True Nature of God

What is your perspective on God, is it like this picture, He is this big giant just waiting to come and trample you down the moment you step out of line. Sadly this is the perspective many have, where does this perspective come from. Often it is from the church that preaches a gospel message which is not the truth. You might ask why would they do that? Simply the answer to that question is in most cases it is done from lack of knowledge and experience. Over the years because of poor teaching primarily based on religious rules and dogma, much of the church has established Religious Doctrines (Laws) that have no resemblance to the true Nature of God.

If you have been associated with church in anyway you are almost certainly to have experienced this poor teaching in one way or another. Note in the previous paragraph I wrote (Laws). This is something we are very good at, we start of with a meaningful piece of advice like “You need to pray everyday”, this in its self is good sound advice, however, just look what happens, before long people start to measure themselves with others based on how much time you spend in prayer each day. Then what started as sound advice becomes a religious activity with little understanding of why and how we should pray daily. A typical example of this kind of prayer is how we commonly rote the “The Lords Prayer”. Those of us who are of a certain age will recall that we would be required to recite The Lords Prayer in school assemblies and in many churches it would be done at some point in the Sunday Service. Now I am not at this point going teach about prayer, but I hope that you will understand the point I am making, that something so basic to the Christian Faith as become for many a religious activity with little understanding of the true purpose of prayer.

Another typical practice is to dismiss the work of the Holy Spirit, You may have heard statements like “that was for then not for now” often this would be in relation to how the Holy Spirit is portrayed in the book of Acts. Where do these doctrines come from? Again lack of knowledge and poor teaching, this comes because the empowering of the holy spirit has not been their personal experience, therefore they reason it away and then indoctrinate others with their reasoning.

Then we have the teaching about sin and how we must change, this is so true, we have all fallen short of the Glory of God and we are all sinners. But the typical perspective is every time you sin you need to repent and seek the forgiveness of God again. What flows out of that kind of teaching is that God will punish you for every sin you commit there will be consequences and that is why we suffer sickness and financial loss and every other bad experience that can befall us. Some would even teach that God has put sickness on me or I have suffered this loss to teach me something.

There are many other examples that could be used to highlight that poor teaching is why so many people have a perspective of a Big God who is just waiting to trample you down. Another contributor to this view, is a lack of understanding of way God appeared to be treating people in the Old Testament writings. Now I am not going to make a complete commentary on the Old Testament and Father Gods dealings with those people. But it is clear that certain individuals and people groups suffered loss and death at the behest of God either directly or indirectly. However to have an understanding of what was going on at that time one needs to use the whole council of the scriptures, the word of God. This teaching series is intended to help you have a better understanding of the Nature of God.