Christian faith is the story of our world and of the God who loves it. It is a paradox of a God who creates and sustains all things and yet knows and loves us intimately. It is a tale of unrequited love where God sacrifices Godself for a world that will not fully return this adoration. It is a challenge to acknowledge that ‘I am not the centre of the world and that something exists beyond me.’ It is also, and perhaps most amazingly, a gift: the chance to live individually and in community in relation to a loving God.
This great story of God begins where we read in the Bible what an amazing world God created and how this world relates to God and to itself. Here we find the beginnings of reflections on how we relate to the world around us and to each other. Very soon in the story, the world becomes not as it should be as; something we still recognise today. The Bible stories help us reflect upon the sad tales of a broken world with fractured relationships – in the past, and as we see it today.
Fortunately, even as the story of God records a downhill spiral of the world, it also narrates the actions of a God who will never give up on the world God has made. Yes, there is darkness in the Bible, but there is also a golden thread of God working, often in the background, to save his people.
Through these stories we learn more about ourselves – our humanity, our reflections upon good and evil, upon life, death, mercy and sacrifice – and also more about God. Since, like a library, the Bible is made of lots of different sorts of writings, there are many different ways in which the story of God is told, which help us as we try to fill in a picture of what God is like, how we can reach God, and what it might look like to live in relation to God.
We learn many things about God and God’s character, but what runs through the whole Bible is God’s love for us and God’s wish for us to flourish. This wish is ultimately expressed in the person of Jesus. Jesus is God himself, become human, to be with us. He shows us how to live, he teaches about love for God and love for others, and he shows what life could be like, and will be like, when God lives with his people.
Ultimately, Jesus’s life is brought to an abrupt end in an agonizing death on a cross. Yet even this darkest moment in God’s story is not the end. In some amazing way, this death somehow deals a deadly blow to the power of evil in our world, giving hope for a better way and a new future. In an amazing twist, Jesus is raised from death, appears to many people who knew him, and returns to God where he prays for us all and awaits a return to come and reclaim and remake the world for God.
In the time between Jesus’s departure and his coming again, God has not abandoned the world. Instead, God’s Spirit has come to live within his people. It may sound strange, and it may be difficult to comprehend, but somehow God still lives among us. We are not in this world alone. God is with us, enabling us to live more like Jesus and helping us to worship. As Christians we live in the light of God’s Spirit and look forward to a day when Jesus returns and all the darkness of the world around us will be resolved.
The Church
The story of the Church is inseparably intertwined with the story of God. The Church, as a people of God, is born out from the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of God’s Spirit. The Church is a people who worship God, thanking God for all that God has blessed us with. It is a people who pray that God will move with power within the fractured world in which we live. It is a people who try to live, admittedly very imperfectly, following Jesus’s example and in gratitude for all that God has one for us, in particular, for Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. The Church is a people who constantly reflect upon the stories of God constantly learning more about God and what that means for the way we live today. The Church is also a people who trust in the power of Jesus’s death and resurrection to deal with all the wrong that we have done, individually and corporately, and the power of God’s Spirit to help us live differently in the light and hope of God’s future for us.
The Church’s historical reflections upon God result in statements of belief known as the Creeds, one of which is the Apostles’ Creed:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
Creeds, or statements of belief such as this one, are human corporate reflections upon God’s story, attempting to summarise concepts which are really hard to grasp. They might seem difficult, complex, or hard to accept, but that is because they are attempts at summarising God!
Often Christians recite these creeds together in worship as a way of affirming their faith together. As we do this, we reflect on an amazing God who is difficult to fathom and yet came to meet us in the person of Jesus. Effectively and at its simplest level, if you want to know God, get to know Jesus by reading the bits of the Bible that tell you about him.
An Adventure?
We began by describing the Christianity as a faith, a story, a paradox, a challenge and a gift, and it is all these things. Perhaps most of all, however, it is an adventure. It is an adventurous exploration of God – what Christians call ‘Theology’ – an activity we all do individually and together. It is an adventure of taking our place within God’s people, warts and all. It is an adventure of charting a new path in a world which has purpose, meaning and hope precisely because it is God’s world. It is an adventure in forgiveness where all relationships are transformed because God first loved and forgave us. It is an adventure in what it looks like to live differently.
It is God’s Story, and we all are invited to come along for the adventure. Churches are full of people who are on the same journey, encouraging each other in faith just as we all explore new horizons together.
One day, when the adventure ends for each of us, we will be able to look back and see God’s hand in our own stories, and also look forward to being in God’s presence forever in an ongoing, never-ending adventure.
If you are reading this and you are interested in learning more about God’s story and the adventure that can await each one of us, please drop down to your local church where they will be pleased to help you. If you don’t know where your nearest one is, please click here.
For more about the Christian Faith, click here: www.churchofengland.org/our-faith/what-we-believe
For more about the Bible, and how it illuminates Christian faith, click here: bibleproject.com