Question Two: "What Are The Paths To God?"

Almost any Christian, reguardless of demonination or affiliation, will give the same answer...but without really thinking about it. Of course I believe that answer as well, but we almost assume that it is so easily understandable that all we need to do is say it the way we learned in evangelism class...and it will be an effective answer. To a skeptical and unbelieving world (two states of mind that I understand very well) it's not, it's too easy, too simple, too unbeliveable...but untimately it's too true. Despite it's truth we tend to relate it in a ho-hum "yeah he's the real deal...I guess" sort of way. We need to be strongly grounded in our most central and crucial Biblical beliefs...we need to answer this question for ourselves and answer it as if we are truly convinced. Miller's main point this evening was that despite all of our theology and explinations and points and lists, the ultimate dynamic of our salvation comes though the simple precept of our relashonship with God...it's a relashonal dynamic that is the crucial point...but we try to make it so much more (I will talk about this in a future entry because it represents the culmination of hours of frustration over religion and actions versus my relashonship with God). Miller related a story of a girl that came up to him and asked him "Why can you say that Jesus is the answer? Why haven't you studied other religions just as much as Christiantity before coming to this conclusion". Miller's answer: "If I've fallen in love with a woman, I don't need to sleep with fifty others to know that she is the one". Very simple, sharp, but very true. In our search for closeness with God we have done so many things to make the path to God more complicated, more filled with rules and tricks to master. We've taken the simple task of a spiritual relashonship and turned it into a system where we need to become neo-pharasees in order to be a Christian. Nothing could be farther from the teachings of Christ.