{"id":3578,"date":"2014-12-17T18:29:52","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T18:29:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=3578"},"modified":"2014-12-17T18:29:52","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T18:29:52","slug":"when-you-love-god-you-love-people-when-you-love-people-you-love-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/when-you-love-god-you-love-people-when-you-love-people-you-love-god\/","title":{"rendered":"When you love God, you love people. When you love people, you love God."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I found <em>The Matrix of Christian Ethics <\/em>by Patrick Nullens and Ronald Michener a little bit frustrating. Not because I didn\u2019t agree with it, but because it reminds me of the heart of God and how different His values and mine are. I appreciated the way the authors always go back to the heart of God, which are people and community. We tend to value community in theory, but not so much in practice because practice is messy. We like our faith to be clean and proper but when you throw in community you automatically make things messy and complicated.<\/p>\n<p>Nullens and Michener say that the popular expression \u201c\u2019having a personal relationship with God\u2019 carries a great risk, because our relationship with God is always together with others. Now, it is <em>personal<\/em> in the sense that it involves the personal will of an individual before God within the community. But is not as if we alone stand before God, detached from the community of believers in some sort of private relationship.\u201d (157) This idea that we don\u2019t stand before God apart from community is a bit humbling. Obviously, it\u2019s not a new concept, but I wonder what life would look like if we took seriously.<\/p>\n<p>With Christmas season upon us I can\u2019t help to think that Jesus didn\u2019t come for one person\u2026 but He came to a community. It wasn\u2019t just Mary, or just Joseph, but it was Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and the angels, and the magi and all of creation. The community imitates God, who loves the world and gave his Son to redeem the world. I pray that this would be a lived out reality in my life\u2026 especially this holiday season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I found The Matrix of Christian Ethics by Patrick Nullens and Ronald Michener a little bit frustrating. Not because I didn\u2019t agree with it, but because it reminds me of the heart of God and how different His values and mine are. I appreciated the way the authors always go back to the heart of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-3578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nullens","cohort-lgp4"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3579,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3578\/revisions\/3579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}