GOD Is...(What it is-Part 5: final definition)

The power of Words.
This is the final installment of attempting to grasp some of the most important Words in our lives by investigating their meaning. Words like Life, Love, Story, & Christmas were selected because I believe that one’s perspective on this short list shapes the lens of how much of the rest of life is interpreted, particularly as a Christian. Hopefully you have gained insight from this series and will pass along what you have learned. The final term is the single most important one that provides shape for the previous ones. If you are just now joining, I can’t think of a better place to end or begin....GOD.
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Leo Tolstoy once wrote that “God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.”
Additionally, “god” (noun)as defined in Webster’s dictionary is “the supreme or ultimate reality; the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe”.

And in the fictional story of NARNIA :The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, when a character is asked to define who they are, the conversation goes as follows:
“ ‘I am a star at rest, my daughter,’ answered Ramandu.
‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’
‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’ ”

So, below is a collection of quotes that provide a glimpse about the character of God from various perspectives. I hope these ideas help to clarify or challenge your working DEFINITION of who GOD is, whether through agreement or disagreement. At best, the list is utilizing some thoughts from finite minds to glimpse into the infinite one, probably only understanding what God “is made of” and not completely what He is. This, as in the case of the other definitions, will I believe in turn ReDefine how you Live one way or another...
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“If God had a name, what would it be? And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with him in all his glory,what would you ask if you had just one question?
Yeah, Yeah, God is great.Yeah, Yeah, God is good...
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us, Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home...”
- Joan Osbourne song “What if God was one of Us”

“Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep, yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.” - HORACE MANN, Thoughts

“They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.”
- Emily Dickinson

“There is a God and He is good, and his love, while free, has a self imposed cost: We must be good to one another.” - GEORGE H.W. BUSH, RNC acceptance speech, August 18, 1988

“If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.”
- Voltaire

“God enters by a private door into each individual.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“After God created the world, He made man and woman. Then, to keep the whole thing from collapsing, He invented humor.”
- Guillermo Mordillo

“After 9/11, there were a lot of things being said about how the God of Islam and the God of the Christian faith were one and the same, but that's simply not true ... The God that I worship does not require me to kill other people. The God that I worship tells me I am to love my enemy, to give him food when he's hungry and water when he's thirsty.”
- FRANKLIN GRAHAM, Newsweek, Aug. 14, 2006

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.”
- Blaise Pascal

“We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them.” - Charles C. West

“We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity...We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.”
- HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

“God places the heaviest burden on those who can carry its weight.”
- Reggie White

“Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”
- Garth Brooks

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”
- St. Augustine

“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.”
- Stanley Lindquist

“Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway.”
- Mary C. Crowley

“God is an unutterable sigh, planted in the depths of the soul.”
- Jean Paul Richter

“We can never escape God’s lovely essence.”
- Sonnett Branche

“Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.”
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

“God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.”
- Harry Emerson Fosdick

“A lot of people are willing to give God credit, but so few ever give Him cash.”
- Robert E. Harris

“We always keep God waiting while we admit more importunate suitors.”
- Malcolm de Chazal

“People see God every day, they just don’t recognize him.”
- Pearl Bailey

“God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way.”
- Leighton Ford

“God’s will is not an itinerary, but an attitude.”
- Andrew Dhuse

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”
- Mother Teresa

“When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.”
- Charles L. Allen

“Of all created comforts, God is the lender; you are the borrower, not the owner.”
- Samuel Rutherford

“A man with God is always in the majority.”
- John Knox

“If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him ” - 1 JOHN 4:15-16
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LOVE Is...(What it is-Part 4)

For this installment of Defining some of life’s most important terms, I have simply selected the word LOVE. And, yes, I waited post-valentines day intentionally so both your chocolate “high” and possibly skewed view of love during that time could be over and done with in the month of February.
So, what is love? Cue, the song and image from the Saturday Night Live skit/movie “Night at the Roxbury”...Right? Not so much. Let’s see if the dictionary can get us somewhere.

While usually a source of insightful definitions, Webster’s cheaply defines Love as a noun: (luv) “Deep affection and warm feeling for another”. Hmmm. Still not getting anywhere.

Oddly enough, this post will be dated March 9th, 2011 and on this date and calendar year a religious holiday called “Ash Wednesday” is emphasized.
Ash Wednesday simply put is the 7th Wednesday before Easter and the 1st day of Lent. It is emphasized as a time for a variety of well-intentioned Christian denominations to fast, repent, and live in moderation due to spiritual discipline. For example, no chocolate during lent is a huge “sacrifice” for some participants. I feel your pain. And I completely understand the reasoning behind the emphasis. 2 Corinthians 5:15 admonishes all believers with this truth, “And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again”. Lent is correct conceptually but is quite often and unfortunately abused practically.

Irish rock band, U2, and their frontman, Bono, once had a press release in a New York City Kmart on Ash Wednesday. When asked if their was any connection to this particular day amidst the flashing blue lights, lead singer Bono slyly replied, “Ash Wednesday and Kmart—that about wraps us up.”
Hmmm. Thanks Bono for the amusement. Still not completely where we need to be on this definition of love.

So, if love is more than a noun or a holiday for giving cheap gifts (and expressing cheap sentiment not consistent with behavior the other days of the year), nor a religious emphasis time to “sacrifice” from your lifestyle something temporarily to show at best a seasonal devotion, what exactly and where exactly can we find the truest definition of Love?

Love for Christians is defined in a variety of ways. However, the Apostle John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, understood firsthand what Love was all about as he was graced with spending time with the only full embodiment of Love that has ever lived on planet earth.
1 John 4:7-21 provides us with one of the most amazing definitions of what authentic and consistent Love actually is. So here goes:

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
   God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
 We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.”


Love and Ash Wednesday--that about wraps this up!