The sign outside of the train station in Amsterdam
Last Friday night, I had an overnight layover coming home from Helsinki through Amsterdam. I hadn't been into Amsterdam in a while, so I decided to take a train into the Amsterdam City Center to soak in the city a little, and sample my fill of cheeses (and I did buy a piece of Gouda to take home).
Fun fact: Gouda is named after a small town in South Holland where the cheese was invented. It's near Rotterdam. It's on my list of places to see now.
If you get a chance to go to Amsterdam for a day, it's a really beautiful city. One of the first things you see as you walk out of the Amsterdam Central train station is a building by a Catholic cathedral that has two inscriptions on it.
God Roept U (in Dutch), and Jesus Loves You (in English)
As a casual observer who doesn't understand much Dutch, other than the American connotation that it means that you and your date split the bill, I decided to run the phrase through Google Translate; expecting that it would translate "God Loves You." I was wrong.
It translates as "God is calling you." I think that is awesome.
God desires that we know Him and come into a life-giving, saving relationship with Him. It's also true, I believe, that we all desire the experience of knowing that we are right with God (or something/one higher than ourselves) even if we don't say that we believe in the God of the Bible. There's something in us that wants to be at peace with God, the universe, nature, the great spirit, experience nirvana, be one with the force, or whatever it is that we believe as the pinnacle of human spiritual experience.
So, if God really is calling us (and I think that the sign is telling us the truth), how do we dial in? Is God really knowable? And if he is calling us, how do we answer? Is it through study, meditation, achieving our potential, or any number of things that our culture or the religions of the world tell us we need to do? How do we know that it's really Him when we engage with "what is beyond ourselves?"
Why I love this sign, and I know it's simple and somewhat cheesy, but the English phrase is the answer. God is calling you... and the one through whom He is calling is Jesus, and His calling card is His love for you. What's the most awesome about this is that being right with God isn't based on a philosophy or a worldview or a religion... it's based on something that someone did in history that was experienced firsthand by real people like you and me, and is still being experienced today by people who accept the offer that Jesus made to us.
It was so amazing that the people who hung out with Jesus wrote about it and disseminated this message to gatherings of people (called ecclessias, or as we translate it today, churches) who copied it voraciously because they considered the message to be so potent. They also kept and copied the prophetic writings held sacred by the Jews (we know it as our Old Testament) because of the prophecies about this Jesus that were fulfilled with incredible accuracy, because they (and we who call ourselves Christians) don't believe that Jesus's existence on earth was an accident, but it was something that was planned by a God who loves his prized creation and went to great lengths to rescue us from a godless fate.
What kind of God is this? I encourage you, if you are a skeptic, to investigate who He is. He is a God who spoke worlds into existence but condescended to doing blue collar manual labor. He is a God who is holy but would hang out with and would embrace cheaters, prostitutes, and grossly sick people. He is a God who hates sin so much that He... died to free the sinner (you and I) from it so we can be made right with God and experience Him not as judge but as Father.
And He is a God who, like the sign says, is calling you and I. His calling card is Jesus, and He loves you. No other person who claims to be divine can back up that claim with integrity, to my knowledge. Jesus, however, fulfilled prophecies made generations before his mother was even conceived, did miracles that backed up the claim, and after being crucified by the Romans was brought back to life and seen by several hundred people before a single Christian sermon was even preached and 20 years before a single page of the New Testament was even written. His claim to be the Son of God was backed up, and his followers all went to die martyrs' death because they could not deny it.
I encourage you, it's worth it to investigate.
Within the church, I know that we can argue about a lot of things and some things are worth being discussed. However, let's not EVER distract ourselves or the people that God loves and is calling from the fact that the main thing is that Jesus loves us, so much that He died on a cross to make us right with God, and that at one time we too were outside of relationship and needed to know the powerful simplicity of this message. Let's not detract to it, or add to it or subtract from it with our rantings, our controversies, and our debates, especially in the social media sphere. It simply is not worth it. What's worth it is being in relationship with people, believing the good news for ourselves and letting it change us first, and letting our world see that this message is true.
