Sunday, December 14, 2008

Being Human ... Image working on Likeness

Christmas is one of those times I ruminiate, refocus and remember Jesus is “God in the flesh”. It’s a seasonal celebration of God coming to us in human form. What is a human? I allege I’m a human, and assume that you are also. Some days we produce enough evidence to prove we are human, some days too much!

The Jesus who comes to us in humanity existed before he arrived among us . . .

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

As God, Jesus became a human. Again, “what is a human?” Page one of “the Book” reads . . .

God said, "Let us make humans in our image, in our likeness” . . . so God created us humans in his own image, in their image God created us; male and female.

Humans are, “Divine creations who bear His image as moral, spiritual, creative, rational, relational and responsible”. All of us as human bear God’s image. Often marred, defaced but not so destroyed as it cannot be renewed through personal response of faith in Jesus. Good news, the human Jesus came to die and rise again for us to make “born-again faith” possible.

Hold it ... image is only half the “human equation”. There’s also likeness. “Divine likeness is our being compassionate, related to broader humanity, serving, grace-giving, incarnating truth through lifestyle” Growing in resemblance of the Divine likeness is the big challenge of being human.

As an image bearer, how am I working on likeness? Christ-likeness is God’s measure of true humanness ... its how the young church summed up Jesus as God in the flesh amongst them.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Spirituality … a Buzzword that won’t ever really buzz-off

I’ve been doing some “inside-head-thinking" … brain-buzzing … now a “think-dialogue” from me to/with you . . .

Our worlds have always had prevailing “buzz words”. They come, make a sound that gets attention – and then buzz off. Good riddance! But not all purported to be buzz-words are in fact so … neither should or even will they “buzz-off” at our wishful requests. Spirituality is a non-buzz-off, buzzword.

What does the word spirituality convey?

It is a “trans-religious word” you know. We live in a world abounding with spirituality and spiritualities. But note this, religions and faiths never effectively build their focal points from generalized definitions. Effective and living faith always demands faith-development growing from particularized and applied definition. For Christians and Christian churches, spirituality is vitally linked with the adjective, “Christian”. Christian Spirituality is a particularized spirituality. Some of the recent writers my eyes have read define it as:

“The conscious human response to God that is both personal and ecclesial.”

“… the quest for a fulfilled and authentic Christian existence, involving the bringing together of the fundamental ideas of Christianity and the whole experience of living on the basis of and within the Christian faith”.

“The spiritual renovation that comes from Jesus is nothing less than an invasion of natural human reality by a supernatural life from God”.


The essential aspects of these and other definitions of Christian spirituality are; the human soul and existence, being lived in a development and synergism of the life of God in Jesus Christ, which calls for personal and communal response as the conscious foundation for living within culture and society.

Oh, one more thought for your thinker … unlike generalized spirituality, Christian spirituality is not trans-religious, though it is trans-cultural.