ugmsac

Website Links

Description

As I was leaving later I passed through the lobby at United, and down the hall I heard a person sobbing great heaving sobs and saw two people in each other's arms. And I wondered, "Do they have hope?" You can't tell from the sobs. The hopeful and the hopeless both sob when someone precious is amputated from your life. The difference is mainly on the inside, and then how you live. The Crucial Question Faced Every Christmas Now I realize that there have been very sophisticated attempts to show that statements like Patty's are not based on the reality of God outside of us, but are the basis of the creation of the idea of God inside of us. In other words people like the German philosopher Ludwig Feurbach said in 1841 that God is not a reality outside of us that we can trust and obey; instead he is a projection of our own needs onto reality. God does not create us, we create God. It's precisely because we feel what Patty felt that people are forced to create a God to believe in—the loss of a child would be unbearable without hope in an afterlife. And so over time God is created to sustain that hope. He has no other reality than we create for him. That is the question every one of us faces every Christmas. Is this story of the Son of God coming as a human, born of a virgin, living a life of sinless love, and dying for sinners that all who believe might have eternal life—is this story a creation of human imagination because we need it to be true? Or is it true, and therefore we need to believe it? Is Patty's viewpoint—that death is bearable because there is hope—the impulse for creating an imaginary Christmas story? Or is that viewpoint an impulse created by the reality of the Christmas story? The answer to that question is more important than anything you will think about this Christmas—or for that matter, all the rest of your life. Does our sense of need—for God and forgiveness and help and hope—cause us to create God? Or do we have all those needs because we were in fact created by God and have rebelled against him? The Self-Authenticating Power of Scripture One of the ways to go about answering that question is to listen patiently to the different testimonies from the Bible about why the Son of God came into the world. You see, I believe this book is inspired by God and is therefore very powerful to vindicate its own truthfulness. It is like a two-edged sword that penetrates to the division of bone and marrow. And when people give it a chance, the result is often that not believing what it says becomes a moral impossibility. Its testimonies are too penetrating, its witnesses too diverse, its insights too high, its vision of divine things too wonderful, its authority too compelling, its love too rare, its Savior too radical that it should be the mere creation of sinful men. Six Reasons for Jesus' Coming So I want to let six of the witnesses speak and testify to why the Son of God came into the world. The witnesses are Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the writer to the Hebrews. The answers they give are six reasons for Jesus' coming: 1. to ransom many, 2. to call sinners, 3. to give sight to the morally blind, 4. to divide households, 5.

Companies nearby