Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Christmas and Easter
Christmas and Easter are extremely important holidays in the Christian community; one holiday celebrates the birth of Christ and the other celebrates the rising of Christ from the dead. Therefore, it is not ironic that more people attend church around these two holidays than any other time throughout the year. You do not need to go to church every Sunday to consider yourself a Christian. However, attending church should still be a part of your life. Communion, the receiving of Christ, still needs to be obtained. Plus a sermon every once and awhile never hurt anyone.
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ReplyDeleteI wont argue the importance of these two holidays. As you said, Christ dying for our sins and then being raised back to life are the very basis for the Christian faith. The point I want to make is that, God’s tremendous gift to us – giving his son to be brutally killed – deserves an extreme response on our part. Lets say you have a dog that you love so much you would do anything for it, and keeps attacking the neighbors. The only choice you have is to kill it unless you send someone of much greater worth to pay the penalty, so that the dog could be forgiven for the injuries it already had caused and the ones that it would cause in the future. You decide that you will – knowing that, after experiencing an immeasurable amount of pain, he/she will come back to life– send the person you love most in this life. After this is all done, wouldn’t you be pretty let down if your dog no longer wished to have a close relationship with you? In fact, if that dog acted up even one more time in its entire life you would be extremely upset based on what you, and the person you love, suffered for it. Obviously this is a somewhat impractical analogy, but I think it communicates my point. Really, the point of this whole life is that God loves people and wants to have a real relationship with them.
ReplyDeleteThe video posted on my thesis further stresses the point I’m making. Christians absolutely need to get their minds wrapped around this and start living what they believe. If you don’t have a long enough attention span, at least watch the second half of this, but the entire video illustrates what the Christian life is.
I would just like to strongly express the fact that an individuals relationship with God is going to be a personal one. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to have to publicly show the relationship you do have. One person may be one who attends Church every Sunday and goes to Bible study every Wednesday as well, the other prays when they are alone or with close family. How does being in the presence of Church change the relationship that God has with you? God is also known for being forgiving, not everyone is comfortable with sharing their beliefs with the whole community. They would rather do things on their own time and how they want to do it. I want to emphasize that even another aspect of being a true Christian is to not show any bias to others based on their belief an how they practice it. Therefore, if one who believes that you have to go to Church every Sunday routinely is showing any kind of bias, rather it is feeling they are better than the other or if they think that they are not a true Christian, they are also being sinful and are acting in a way that is not what a TRUE Christian is supposed to do.
ReplyDeleteI am glad that you asked the question, "How does the being in the presence of church change the relationship that God has with you?" The idea of attending church has been largely converted into a "guilt-trip", trying to convince professing Christians that they need to attend to be a "good" Christian. If church is about God, and God is about a personal relationship with us, then the reality is that God isn't about us to coming to church if we don't want to. No one wants to hang out with someone that doesn't want to be with him or her. We want to hang out with people that want to be with us. When we commit to a close relationship with our Creator, it serves to reason that we are going to WANT to learn more about Him so that we can draw even closer to Him.
ReplyDeleteTo address your statement that Christians shouldn't "show any bias to others based on belief and how they practice it", I would agree, to an extent. Christians believe that everyone is equal before God; however, once a Christian reaches a point in her/his faith where s/he becomes certain that this faith is "truth", isn't s/he doing her/his fellow person a disservice by not presenting them with an opportunity to join? I certainly don't endorse ramming religion down anyone’s throat; however, a Christian should be capable of a civil discussion regarding their faith.
Again, i stress that Christians cannot know what they believe without studying the Bible to find out what their religion is about. Without Biblical study, one isn't challenged to respond to the Bible's ethics of radical living. Casually claiming Christianity, while living like everyone else doesn't impress anyone.
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