20100723 New (Lord's Prayer 2)

"Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

God is the source of everything we could need or want because He is the source of the whole universe. Asking God to give us our daily bread is recognizing that even our basic needs for life are from Him. This is what we recognize when we worship God. By making choices to live for Him, by faithful worship, and by giving things up to Him we recognize that He is our Lord in every sense.

Throughout time, mankind has struggled to live up to the goodness we were created to have. Even with the first man and woman, we wound up sinning and hurting our relationship with God. In every generation after, sometimes better, sometimes worse, we have continued to sin and to forget how much God has done for us.

Yet in every age, God has continued to reach out to us. He has given us covenants to try and help us to live out our relationship to Him, revealed Scripture to us to guide us, and has worked miracles to strengthen our faith. The fullness of all these outreaches is Jesus. He and His message are the final public revelation of God’s Word. He worked great miracles and still does even today. And He gave us a new covenant in His blood.

Jesus has given us true forgiveness for our sins. In dying on the cross for us, He accepted the death that would only be fair punishment for our sins. He died in our place to give the opportunity for new life to all mankind through all time. He even descended unto the dead so that He could raise the righteous of the past up to life with God in Heaven. He died for each one of us as if we were the only one. This is the example of the kind of love we are supposed to try to live out in our lives: to give your life for your friends.

20100723 New (Nicene Creed 2)

"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man."

Jesus is both God the Son and the Son of God. That is to say that He is both God and man. This is one of the most central and most difficult aspects of Christian faith. Many years of conflict led to the Church adopting this part of the Creed to express this idea.

Jesus being truly a man means that He shares fully in our human nature but without sin. He has both a human body and a human soul. He has a human mind and human free will. He lived a truly extraordinary life in that with everything He did, He united His human will with the Divine Will.

Given that Jesus shared fully in our human nature except that He was sinless, we have to deal with the question of how His humanity was sinless. Jesus received His human nature from His mother, Mary, by the work of the Holy Spirit. For this reason and others, knowing that God had created and prepared Mary specifically to be His mother, we believe that Mary was also created without sin. The fact that Mary was conceived without Original Sin is what we refer to as the Immaculate Conception.

Because Mary was so important to God that He preserved her from sin and chose her to be His mother, we hold Mary in a special place in our hearts. We take her for our own because we take Jesus as our own.

Jesus’ life was mostly hidden from public view. He grew up in much the same way as every other boy. He lived out His teenage years much the same as others. He lived a fully human life, but His obedient sinless example stands as a challenge to us to follow in His footsteps.

When Jesus began His public ministry, He worked miracles to show that He was from God. He preached our relationship with God in a new way that focused on having a real relationship with God above simply following rules. Following the rules is great, but only if it is done with love. Jesus said that the greatest Commandment of God was to love God with all our heart, mind, body, and soul, and then to love our neighbor as ourselves.

20100707 New (Lord's Prayer 1)

Lord's Prayer Part I

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

God created us to love and serve Him and to be happy with Him in Heaven. At the end of our lives, we hope that is where we shall go. We only know a few things about Heaven, but we know that God loves us and knows what is best for us, therefore we trust that Heaven will be the greatest thing possible for us.

To be able to go to Heaven, however, we must observe God’s law on Earth. God created the whole universe good. In the beginning, some of the angels rebelled and thus were expelled from Heaven. We recognize therefore, that following God’s will is necessary for us to enter Heaven.

Thankfully, we can recognize God’s law, not only in Scripture, but also, using our God-given intellect, in the world around us. This is what we call the “natural law.” Everyone, whether Christian or not, is required by God to observe these laws because they are available to all of us.

As persons who long to be with God in Heaven, we must do all we can to love God and one another on Earth. We must also do what we can to make sure that people treat one another as they should be treated. This is called “justice.” While we cannot make people love each other, we can do things to help make sure that they do not treat one another with injustice. This is part of what we must do to bring a little bit of Heaven’s ways to Earth.

20100707 New (Nicene Creed 1)

Nicene Creed Part I

"We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen."

Unlike most ancient belief systems, we do not believe in multiple gods, nor do we believe that God has only specific domains over which He has power. God is also not distant or uninterested in the world. Rather, we know God to be the One who created both the whole physical universe and the heavenly realities that we cannot see. Even more than that, He lovingly cares for His creation and actively works for the salvation of His prized creation, mankind, whom He made in His own Image.

Being made in God’s Image does not mean that God the Father looks like us, rather that we are made to resemble Him. We are made to resemble Him in His Essence, that is Love. We have intelligence, free will, memory, and the ability to love. In all of these things, we reflect God’s Nature and are meant to demonstrate His goodness to the world.

God is all-powerful, that is to say that everything in the universe is completely within His power. The only thing He never directly changes is human freedom. Rather than take away part of what makes us so special, He chooses to act in other ways that draw greater good out of the evils that we do.

God is all-knowing, that is to say that He perceives all aspects of all things in the whole universe through all time at all times. God is also eternal, that is not just to say that He has been in existence forever, but also to say that His existence has no reference to time. He created time and space for our world, not for Himself. He perceives all time already laid out before Him.

God is Loving, Merciful, and Just. Even though mankind sinned against God, He still reached out to us time and time again. That is not to say that He does not punish our offenses, but rather to say that He forgives far more than we deserve. God has a deep, abiding and passionate love for mankind that we have not nor can do anything to deserve. Rather, He has asked simply that we accept a loving relationship with Him, accepting Him as our God, and we shall be His people.