Simplicity

Richard has got me thinking about all sorts of things. He's that kind of guy, with a brain that never stops, and that kind of perpetual motion of the thinking muscles can be rather infectious. One thing he's got me thinking about is how to portray a simple gospel message, including all the main points of the Christian message but that's simple enough for anyone to understand. So, I thought I'd have a go:

God exists. That's something that I'm pretty sure of now, sure enough to spend several years of my life dedicated to finding out more about Him, but I wasn't always so sure. First it took a tentative acceptance that God might exist, then it became faith that God did exist. There are 'proofs' of God's existence, but honestly, they're not that convincing. What really convinced me that God exists is the change he has made in me, we have a relationship, me and God, and it's not all one way. You can't have a relationship with a fictional being, God is not an imaginary friend, imaginary friends don't change how you are or how you feel.

I'm getting ahead of myself here, this is the end of the story, and you need to hear the beginning. If you trust me that God exists, then trust me when I tell you that God created us. In fact he created everything, but especially he created us, and he made us for a purpose, to love - to love Him and to love one another, and because He created us, He loves us - like a mother seeing her child's face for the first time, that kind of love.

It could have been a blissful state, creator and createe living together in mutual love, God caring for us and us responding to God, trusting him and talking to him regularly. So why aren't things like that? There's a little word that Christians use that sums up what when wrong and that word is 'sin'. Sin has two meanings, it means the overall breakdown of that God/mankind relationship and it also means the things that we do that are the result of that broken state. Most people know the second meaning of the word - they know that murder is a sin and theft is a sin but they don't know that even if you can't put your finger on any one nasty thing like that that you've done sin is still a part of your life. It's still a part of my life too because even though I'm a christian and I believe in God, that doesn't make me perfect, there's still a long way to go to fully restore my relationship with God. I've got a lot of bad habits to break and a lot of rebellious thoughts to bring under God's control.

I don't know when we lost our love for God, when we became hard-hearted, I don't know when we turned our love for God into love for money, power or sex but I know that happened and we see the results of it all around us. God would not be a loving God if he wasn't angered by our behaviour to one another and distraught by our rejection of him but God never lost his love for us, never gave up on us, he thinks we are worth saving.

You see there's a bigger problem than we realise about separating ourselves from God and we didn't know it until God told us about it. God is the source of our life and we don't know how dependant on Him we really are, our own resources are finite, every second we spend away from God, we are dying. Of course, we're all physically dying, but we're also dying spiritually, we need some kind of help otherwise that void between ourselves and God will only get wider and we will cut ourselves off completely from the source of all life and all hope. If there is any such thing as hell, surely that is it - to be completely removed from God. Because I'm a christian, I do believe death is not the end for us, the life we live is going to continue but that does require God's intervention and to live a full life after death requires us to assent to being refilled with God's life here and now.

So far I've described a problem and its solution, but I haven't explained how that solution came about, what it was that God did that made it possible for us to turn back to him.

It happened through one man - Jesus. This man was special, people could see it in him, he was different, he cared. He had an air of authority but wasn't aloof, his teaching was refreshing and something about him drew people to him. He did things that only God could do and said things only God should say and a few of his closest followers guessed the truth, this man who was just like them was God himself. They must have shaken their heads to try to get this ridiculous thought out - how could a man be God? how could God become just an ordinary man?

People noticed that Jesus was different, special and that he had something they didn't, something they wanted. What he had was a never-ending supply of spirit, and therefore a never-ending supply of life. There was no abyss between Jesus and God, he was born with all the disadvantages that we are, with all the temptations to sin, in the same frail body and with the same weak mind yet he was all-consumed by his relationship with God, he was completely reliant on God's spirit - his own spirit - within him. Directed by that spirit he always chose the way of love for others, not love for himself.

That obedience to God's direction even led him to not fight when men came to take him away, when he was sentenced to death, and when he was beaten and nailed to the tortuous cross. God died. We are so distant from God that we didn't recognise him when he turned up and we killed him. It was our sin that put Jesus on the cross -and I say our because I mean mine too, it wasn't just a handful of people years ago that killed Jesus, he died because of your broken relationship with God, and because of mine.

That could have been the end of the story and if it had been, we would all have been lost but Jesus death was not the end. Resurrection means coming back from death, but it's more than just the reanimation of a body, it's the beginning of a new and different and fuller life and that's what Jesus began. Jesus resurrection is a mystery, I can't explain the mechanics of it, I can't understand how Jesus could be resurrected from death and although I know Jesus was special, I don't understand why he could be resurrected and we couldn't - except that it's sometihng to do with his purity, his closeness to God and his supply of inexhaustible life. That is we couldn't until Jesus had first been raised because Jesus did something for us when he died, not just for himself. He offered us a gift of the same kind of life and purity and closeness to God that allowed him to break through death's grip. It was our sin that killed him and he is able to forgive us for that, to restore the relationship that we need with God that gives us life.

Learning to live with God in our lives is slow progress, we have learnt many rebellious traits that will take a long time to unlearn, we have taught ourselves that it is better to look after number one than to care for others and we need to relearn the value of love. When we look again to God, he accepts us, forgives us and fills us again with his life and we begin to die to sin, dying the death of Jesus so that we can share in his eternal life.


I know that's not short, but I hope it is simple. You might not think it is simple and I will accept that I have probably waffled around some of the ideas in here, trying to express inadequately what someone great could have probably said in two sentences. No matter how much I think about and try to understand, I know that what I have given falls short of the real good news of God several times over. It can never be more than a story that points to the real truth that is only found completely in Jesus, and I'm pretty sure that some minor points won't quite be right but I've tried to keep my story in line with the stories of Jesus found in the bible. You may know other stories, and yours may disagree with mine in some places. I don't mind that as long as you are convinced that your stories are in line with the bible too. Keep telling your story, keep telling your good news and hopefully all our flawed stories will lead people to Jesus where they can find the real truth and real life and real hope.