Eric's Sunday Sermon; Whose God is Yours?

We can read all the texts we want to get answers as to "who" God is. We can read all the sermons from a to z. We can study the Holy Books. But in there we cannot find what God is to us.

Many good folks will read or recite to you passages out of the Bible and say that that is what God is to everyone. How "head in the sand" is that? In our humble abode we have an almost over the top love affair with Jesus. We have several picture renditions of him hanging on the walls. They are the classics, an Ascension, one with him gently hanging out with a small child and that ever classic head shot of him looking near regal with long hair and a beard. But I got news for you, he very well may have looked like something totally different. Now this guy walked the earth and we still don't know now just what he looked like, how more so for God the Father.

There are two cool lines in the Bible that can send us off in two totally different directions. Genesis 1:27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And: 1 John 4:16 God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ... God is love.
Those who live in God's love live in God, and God lives in them.

So if we choose to say that the above concepts are antagonistic to each other, we are just looking for problems. If we choose to read them as compatible we are looking for insight. If God is Love and He made us in his image - then we are Love. As plain as the rather large protuberance on my face. But where does that leave us for we are well to understand that there are hundreds of types of love and each person has their own feelings of love. Let us just say that there are well more than 100 billion different loves out there.

Now we can see that there are many different kinds of love. But yet they are all the same. Of course you should be looking at this page and saying IMPOSSIBLE! For all to be different and yet the same is an impossibility. Yet it is so. I think one would have to be sequestered from society to have never heard these two terms: "With God all things are possible" and "Love makes all things possible". I don't think that they mean the same thing in our everyday parlance. Yet in reality they mean just that - the same thing. For some reason we have so anthropomorphised God that we think of God as a being. We are far better off conceptualizing God as pure energy, an energy of Love. Maybe I should swap out my pictures for ones resembling the sun. But those are of Jesus which is a whole other matter.

What is really cool here and fires me up is that this is one thing that even silly old lacking of discipline me can do. I can love. Even when I feel in pain or sickness I can still love. If we think about it, it kind of throws meditation and prayer out the window. Why would you practice those instead of just loving and being a part of God, no real need to talk to God for that would just be talking to a portion of yourself. No that is not deep, it is really easy to understand if you try with a little bit of love.

I carry my darling bride around in me all day long. She is a part of me. I think most understand what I mean by that and can relate. How much easier is it to carry around God in you as a part of you?

It does not seem to me that it is that simple. Because it should not be that simple. If it were we would all just hold hands in our pajamas and bliss out into eternity. There must be something special about love that makes us need to strive and struggle.

I am going to say something right now that I do not think I will love me for saying, if you get my drift. Nothing worth having is free. There is no charge for love. And there is no requirement of us to receive God's love. So what the heck? How does free love cost us? Probably you know where I am going with this. It is impossible. When I earn someone's love it is priceless. My wife and I fell in love and oh boy I liked that feeling. But over years, through fights and adjustments and illness and poverty and wealth we are earning each other's love. That deep abiding lover produced a little boy who is a bundle of love but a lot of darned work. Worth every priceless moment. Without the struggles the love would not be as rich. So maybe we look back on prayer and meditation as the work that will pay the price for us to get more "in love" with love, which is to say God.

Sin is a word that has been used way to much to declare that certain folks are going to Hell. Sin is not all that wild and crazy. Sin is getting out of sync with love. If it blocks your love don't do it. If in the long run it will hurt someone and is avoidable do not do it.

Repent means to turn around. It is that simple. Turn your back on all things not loving. If you cannot find love in doing something - change. One day we see our honey and are filled with love. The next we are not. Take my word for it, that is an inside job. It is not the circumstances that change you, it is in you. And I hope that today we reached some understanding that that thing in you is Love and that Love is God.

Whose God is it anyway? Or maybe for you it is "who's" God is it anyway? Now figuring that out is harder than grasping love. Who has love anyway? You and I do.You even have some of my God in you. So now maybe you can understand this old Christian when I say, Namaste.