Oh God

I know several people who are hospital chaplains, trying to be the heart of God for families going through difficult times. I was not surprised when one told me that other than church, the hospital emergency room is where God's name is used the most. When we come to the end of ourselves we cry out, “Oh God...!”

John 3:16 is probably the best known verse in the Bible, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son ... " God and God alone understands that kind of love. There is no greater comfort in this world than knowing that God loves you.

Jesus told Nicodemus he could not see the kingdom of God unless he was born again. Jesus said we must be born of water and the Spirit. I was taught that the water was the water of baptism, but I have come to wonder if we are not all born of the water when our mother's water breaks. Silly? Maybe, but I always wonder about the things we all have in common.

Does geography based eternity seem unbiased? Does the Bible affirm favoritism? The more I read the Bible the more I wonder how a John 3:16 God would send people to hell, people who never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel. Besides, aren't we more than capable of condemning ourselves?

Can good exist apart from God? I believe every second of our life we are wooed by the Spirit of God and presented with continuous choices of whether or not to respond to the love of God or our own ego. To say the Holy Spirit waits on missionaries seems terribly short sighted. When a person responds to the promptings of the Spirit of God they think things, say things, do things out of step with their own nature. Isn't the doing part the witness of whether or not a person is in conversation, relationship with God? Who am I to separate myself from others because of some arbitrary label?

Paul writes in Romans 1:20 that none of us have an excuse for not knowing God because creation testifies to God's greatness ... if we will listen. Does Paul mean just the church or is creation God's witness to everyone? Is the person who knows God the one who crosses the road to help the wounded, the broken, the orphan, the widow? Or is the person who knows God religious? Should they not be one and the same? Are they? What does Scripture say in 1 John 1:7 or even Isaiah 2:5? What is walking in the light all about?

Should I allow your sin to separate me from you? Should you allow my sin to separate you from me? Romans 3:23 says both of us have fallen short of the glory of God. Where in Scripture are we called to compare our sins to see who has fallen furthest? Maybe it is best to leave that to God. Maybe instead of focusing on each other's sins we should focus on hearing God for our self and responding to God's Spirit. If we respond to God's Spirit, not knowing it is God's Spirit, won't God reshape, reform, transform us? Isn't obedience better than lip service?

I suppose this makes me a heretic by the standards of many. I neither deny sin nor its consequences. What I am saying is that I have not been given a plumb line to measure the sins of others, especially when there is a forest in my own eyes. Have you?