accept us fully in Christ and to look to something else is a failure to keep the first commandment-love God with all the heart. Thus beneath ANY particular sin is the general sin of rejecting CHRIST-salvation and indulging in SELF-salvation or in other words, being our own Gods.
God’s love is what we are looking for in everything. God loves us so much that He was willing to lose Himself in order to give us life.
So..basically, the Gospel is realizing that God loves us beyond our own comprehension. That HE is what we need to get life. We can not find life in rules or in our addictions, but in the realization that God loves us so much, that He did lose Himself for us.
posted by mel at 9:01 AM
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