A Bit of What I Believe (at this present time, subject to change, terms and conditions apply)

I was listening to Five Live this morning.

(I feel a small aside is necessary here:

My brother thinks that Radio Four is better than Five Live because it is more intellectual. I think that people who are truly intelligent care about the people, and the people are more interested in Five Live. I also think that people who call themselves intellectual need to consider the word 'humility'. But I am being judgmental and therefore hypocritical, I'm sure. Incidentally, someone told me the other day that anyting completely logical is always contradictory, or collapses in on itself or something. I wonder whether the person who worked that out did so logically.)

They were asking the question,

"What do you believe?"

This made me think, and realise that I have recently come very far in my beliefs and my certainty of them.

For a long time I have believed that Jesus was God's Son, came to earth and was resurrected.

It is the niggly bits in between that have caused me problems.

Now I think that Jesus lived and died not only to forgive sins but for so much more.

Jesus showed us how to be compassionate, how to love, how to protest, how to forgive, how to guide, how to teach, how to give, how to serve, how to think and how to serve.

Jesus showed us how to follow God the way God wants us to follow him.

One of the niggly bits is 'Why does God want us to follow him?' but I think that that is almost irrelevant, because I am awed and stupefied by the fact he wants me to follow him.

Jesus came to begin the salvation of the world, and the rest of wondrous creation that we might live as God first intended.

As you can see I believe Jesus was pretty important. There are a lot of things I don't know, and I wonder at, like God being omnipotent and omniscient and not thinking through the fall. But this is the nature of faith, and I think it is faith that brings about change (even if, unfortunately and too often tragically, not for the better), because faith in ideals and the future and mankind and even selfish faith in ourselves is what has made humans progress (if that is an appropriate word for the ruin we've made this incredible planet) so far. This is why I continue to believe; faith may have been a large part of our downfall, but it is faith that will be the reason for our revival.