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Another New Year, another set of resolutions?  Every January gyms sign up loads of new members, people give up bad habits, start new hobbies, commit themselves to make major changes, organize their lives and so on.  Every February most of this is forgotten!

Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those anti-resolutions people that never even tries.  This year I am making a big effort to get on top of my email, and I’m starting to swim each week.  But there is something far more foundational than how we organize our lives or look after our bodies.  Let’s call it the real foundations of life.

The foundations of our worldview and belief system will influence everything we think, everything we do, and every way in which we engage everything around us.  Probably the healthiest thing we can do is take some time to prayerfully ponder the foundations of our faith.

What do I mean by the foundations? I mean the answers to basic underlying questions that everything else is built upon.  The foundational questions of any belief system are these:

Which god is God, and what is He like?

What does it mean to be human, to be made in His image?

What is the nature of the problem between us and God, or what is sin?

What is the solution to that problem?

These are really basic questions, and yet strangely, most of us never stop to think about them.  After all, everyone knows who God is, right?  Everyone knows what sin is?  Do they?  Do we?

Let’s just take the first question: Which god is God, and what is He like?

Which God?  For too long we have been lulled into a false sense of clarity here. How easily we assume that God is, well, God.  He is the supreme, ultimate, in charge, powerful being sitting on the throne, right?  Well, these facts may all be true, but already the description is starting to specify a certain version of God.

Let’s say you are talking with a friend and they say they don’t believe in God.  Uh oh, defensiveness rises within you. But then they start to describe their view of the heavenly Hitler who inflicts suffering without any sense of care for the creatures. Hopefully this starts to feel very uncomfortable. After all, I hope the God you believe in is not a heartless despot inflicting agony on a helpless world. And thankfully, your job in this conversation is not to defend the absolute power of a generic God-being, but rather to help introduce your friend to the true God.

The world is full of different “gods” and we need to start thinking about which God we actually worship. For most people, in most of the world, for most of history, there have been numerous deities.  It is only really in the West, influenced by a combination of Greek philosophy and a politically powerful but theologically poor Christianity, that the generic distant power-broker god has become the assumed deity.

The Bible does not assume that everyone is referring to the true God when they speak of God.  The Bible points us to the God who is a Father revealed by His Son through the Spirit.  The Bible points us to a specific God, with a specific character, who can be known. This is an amazing reality – nobody has ever seen the God (the Father), but unique God who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known! (John 1:18)

 What is He like?  God is like Jesus.  Perfectly like Jesus.  And once this truth grabs a hold of us, suddenly this most foundational question can become a lifelong quest.  In a good friendship there is the joy of continual discovery as you get to know more and more about your friend.  In a healthy marriage this quest to know the other is thoroughly satisfying, but never complete.  And if it is true in a friendship or marriage, how much more will the infinitely wonderful Son of God captivate our hearts forever? For all eternity the Father has found the Son to be delightfully satisfying.  Surely there is enough there to stir our hearts for the rest of this life, not to mention eternity!?

Too many of us have settled into assuming we know the answer to the most foundational of all questions.  I know which god is God – it is the God of the Bible.  What is God like?  Well, you know, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc.  And we sound like we are describing a set of facts like the specifications on a car (and not like a car enthusiast would either!)

God is not a set of facts to know and quote.  God is not a set of doctrines, no matter how wonderful that theology may be.  God is personal, and He can known through Jesus, His Son.

Do you like God?  Seems like a strange question for many.  We know the correct answer to “do you believe in God?” or even “do you love God?” but what about “do you like God?”  It does seem weird that we know instinctively whether we like a waiter or waitress before they finish their first question at our table, and yet many go to church for years, live in God’s family for years, and then struggle to answer the question, “do you like Him?”  It is almost as if God were impersonal, just a set of facts.  Do you like the spec-list for your microwave?  Do you like the ingredient list for your bag of crisps?  Who cares?  These are impersonal.  But do we like God?  This is a gloriously significant question.

As we stop to ponder the foundational questions we will find that the answers the Bible gives us are progressively more thrilling.  The foundational questions can be answered quickly, but our entire lives are really a working out of our answers to these questions.

Let me encourage you at the start of this year to take some time to pray through the four questions and ask God to help you see the truth of the Bible for each, and to see how getting the right answers to these questions can become the thrilling quest of a lifetime for you.

What is God like?  He’s like Jesus.  Get to know Him better this year.

The post Foundations for a New Year first appeared on Cor Deo.

“Satan’s first attack upon the human race was his sly effort to destroy Eve’s confidence in the kindness of God.  Unfortunately for her and for us he succeeded too well.  From that day, men have had a false conception of God, and it is exactly this that has cut out from under them the ground of righteousness and driven them to reckless and destructive living.  Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.”

This is so on target.  Every bit of the brokenness we see in the world stems from people with a broken view of God.  This is not only true in the world around us, but also in the church too.  Every bit of the brokenness we see in the church stems from people with a broken view of God.

What is interesting about what Tozer writes here is that he doesn’t say the issue was an attack on Eve’s belief in God’s existence.  It was an attack on her confidence in God’s kindness.  This is so important.  Too often we have allowed our view of faith to be diluted to the level of belief in God’s existence, rather than an essential trust in God’s character.  So, we think, as long as people believe in God then they are more or less on the right page and that is sufficient.  It is not.

One of the great and dangerous assumptions in the church today is that we all know what is meant by the term, God.  Yet for many God is seen to be a distant and power-hungry being whose benevolence toward us is motivated by the arm-twisting kindness of Jesus Christ.  This is a corruption of what the Bible teaches.  For many, God is seen to be essentially demanding and judgmental.  His justice has been separated from his love and now acts as a counter-balance to the softer or warmer features that are presented in Christian preaching.  Again, a corruption.

“Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be. . . . The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service one of unspeakable pleasure.  He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.”

Tozer goes on to underline that God is just and never condones sin, but that is not a counter-balancing thought.  It is precisely in the delightful fellowship of God that such undeserved kindness can gladly co-exist with the holy perfection of the fellowship of God.

Whatever concerns we may feel as we look at the church today, or as we look at our own lives, it is not too simplistic to say that these ultimately boil down to one primary issue – our view of God.

It is not enough to believe that God exists, nor is it enough to believe in a set of biblical truths about God.  Christianity invites us into relationship with God where our hearts grow ever more convinced of God’s kindness and love – not just as a concept to believe, or a truth to affirm, but as a reality that is toward us.

“Unfortunately, many Christians cannot get free from their perverted notions of God, and these notions poison their hearts and destroy their inward freedom.  These friends serve God grimly, as the elder brother did, doing what is right without enthusiasm and without joy.”

Tozer finishes his brief blog post with this:

“Some of us are religiously jumpy and self-conscious because we know that God sees our every thought and is acquainted with all our ways. We need not be. God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still.”

Having an accurate view of what God is like is at the very core of addressing every issue we face in our lives, in our churches and in our world today.  Let’s band together, not in a pompous posse who believe they have the best answer, but as a humble band of brothers and sisters who know what is the right question.  Then let’s search the Scriptures and share the riches with one another.  Coming to know God’s character more is the greatest pursuit we have, and the richest resource we offer.

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This post fits well with Peter’s new book, Foundations: Four Big Questions We Should Be Asking But Typically Don’t (Christian Focus), which is being released next week.  We hope this little book will be a big help to lots of people.

To find out more, or to order, please visit FourBigQuestions.com

(Please help others know about Foundations via twitter – @4BigQs, Instagram – peter.mead, and Facebook – /4BigQs)

The post What is God Like? first appeared on Cor Deo.