Fun fact: Gouda is named after a small town in South Holland where the cheese was invented. It's near Rotterdam. It's on my list of places to see now.
If you get a chance to go to Amsterdam for a day, it's a really beautiful city. One of the first things you see as you walk out of the Amsterdam Central train station is a building by a Catholic cathedral that has two inscriptions on it.
God Roept U (in Dutch), and Jesus Loves You (in English)
As a casual observer who doesn't understand much Dutch, other than the American connotation that it means that you and your date split the bill, I decided to run the phrase through Google Translate; expecting that it would translate "God Loves You." I was wrong.
It translates as "God is calling you." I think that is awesome.
God desires that we know Him and come into a life-giving, saving relationship with Him. It's also true, I believe, that we all desire the experience of knowing that we are right with God (or something/one higher than ourselves) even if we don't say that we believe in the God of the Bible. There's something in us that wants to be at peace with God, the universe, nature, the great spirit, experience nirvana, be one with the force, or whatever it is that we believe as the pinnacle of human spiritual experience.
So, if God really is calling us (and I think that the sign is telling us the truth), how do we dial in? Is God really knowable? And if he is calling us, how do we answer? Is it through study, meditation, achieving our potential, or any number of things that our culture or the religions of the world tell us we need to do? How do we know that it's really Him when we engage with "what is beyond ourselves?"
Why I love this sign, and I know it's simple and somewhat cheesy, but the English phrase is the answer. God is calling you... and the one through whom He is calling is Jesus, and His calling card is His love for you. What's the most awesome about this is that being right with God isn't based on a philosophy or a worldview or a religion... it's based on something that someone did in history that was experienced firsthand by real people like you and me, and is still being experienced today by people who accept the offer that Jesus made to us.
It was so amazing that the people who hung out with Jesus wrote about it and disseminated this message to gatherings of people (called ecclessias, or as we translate it today, churches) who copied it voraciously because they considered the message to be so potent. They also kept and copied the prophetic writings held sacred by the Jews (we know it as our Old Testament) because of the prophecies about this Jesus that were fulfilled with incredible accuracy, because they (and we who call ourselves Christians) don't believe that Jesus's existence on earth was an accident, but it was something that was planned by a God who loves his prized creation and went to great lengths to rescue us from a godless fate.
What kind of God is this? I encourage you, if you are a skeptic, to investigate who He is. He is a God who spoke worlds into existence but condescended to doing blue collar manual labor. He is a God who is holy but would hang out with and would embrace cheaters, prostitutes, and grossly sick people. He is a God who hates sin so much that He... died to free the sinner (you and I) from it so we can be made right with God and experience Him not as judge but as Father.
And He is a God who, like the sign says, is calling you and I. His calling card is Jesus, and He loves you. No other person who claims to be divine can back up that claim with integrity, to my knowledge. Jesus, however, fulfilled prophecies made generations before his mother was even conceived, did miracles that backed up the claim, and after being crucified by the Romans was brought back to life and seen by several hundred people before a single Christian sermon was even preached and 20 years before a single page of the New Testament was even written. His claim to be the Son of God was backed up, and his followers all went to die martyrs' death because they could not deny it.
I encourage you, it's worth it to investigate.
Within the church, I know that we can argue about a lot of things and some things are worth being discussed. However, let's not EVER distract ourselves or the people that God loves and is calling from the fact that the main thing is that Jesus loves us, so much that He died on a cross to make us right with God, and that at one time we too were outside of relationship and needed to know the powerful simplicity of this message. Let's not detract to it, or add to it or subtract from it with our rantings, our controversies, and our debates, especially in the social media sphere. It simply is not worth it. What's worth it is being in relationship with people, believing the good news for ourselves and letting it change us first, and letting our world see that this message is true.
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