e*b 2010 Week 4

For Essentials Blue Online Worship Training Course with Dan Wilt.

As Essentials Blue comes to a close, I have been asked to compile a Christian Worldview. What follows is where I landed...

In the beginning, God, in the most amazing creative expression, created. Eden stood in perfected beauty, yet God desired relationship with His creation. He made mankind who bore His image and His likeness and gave him the ability to articulate and reflect back to Himself the worship of all creation.

Man, however, chose to rebel and ultimately severed his relationship with his Creator. Sin and its consequences fell into the created order and God’s heart was deeply saddened.

All of time since has been marked by God’s relentless pursuit of man, to raise him up from his ‘bent’ position and bring him back into vertical communion with Himself (1). He calls to us through our desire for beauty and relationship, and through our longing for justice and spirituality (2).

God revealed Himself as the voice behind the echos through the person of Jesus. His rescue plan was not only enacted, but completed. Heaven met earth and “moved into the neighborhood” (3). No longer is man lost and without hope. No longer is heaven far away and distant. God is Creator, God is King over all, God is Trinity, God is Savior...and He is HERE!

God’s Kingdom has come. Heaven meets earth in every person in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. We are His Temple. It is our mission to be the hands and feet of the Kingdom to come, to be part of God’s new creation, to live as agents of the new creation here and now (4).

“It is time” as NT Wright says, “in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning.” (5)

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

1.Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence (Grand Rapids: Hamewith Books, 1989, 1995) p. 59-60

NT Wright, “Simply Christian” Harper One, Grand Rapids, 2006, Part 1

John 1:14 (The Message)

NT Wright, “Simply Christian” Harper One, Grand Rapids, 2006 P. 236

Ibid. 237