my Savior

I am taking a Christianity class and every week we have to post our reflections on a discussion forum and this week our professor told us to respond to the question who is God to you.  I sat in the library writing praises about the God who has captured my heart in His consuming fire.  This is what I came up with:

“Love never fails.  But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and prophecy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears…Now we see but a poor reflection in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:8-12) 

God is everything to me, He is the beginning, the end, and all the days that fall between.  His love and His power transcend my conceptions of time and space.  His ways are so much higher than mine that my understandings of Him are always deepening and transforming.  I think on an intellectual level I have always believed in God, but as I have grown in my experiences my relationship with God has also grown.  At some point in my life, my belief turned into faith and the knowledge I held in my head infiltrated every other aspect of my life and my heart.  The beauty I find in my changing understanding of who God is is that through the change I undergo God always remains constant. 

God is a provider to me, with Him anything is possible, but without Him nothing is.  The beauty of my faith in Him is that it is not about the beauty of my faith itself but the fact that it is through the lens of my faith that I see everything else about my life.  Faith is not about perfect understanding but the peace that goes beyond understanding.  I think that it is impossible for us as humans to ever wrap our minds around all that God is, but in faith I find peace knowing that His power is above my capacity to comprehend.

God is perfect through our imperfection.  I believe that God is perfect in His ways, and He brings me reconciliation through His son Jesus.  I believe that Jesus is the mediator between God and His flawed creation.  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5: 17-21)  The last sentence of that scripture has been so integral in shaping my beliefs about God.  I believe He physically sent His son to die on a cross so that we might be restored in our relationship with Him.  And I believe He did this when we were sinners, and I believe that there is such beauty in that image of sacrificial love.  God had His son become my worst so that I might become His best and live in the light and wholeness of His love.

I realize that most of the ideas I hold about who God is are rooted in faith, but for me this is a matter that cannot be purely intellectual.  To me, faith in God has to be more than belief in His existence; it is a condition of the heart.  To me, faith is God meeting my hunger with His righteousness, my emptiness with His fullness, and my brokenness with His perfect healing.  And in the end, my understandings of God have nothing to do with me or my religiosity; they have everything to do with the faithfulness that He has revealed to me through the sacrifice of Jesus, so that I might experience and assurance of life in Him.