HIS PRESENCE?

GHANDI, JESUS, AND PINOCCHIO

The Importance of Theology

Romans 1:1-7; John 1:12-16; 3:16;

  “Describe a time when you experienced God’s presence?” was Pastor’s question we asked each other after singing a few praise songs.

  I immediately thought “Is it that He comes to us, or that we have receptive moment(s)?” (Ps.16:11; Jn.14:23) Then “What makes us receptive to sensing His presence?”

  Does it take DVDs, CDs, internet to experience? To experience Hawaii for real we must go to Hawaii. Pastor pointedly asked grandson Aaron Bullock, who had lived outdoors on mountains there for several years. He answered in the definite affirmative.

  We can read and study about God and yet never experience His presence. Experience is not the automatic result of knowledge. This includes relying on reading books by others on their experiencing God’s presence in bad or good situations.

  For many years large numbers of people were not allowed Bibles, with only priests interpreting and applying. Baptists and protestants provided Bibles and encouraged personal study and appliication. This resulted in considerable religious strife between the two groups with the centralized organized denomination exercising power socio-politically, including arrests, torture, and bloodshed.

  Jesus is accepted or acceptable in many religions here and abroad, though frequently not as He says He is. “I and the Father are one.” (Jn.1:1, 14; 8:58; 10:30) Jesus is most commonly accepted as other than deity. C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity, wrote: “I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [Jesus Christ]: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to.”

  Ghandi considered Jesus as great teacher, saying the reason he didn’t become a Christian is because of Christians. We too are a woodenhead with serious limitations until we are given power as family members. (Jn.1:12; 3:3; Eph.2:1-5; 2Tim.1:7)

  Jesus is not special. He is Special. We are special. (Ex.19:5; Tit.2:14; 1Pet.2:9) Are we to live from experience to experience or every moment in and by God’s grace?

EBB4 (Resultant thoughts from Pastor Paul Marine’s 10/14/12 sermon and Pastor John Seivering’s lecture yesterday 6/17/18)