hahahahahahaha

Your Star Wars Name and Title

Your Star Wars Name and Title

Your Star Wars Name: Wilsu Yupon Your Star Wars Title: Opowin of Nifira

WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE (Final part)

5. Practical Conclusion

The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man. Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him as to be put into us.

There are 3 things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief and Holy Communion. These 3 things do not replace our attempts to copy Christ. A Christian can lose the Christ- life which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own effort—he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.

A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

Christians are in different position when trying to be good. Their efforts are not to please God or men. But a Christian thinks that any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

Being in Christ or Christ being in Christians is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts.

It may seem unfair that this new life is only confined to those who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. And you have to make the choice now because the chance to take it will not last forever.

WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE Part 3

4. Atonement and repentance

It is obvious (at least to me and the author and Christians) that Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a fiend. Therefore, we have to accept the view that He was and is God. God landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form. 

He came to teach and according to Christian writings, His main purpose to come to earth was to suffer and be killed.

The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.

The explanation of how this works may never be adequate to the reality. You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works; indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death washed our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement; he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. This process is what Christians called repentance. Repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into thousand of years. It means killing part of ourselves, undergoing a kind of death.

In fact, it needs a good person to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it.

Repentance is not something that God demands to us for Him to take us back. It is just a description of going back to Him. If we are asking God to take us back without repenting, we are then really asking Him to let us go back without going back.

However, the badness which makes us need repentance makes us unable to do it. Therefore, it can only be done if God helps us.  What do we mean by God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak.

WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE PART 2

This part is long, so there’ll be part 3

3. Freewill, Satan and Jesus

Christians believe that an evil powerhas made himself for the present the Prince of this World. This raises a problem. Is this condition in accordance with the will of God? If it is, He is a strange God, if it is not, how can anything happen to the will of a being with absolute power?

Anyone who has been in authority may understand this. For example, a mother may to the children, "I am not going to go and make you tidy the study room everything.You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own." One night she will go to the room that the children are sleeping and the room untidy. When you make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.

It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had free will. A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating.

Of course God knew what would happen if humans use the free will the wrong way, but He thought it would worth the risk. We may feel inclined to disagree with Him. But then we would arguing against the One who gives us the ability to reason. So therefore we may take it is as worth paying.

The next question would be what is the origin of the Dark Power? Here, humans would not have an answer with complete certainty. However, a reasonable (and traditional) guess can be offered.

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the center - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan, and that was the sin he taught the human race.

Satan teaches us to be our own masters - invent some sort of happiness for ourselves outside and apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery- the long terrible sory of man trying to find something other than God which will make Him happy.

We can never succeed. God designed us, the human machine, to run on Himself. He is the food our spirits were designed to feed on. That is why we can not ask God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion.

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended – civilizations are built up—excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. It seems to start up all right and run a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

And what did God do? He left us with 3 things;

1.      Conscience, the sense of right and wrong, and through the history there are people who try to obey it, but none succeeded perfectly.

2.      Good dreams (according to the author): those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. (I don’t really understand this point also, my best guess is that there were ancient religions who had kind of myth. Buddha and Lao Tze had this similar kind of myth).

3.      He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was – that there was only one of him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He did indeed claim that He was God when He claims to forgive sins. His name is Jesus. He meant that He is the Creator, has always existed. This is the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

He told people that their sins were forgiven without consulting all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.

We can not accept Jesus as a great moral teacher without accepting is claim to be God. A man who was merely a great moral teacher and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.

Hhahahahaha, maybe very true