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Jeff Turner’s Followers (23)
Jeff Turner
More books by Jeff Turner…
“Christ paints the Father in the most beautiful of hues! According to Jesus, He is a God who is delighted at the sight of little children, goes out of His way to converse with the marginalized, turns water into wine to keep the party going, and who brushes aside religious laws in the name of showing mercy to sinners. He pardons the adulterous without being asked, takes tax collectors as His disciples, and dines with scam artists and traitors. He places His disciples’ wellbeing above the sacred nature of the Sabbath, brings healing to His nation’s foreign occupiers, and assures us that violence is never the way that God solves His problems. ”
― Saints in the Arms of a Happy God
― Saints in the Arms of a Happy God
“The glorious truth is that the Bible does not teach that all men are separated and cut off from God because of sin. It is a mythical conclusion, arrived at by men philosophizing in accordance with the fallen mind; men who, in their scramble for proof texts, read their preconceived ideas into passages that are irrelevant to their argument. What the Bible actually teaches is that it was us who separated ourselves from God. The guilt, shame and fear that accompanied sin caused us to run and hide, but God was right where He’d always been. Remember, man’s mind had become corrupted by the knowledge of good and evil, rendering him incapable of perceiving God rightly. Over the years, people born with this same inability began viewing their loving Father as someone to be terrified of. ”
― Saints in the Arms of a Happy God
― Saints in the Arms of a Happy God
“Like the Gadarene demoniac, Jesus heals our demonic visions of God, and presents us instead with a vision of a loving Father, a compassionate Son, and an affirming Holy Spirit. Yet somehow, people find this safer, more loving vision of God terrifying, and often seek to chase away the Living Word, with His warm smile and open arms, and long for the terrifying comfort of normalcy. I believe we react this way because we have grown afraid of not being afraid. Fear has become such a common component in our “relationship” with God that we simply don’t know how to function without it. When we cannot feel its presence, we panic, and assume we must be on a greased pole to heresy land, as, so we’re taught, being afraid of God is essential to being a Christian.”
― Saints in the Arms of a Happy God
― Saints in the Arms of a Happy God
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