God is Not an Idea
LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON
Today I simply want to remind you, remind my own heart, of something that in all our religious activity and spiritual conversation can be easy to forget.
God is not an idea, a doctrine, or a dogma.
God is Personal Boundless Being, filling all places but not spread thin, big enough to be attentive to every little thing.
God did not wind up the universe to watch it run from a distance.
God spoke all things into being and that Word still holds all things together.
God pushed warm air through a self-modeled sculpture and that breath still sustains every one of us.
One day, not that many years ago by cosmic standards, God the Breather became God the Breathed.
Think of it. One day in history — maybe it was a Monday, like every other Monday — God was everywhere. Then one of those Monday minutes was marked by a miracle and God was suddenly (also) somewhere, in a womb. God was a Someone. Someone taking shape like us and born like us, coughing into the coldness. The invisible heart of God now had a face.
And what a face, what a life it was. His living and suffering and dying and rising revealed God’s heart and our worth and gave hope that our pains and labors are not in vain.
Perhaps best of all, this Son of Man, our breath-taking brother, made the way to unspeakable nearness with our Maker — mystics call it union. Before Christ flew his resurrected physical body wherever he flew it, he breathed into the disciples (and by extension into us) a Second Breath — his Spirit, his actual self.
You know this story. I know it. That’s the challenge — to awaken the heart to it daily.
Ideas about God are important. Sound doctrine is a boundary line where abundant life grows. It’s true. Yet so often I catch myself talking about God or simply living life as if the Author isn’t in the room.
But he is.
He’s always in the room. Even closer.
He’s within and awaiting our awareness, available to respond to requests for wisdom and courage.
Read Thomas Kelly. Read Sundar Singh. Spend time with people who practice the Presence. Remind yourself, as I’m trying to remind myself now, that God is more than an idea. God is a Person — three Persons, in fact. And the Person of God who wears our face promised to be with us to the end of the age. Our part, through practiced awareness and obedient responsiveness, is to be with him.
Brian Morykon
Director of Communications
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
On Life with God Nathan Foster talks with Tiffany Clark about what the 20th century Indian Christian mystic Sundar Singh can teach us about encountering God. (Singh’s book is an upcoming selection in the Renovaré Book Club, and Tiffany is facilitating the discussion.)
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2.
From At the Master’s Feet, read Sundar Singh’s conversation between “The Disciple” and “The Master” in which Jesus responds to questions on prayer with gentle, imagery-rich wisdom.
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3.
Richard Foster says we “should take the material world quite seriously; it is the ’icon’ of God, the epiphany of his glory.” Read “Defining the Incarnational Tradition: The Sacramental Life.”
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
WORTH QUOTING
“To pray is to be on speaking terms with Me, and so by being in communion with and abiding in Me to become like Me.”
– The Master speaking to the Disciple in Sundar Singh's
At the Master’s Feet
(source)
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TO CONTEMPLATE
Jesus in Benares
Frank Wesley c. 1990s
(source)
This week’s art reflection comes from Tiffany Clark:
The artist was born in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh into a fifth generation Christian family of Hindu and Muslim descent. He paints Jesus “surrounded by priests, pilgrims and devotees” in a local setting in Benares, India. The artist writes, “In the sense of epiphany, this scene is in the spirit of his teaching in the temple at Jerusalem and probably would be met by the same mixture of fascination, awe, worry about sacrilege, fear and anger which Jesus met in his own time and place, except that Indians love to discuss theology and have accepted that there are many ways to know God…”.
Benares is the city we lived in for our first nine years in India and is still a place I watch and wait to see Him show up!
~Tiffany
TO PONDER
From Thomas Kelly’s Testament of Devotion:
Begin now, as you read these words, as you sit in your chair, to offer your whole selves, utterly and in joyful abandon, in quiet, glad surrender to Him who is within.