Thursday 4 June 2009

Top Five - Reasons to be a Christian

The top 5 reasons to be a Christian.

1. Jesus.
In the words of Philip Yancey,
"God is, in a word, Christlike. Jesus presents a God with skin on whom we can take or leave, love or ignore. In this visible, scaled-down model we can discern God's features more clearly.
I must admit that Jesus has revised in flesh many of my harsh and unpalable notions about God. Why am i a christian? I sometimes ask myself, and to be pefectly honest the reasons reduce to two: (1) the lack of good alternatives, and (2) Jesus. Brilliant, untamed, tender, creative, slippery, irreducible, paradoxically humble - Jesus stands up to scrutiny. He is who I want my God to be."*


2. Adoption.
In the words of J.I.Packer,
"In adoption, God takes us into his family and fellowship, and establishes us as his children and heirs. Closeness, affection and generosity are at the heart of the relationship. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater."**



3. Meaning and purpose that death does not destroy.
In the words of N.T.Wright,
"...when Jesus rose again God's whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of that new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the ressurrection of Jesus does not leave us passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet, given new breath in our lungs, and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world."***



4. A multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual joining of people.
In the words of John Piper,
"I infer from this that the beauty and power of praise that will come to the Lord from the diversity of the nations are greater than the beauty and power that would come to him if the chorus of the redeemed were culturally uniform. The reason for this can be seen in the analogy of a choir. More depth of beauty is felt from a choir that sings in parts than from a choir that sings only in unison. Unity in diveristy is more beautiful and more powerful than unity of uniformity. This carries over to the untold differences that exist between the peoples of the world. When their diversity unites in worship to God, the beauty of their praise will echo the depth and greatness of God's beauty far more than if the redeemed were from only a few different people groups."****


5. The local church.
In the words of Eugene Peterson,
"Men and women are not admitted to the community by presenting credentials of love skills, nor do we maintain our place in the community by passing periodic peer reviews on love. We are here to be formed over our lifetimes into a community of the beloved, God's beloved who are being formed into a people who love God and one another in the way and on the terms in which God loves us. It's slow work. We are slow learners. And though God is unendingly patient with us, we are not very patient with one another. Outsiders, observing our embarrissingly slow and erratic progress in love, wonder why we bother. Well, we bother because God is love: he created us in love; he saved us in an act of love; he commanded us to love one another. Love is the ocean in which we swim. So what if many of us can only wade in the shallows, and others of us can barely dog paddle for short distances? We are learning and we see the possibility of one day taking long, relaxed, easy strokes into the deep."*****



*The Jesus I never knew. p265. Zondervan, Michegan (1995).
**Knowing God. p233. Hodder and Stoughton, London (1993).
***Simply Christian. p99. SPCK, London (2006).
****Let the Nations be glad; the supremacy of God in missions. p.199. Baker Academic, Michegan (2004).
*****Christ plays in ten thousand places. p.312. Hodder and Stoughton, London (2005).

1 comment:

Jill said...

Nice to have you back on the blog mate