God is Love

A dear friend of mine is wrestling with the different accounts of religion and of what/who God is. After a fabulous visit, I thought about what she said and wrote the following letter to her.

I would appreciate any comments and thoughts.

Dearest Friend,
I've been thinking a lot about what you said: God is Love.
yes, that is ABSOLUTELY true, but, my love, it is only a part of the story. Mind you, it is the BEST part, but it is the best part because of what comes before it:

So, I share what the "gospel" really is with my most precious friend.

Going to the personality of God, we must first remember that He is God, and we are not, so we can only understand God through ourselves, which is ultimately inadequate. This is why we have scripture (and sometimes disagreement :-) ).

the four atributes of God:

1)God is perfectly Holy/Pure: He cannot be around that which is not perfectly pure. He cannot sin. He cannot violate his own law, nor simply "look over" when it is violated. Whether one believes we violated His law and commandments (they are pretty good - that top ten has yet to be beat!) through birth, or after, the fact is that we all have done so. We are, therefore, not pure or holy.
2) God is perfectly Just. When we have violated our relationship with him through sin, there must be penance. "The wages of sin is death." Pretty drastic, I know, but not when you even try to consider how perfect He is in His being and doing.
3) God is perfectly Merciful: God does not want us to die. He does not want us to be out of fellowship with Him. He wants to be with us, His creation for EVER. He wants to Love us...so..
4)God is perfectly Loving. This is where Jesus comes in. In the Old Testament, God required a sacrifice of a perfect Lamb from the Hebrews each year. This lamb died for the sins of the Hebrew people. However, even the Garden of Eden, God promised a savior one day. That savior is His son, Jesus Christ. "He that knew no sin, became sin for us that we might be Holy in Him."

Jesus died to pay the price for our sins because we could not pay for them ourselves. God made a way for us to be with Him forever! We must be pure to be with God, and the only way to be pure is cast our sin/transgression/disobedience on Christ. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one may come to the Father, but by me."

Many people simply call Jesus a great teacher, but no other teacher has said what he just said, and no other teacher in the world has ever done what he has done - conquered DEATH!

Jesus has given us a legacy of peace (not perfect easiness, but peace) if we will believe and follow Him. I hope you will be blessed by experiencing and living in His perfect Love forever through Jesus-the only way.
All MY LOVE, FOREVER,
Charly

I visited here today and thought that you would enjoy it too! - check this out at: http://wandascountryhome.com/trilogy/

CBS News "Shocked" most American are Religious

Tonight the CBS evening news opened an article on “Religion in the U.S.” [or America, I’m not sure] with the following statistic stated and even printed in large letters/numbers for us to see:
Of the 225 Million people in the US, 183 Million are affiliated with Religion.
They went on to say that this figure “shocks” experts…um…DUH!!!

This certainly seems to be another wonderful example of the “experts” living in some far distant ivory tower while the rest of us, go to work, raise our children, shop at the grocery store and…surprise..GO TO CHURCH! The “get to know you question” changes from area to area (in DC, it’s “what do you do”) and in much of the country, it is some variety of “where does your family go to church?” A quick walk into any American coffee shop in real-town America will reveal quickly this very fact - people go to church.

This is NOT a new phenomenon. Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” devoted major portions of his musings on his journey across America to our faith and its practice even noting its necessity to the endurance of a free nation:
“For my own part, I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire political freedom. And I am inclined to think that, if faith be wanting in him, he must be subject; and if he be free, he must believe.” [Volume II, Chapter V]

So, yet again, We The People are insulted by both the “experts” and “CBS News”. Not content to let us live and be happy, the news broadcast noted that for a developed nation it was very unusual for there to be such a high number of “believers” in one faith or another.

However, to add insult to injury, when going to the CBS news website, the article is now retitled as: Many in U.S. Drop Their Childhood Religion. While the on-air article focused on the large numbers of Americans who have a major belief, the article would like to immediately give us the impression that Americans are leaving their faith in droves. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/25/national/main3873100.shtml

If one reads the article, it becomes immediately obvious that mostly, folks are leaving one type of Christianity for another. Sometimes, it is even that people leave their church because (gasp!) they moved! Both of these facts merely seem to remind me of my own experience in “religion”. This experience is by no means unusual. As I grew up, I started to ask questions and do research. As my convictions were moved due to both reason and supernatural influences, my husband and I chose different places for our family to worship God. Also, as a military family, changing churches is a fact of life. I think the mere fact that people search out a new church after a move is a wonderful testimony to the amount of faith still very prominent in the United States!

Despite what we read in mainstream media, I think Alexis de Tocqueville would still be generally impressed. Mostly, I believe that our Sovereign God knows all about the foolishness of changing churches and of ridiculous articles intended to injure us regular folk.