April 29, 2006

I'm going to take the plunge and dive into the blogosphere. I am encouraged by a friend's blog because he is putting out Big Ideas about God and our place in His world, and he is generating some thought-provoking discussions. Now, I don't pretend to have alot of new thoughts or ideas about who the God I believe in and love is because He has written it all in His Word. But I do know that my perception of who God is has been radically changed in the last 5 years, so much so that I want to try to record my journey of ongoing revelation and see if anyone else is interested in coming along with me on the ride.
To get this endeavor of mine jump-started, Here is a quote from the book "Searching For God Knows What," by Donald Miller (it's on pps 13-14):

"So if the difference between Christian faith and all other forms of spirituality is that Christian faith offers a relational dynamic with God, why are we cloaking this relational dynamic in formulas? ....And are the formulas getting us anywhere? Are modern forms of Christian spirituality producing better Christians than days long ago, when people didn't use formulas and understood, intrinsically, that God is a Being with a personality and a will of His own? .....I started reading the Bible very differently. I stopped looking for formulas and tried to understand what God was trying to say. When I did that, I realized the gospel of Jesus, I mean the essence of God's message to mankind, wasn't a bunch of hoops we needed to jump through to get saved, and it wasn't a series of ideas we had to agree with either; rather, it was an invitation, an invitation to know God."