Jonny Heart: My answers on Whipple Peeves' thread

Saturday, June 30, 2007

My answers on Whipple Peeves' thread

Whipple Peeves is a fellow blogger who prompted these two questions and I am letting you see my answers.

1.) What Makes The Church The Church?

What makes the Church a Church is a gathering of people who worship God, learn about his nature and commands, and help each other through trials and struggles in their lives. That is what makes a Church. But what the church is, It is the Kingdom of God. The very kingdom God said he would establish and later justify and reconcile to him so that God may once again dwell with his most precious creation. The church is Christ's bride, in which by a bond between us and Christ we are able to come to the father. Through this Kingdom the whole world may know that Jesus loves them. I quote John 17:20-23 "My prayer is not for them alone (the disciples) I pray also for those who believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and i am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and yo in me. may the be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."

2.) What Makes A Christian A Christian

Well, the very title of Christian means to be a follower of Christ. Now that can be a very broad statement to summarize yet I think the core comes down to this, Believing in your heart and confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord. If you truly believe in your heart then you will be in a continuous state of discipleship where Jesus the Christ is your rabbi and as Rob Bell says (creator of the devotional nooma videos) "every great disciple wants to be like their Rabbi. To many people only confess with their mouth to be Christians yet live against everything he taught. That is where the continual confession comes in. Through works and acts your faith can be seen and judged and if a bad vine doesn't produce fruit then it is cut down and thrown in the fire proving that it was never a true or good disciple to begin with. When reading Romans 10:9 to many people take being a Christian for granted and think it easy. What really happened is they failed to read the first ten chapters that describe and lead up to that very statement. The real test of Christianity if found in Romans 1:17 where it says; "the righteous will live by faith." To me submitting your will and life to Jesus is the real Christian. Be like THE Rabbi!

To give your own thoughts on this thread go to http://www.whipplesfaith.blogspot.com/

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."