Different ways of relating to God - Monday Morning Mail 18th May

By -
Good morning all!

Yesterday morning we continued our "back to basics" series looking at some of the basics of the Christian faith from different angles. We were thinking in particular of different ways that people relate to God at different times in their lives.

Of course God is the same God, Jesus is the same Lord. We all need to keep doing the basics of meeting together as Christians, meditating on God's Word and praying. But we are also all different, each with our unique personality and gifts, and that shapes the way we pray and so on.

Theologian Gary Thomas (in his book Sacred Pathways) identified 9 different ways of connecting with God. All are valuable, but some people are better at some than at others:

  • Naturalists love being outdoors and feel much more connected to God when they are surrounded by the natural world.

  • Sensates find that awe, beauty and splendour, in art, architecture, music and so on are often paths which lead them to God.

  • Traditionalists value ritual, symbols and structure and often familiar language.

  • Ascetics find it easy to connect to God through simplicity, fasting and retreats.

  • Activists find that they meet with God through standing against evil and confronting injustice.

  • Caregivers show their love for God by practical service of and love for others.

  • Enthusiasts find God in joyful celebration and need their hearts to be moved.

  • Contemplatives love the experience of just spending time with God and wanting to be with him.

  • Intellectuals need to have their minds stimulated.

I think there are several important things that we can learn from this.

One is to do with looking after ourselves and our own walk with God. I find that if I just use one of these ways of connecting with God, I quickly end up feeling spiritually dry. I need variety, so I try to build in some of the other ways of connecting with God into my weekly and monthly routines.

We shouldn't expect other people to be the same as us, and that's especially true when it comes to church. Some people value tradition, others value passionate encounter with God; it's often hard - though not impossible - to do both together. (I think we managed it on Thursday night at the Ascension Day service!)

We shouldn't beat ourselves up if we don't live up to other people's ways of walking with God. God has made us each unique - we need to learn to walk with him as ourselves, connecting with him in the ways that work for us (which might sometimes not be the ways that come most naturally to us). God doesn't call us to be clones of each other; he calls us to follow Jesus as we are, and let him transform us into our new selves, who are still us, just us-in-Christ, us-in-relationship-with-God.

May God help us see how we can best be following him this week; where we can helpfully make changes so that we connect with him in ways that fit better with who he has made us to be!

God bless,

John

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Any Questions?

By -
There is one sermon slot free in the Autumn service rota, and I'd like to use it to answer a question that we have about Christianity - a point of doctrine, how to respond in a certain situation, anything along those lines. If you've got any ideas, just post them as comments on this post - completely anonymous!
Read more

Book of the Year?

By -
Image
I read quite a lot of books. The best book I've read this year is probably The Good God by Michael Reeves. It's a book about the Trinity. The big point is that the Trinity is central to understanding who God is, to understanding the difference between Christianity and other religions, and to understanding how we can be saved. Reeves doesn't say anything new, but he explains the theology very accessibly and clearly, quoting and explaining "big name" theologians like Athanasius, Augustine, Luther and Richard of St Victor in a way that is accessible to all, and he does it very well. It would be my top recommendation for anyone wanting to understand the Trinity and why it matters, whether they were a new Christian or training for ordination. My one criticism of the book is it could be very good for ecumenism as well - building links between evangelical theology and the Roman Catholics and Orthodox, but the end lets it down in that sense. Trinitarianism is tru
Read more

Monday Morning Mail, 7th April 2014

By -
Image
Good Morning! Yesterday morning, we looked at John 12:1-11, which is the story of Mary anointing Jesus' feet with perfume that cost a year's wages. We saw that Mary's grateful, responsive, loving, extravagant, disgraceful love was exactly the right response to Jesus, even though it left her with no money, no provision for the future and her reputation in tatters. In contrast, Judas was shown to be hiding his real sin behind trying to look pious. One of the ways we applied it was by thinking about whether we hold back from worshipping God for fear of what other people think, whether that's when singing at church or when speaking to our friends at work or at the pub, or even whether we're sometimes, like Judas, people who sit on the sidelines and snipe at those who are putting their hearts into worshipping God. We also saw how Mary's action predicts what Jesus is about to do – that she becomes the servant who washes Je
Read more