Light.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
~ A. W. Tozer
Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness.
~ Luke 11:34
Advent, week 1
So to echo Tozer, what does come into your mind when you think about God… Powerful? Loving? What else?
It’s even more insightful to ask, what do you think comes into God’s mind when God thinks about you… Delighted? Disappointed? Something else?
When we launched this year’s Crush Campaign, I talked about the unique mission of The Vining Center, which has to do with changing our minds… about God, about ourselves, about the redemptive narrative, and ultimately about the point of this human venture on earth. Which brings me to Advent!
This season of the next four Sundays is, of course, about the coming of Christ—about God doing the unthinkable and forever joining the human with the divine. The great Egyptian church father Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296 - 373) fearlessly declared that Christ “was made [human] that we might be made God." We’ll unpack that scandalous idea later in this series, but for now, I simply want to introduce the next four blogs as an exploration into bringing more light into our souls this Advent.
Last year’s Advent, we explored the treasures hidden in darkness, both naturally and spiritually. This year, we’re exploring four specific shafts of light that pierce the darkness and invite us into new perspective… starting with how we see God. As the days get shorter and darker, our hearts can actually burn brighter with “the true LIGHT that gives light to everyone” (Jn 1:9).
Much of the modern church holds a concept of God I can only describe as “Bipolar”: a god who is infinitely loving and persistent in pursuit of relationship with us… while simultaneously being wrathful, requiring a blood sacrifice in order to forgive us, and ultimately planning to send the overwhelming majority of humans to an eternity of torment. Somehow we just accepted these dissonant, mutually exclusive perspectives on God as completely normal and healthy. As if the greatest architect of joy and greatest perpetrator of suffering could inhabit the same being.
We attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable with words like “holy” and “just”… but with just a modicum of scrutiny, the effort fails miserably. The word holy means “dedicated” or “consecrated”—not wrathful. And the word just means “that which restores something or someone to its rightful place”—not that which punishes or penalizes someone for wrongdoing. Our human judicial system has some merit, but it is a far distant cousin to divine justice that can transform the human heart.
It took me a long time to realize that Bipolar God is a figment of a darkened religious perspective. This is not the God that Jesus described, which is perhaps best revealed in the prodigal Father of Luke 15:11-32. Just a few chapters earlier, Jesus urges us to see clearly and brilliantly, to have “healthy eyes” so that our whole being can be full of glorious light. This, my friends, is the significance of Advent and I hope a faithful introduction to what the angels could honestly declare as “good tidings of great joy” and “on earth peace, goodwill toward humans!” Truly, the Good News is better than anything we have imagined.
growing the soul
Do you dare hope that God is as good as our hearts imagine? Jesus promised that the Spirit would “teach [us] all things” (Jn 14:26)… so what is the Spirit speaking to you right now about the goodness of God?
serving the world
How do you think a more redeemed, more enlightened view of God could change our work for justice in the world?
takeaway
More good than we know!