Christianity 101

One of the more difficult things I deal with in the Christian life is waking up on Sundays for church. Honestly, this is just a matter of laziness and discipline with going to bed earlier on Saturday nights, but I still struggle with it. It hasn't been built into me that I need to go to church on Sunday morning because I don't live in a Christian family. Thus, the church that I claim to have to gone to my entire Christian life, probably does not lay the same claim on me as an attendant.

However, I did decide to go to my church retreat this winter. The theme was Christianity 101, perhaps an appropriate theme for my entry as well. When I saw those words, I was disappointed inside. I like for church messages to be meaningful and let me look at things in a light I had not found before. I usually don't like to waste time with something I've heard already. Gazing upon "Christianity 101" sunk my heart into my stomach because I would have no choice but to endure whatever mundane message was conjured up.

The retreat ended up being insanely insightful though. One of the main things I came away with was how to interpret the Bible. Now, I know I'm one of the few who haven't been going to church their entire lives, but even so, I've gotten acquainted with church culture very intimately. One of the most basic things I can think of is to read the Bible and then discern what it teaches us. Sam Ock once said to me that reading scripture was like food for your Holy Spirit. If you feed it, it'll become stronger and can be more active in your life, ie. help you resist temptation, be more like Christ, etc etc. But if you starve it, obviously it'll be weak and you'll probably fall much more often. This is why reading the Bible is so important. I'd like to think that I was reassured of that fact last semester and would often see my life improving after reading the night before.

The strange truth is that I was not completely right in reading the Bible this way. We often look to the Bible to give us wisdom, to tell us what to do, and to make us better Christians. There is nothing wrong with this, but this is not the most important aspect of the Bible. If you can recall one of my previous entries, I referred to Jesus' declaration that the Pharisees were blind. This was because they knew the Old Testament forwards and backwards yet they didn't realize that it all pointed to Him, the Messiah and Christ. The Bible must mean the same to us. It's not something I should use to make my life better. It will of course do that but that's not it's function. The function of the Bible is to tell about Jesus Christ. And if an object ceases to complete its function, it's either faulty or I'm using it incorrectly.

Now of course we see what the Bible says about Jesus in the New Testament. There's no doubt about that. The whole thing is about Him and we see His name everywhere in it. It' gets more ambiguous when you turn to the Old Testament. Everyone remembers the story of Noah's Ark. I didn't even go to church when I was younger and I know that Noah his family and all the animals of the Earth onto his ark when the flood came. Something you can get out of this is that God has a huge amount of wrath. He flooded the Earth, and also promised that He wouldn't ever do it again. Yet it's harder to see how this points to Jesus (or at least it was for me). Pastor Hank (the speaker) told us that this is God given evidence that a single man can save all of mankind, much like Jesus did.

From here on out, it becomes much easier to analyze passages with this in mind. The story of Jacob and Esau is about two brothers, where one betrays the other in an insanely bad way but he forgives his brother and embraces him when the two meet again. I remember I wrote a xanga entry about this when I first read it because I found it so moving. Esau At the time, I thought about how I should use this example and forgive those around me. Yet, this also shows what kind of forgiveness Jesus showed, that He loved and died and forgave the people who hated Him.

I never know how to conclude these entries.