Non-Negotiables

What are the non-negotiables on your faith?

I believe God is the creator of everything that is.  God’s character is love – a love we cannot understand and can only begin to experience.  God is not a God who creates and abandons.  God is involved in God’s creation, every day, all the time.  That involvement does not remove the will of God’s creation, for if it did, we could not love.

 

In God’s love, God sent Jesus, his son, and himself, to us to show us who God is – the infinite nature of God’s love. Through the son we learn that forgiveness, mercy, and grace are real and are for all of us. Through the son we learn how to live, here on earth, and there, in heaven.

 

God remains with us as the Holy Spirit, and through the spirit, as an example of God’s continuing grace, we can communicate with God, and are made whole.

 

God’s body on earth is the church – the union of God’s creation, sharing God’s gifts to demonstrate God’s love to all. 

 

These beliefs are derived from the whole picture of the Bible, from my experience as a member of the Body of Christ, and from the nudging of the Holy Spirit.  I pull back from the word non-negotiable; my faith is dependent on the truth of God, and is not a full or complete reflection of God’s truth.  In that light, the truth of God’s reality is the non-negotiable, not my understanding of God.  In other words, God exists outside of my beliefs, and where my beliefs fall short (and they will), the reality of who God is is the “gold standard” of my faith.

 

The Reality of Doctrine

St. Louis

In Wishful Thinking, Buechner says, "No matter how fancy and metaphysical a doctrine sounds, it was a human experience first."

I have yet to find anyone who can adequately explain the doctrine of the trinity. There are those who come close, but their analogies and descriptions always somehow fail. I don't find that to be evidence against the idea of God being three in one, but only confirmation that God is bigger than our words can ever describe and more complex than we can understand.

However, the belief that God is creator, sustainer and redeemer is part of my faith. It was articulated by others, long before I was born, but my experience supports it. I see the beauty of the creation of God all around me - in nature, in animals, and in the people who walk through life on this planet with me. I see the power of the grace of redemption through Christ - how impossible it is to forgive and love, and how, with the example of Christ, we do it anyway. I see the sustaining power of the holy spirit in the way people are able to survive the unsurvivable and in the beauty of worship.

I may not be able to explain how God is one and yet three at the same time, but human experience tells me it is so.