God is IN His people. And that’s always been His plan. He created Adam and Eve and you and me in His image. He literally imprinted our souls with His DNA. He left His fingerprints all over us from the earliest days of forming us in the womb. We were meant to reflect His Spirit in everything.
But the world was broken by sin… The creation was given the choice to abandon the Creator… And a barrier of separation was put up between God’s heart and ours.
God was FOR His people, but that wasn’t enough. God was WITH His people, but that wasn’t enough. Jesus was ONE OF His people, but that wasn’t enough. Through the Spirit, God was once again IN His people. Romans 5:5 says, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
God is IN His people. And that’s the ultimate goal of the Church… To be the vehicle that God moves through to be IN the hearts of every single person He created. The Church exists to create environments and opportunities for its culture to tear down the barrier between their hearts and their Creator. Anything else is a waste of energy and resources. The Church was never meant to gather an audience for a show. The Church was created to reflect the God who is IN us.
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Make sure you check out the first three parts of the drawing…
#1 - “God Is FOR People.”
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October 29th, 2011 at 12:08 pm
Isn’t “He literally imprinted our souls with His DNA. He left His fingerprints all over us from the earliest days of forming us in the womb.” a bit dramatic rather than factual? A bit like telling us how many drops of blood Jesus shed from the cross as though the number matters as much as the act.
I am 100% certain that the Bible doesn’t mention DNA. Why? Because no one ever heard of DNA when the Bible was written. Now I know that doesn’t make your statement false; it’s just that you can’t prove it. Or maybe someone captured Jesus’s DNA from the cloth of Turin. I would say that was a good thing, but I’m afraid you don’t make those other leaps (where truth is more important than fact). Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.
I like how this series shows the intimate side of our relationship with God. the God to whom we can freely speak and share our deepest concerns. I hope you consider writing about the ineffable God also, the God before whom we are so awe-stuck that we cannot speak. God is both, and I’m sure you know that.
October 29th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Of course the Bible doesn’t use the term “DNA.” But it does say very clearly, “God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” If DNA are the basic genomes that make us who we are, I think it’s easy to lay modern terms over Biblical language and say that God molded our DNA to look like Him. I’m not sure that’s a big leap to make.
I don’t have another series planned, although God is definitely an awesome God who takes away our very breath. We see that all through the Bible when people were unable to approach God face-to-face because of His awesome presence. That would be a great series to work through sometime.
This particular last few days, though, have been fleshing out some of the ministry philosophy that Reset is going through. We’ve always been very “attractional,” with the mindset of “if we do church well enough, people will come to us.” But if God is FOR people, WITH people, ONE OF people and IN people, His Church should reflect that. So we’ve been moving in a more missional direction of being FOR, WITH and ONE OF people in our community so that God can move through us to be IN people.
October 29th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Makes sense in context. Actually, from what I see on FB (which isn’t all that much), it looks as though you are doing a fabulous job of taking Jesus to your whole town.
November 17th, 2011 at 6:59 pm
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