Who is God? Who am I?

Two years ago, if someone told you that you couldn’t leave your house or sing hymns in church, you might have laughed it off. When something inconceivable comes along it’s hard not to dismiss it entirely. So when people try to explain who God is, we might be tempted to ignore them too.

Familiar concepts
Explaining strange concepts is hard, so to help you might take a shared experience and relate that to the new concept. Which is why in the Bible John weaves together the concept of life, light and truth, to describe who God is. The other gospel writers jump straight to the action, to Jesus’ life, yet John starts at the very beginning with God himself as the focus.

The key to it all
Do you remember the last time you went somewhere new and had to decipher a map. The best maps have a key to help you decipher them and find the real points of interest. John says that the key to understanding God is to know who Jesus is. He gives us a key ‘the Word’, and opens his good news like this. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1

Who, what, where?
John opens with the most important news in human history, before anything existed, God existed, and in the beginning ‘the Word’ created the universe. At the start of the Bible we are introduced to the beautiful, complex, creator God. The Word we are told was with God and was God and we know him as Jesus. Jesus, who is the source of life and light itself, which means we all need to expand or amend our view of him. Why? Because if we think that Jesus was just a man or even a great teacher then we’re not even close, if we think he was a prophet that doesn’t cut it either. The Bible says we exist because Jesus spoke everything into being and he sustains us, that means that we are alive because of Jesus.

Does he care?
Yet does Jesus really care? What do we know about the heart of God? Well the Bible reveals that God cares for you more than you can imagine. He cares enough to show up in person, to live as part of a poor family, to be rejected, over looked and abused because he cares for you.

Too much to say
The problem is that there isn’t enough space to tell you how much Jesus cares, but the good news is, that is what Easter is all about. So I pray that over the next few weeks we might listen together and discover more about God and how much he cares for us.

Want to know more now?
If you want to hear more now, here is a talk which explains why Jesus matters so much and what we discover about ourselves in the process.

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