Christmas thoughts: What you are

¹³ “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
Matthew 6:13 (NIV) 

Christ follower...don't lose what it is that God made you to be to serve the world in the way only you can.  If you do, then you lose your sense of purpose and you lose you momentum, and it's likely that you'll get trampled by those that don't get it.  Don't just quit being what God has called you to be and "lay down" waiting for it to happen.


How do you lose it?  By taking your eyes off Christ daily...by putting your judgment ahead of God's...by listening to those naysayers who are rarely party to the conversations that you and God had.

Stand up...be what God called you to be...let Him worry about that results of that.  It says later to "let your light shine before men"...that's YOUR light.  Not someone else's light that seems to have it more together or to have it figured out, it's YOUR light, the light that God placed in you, the gift that God gave you...the light that is fueled by hanging around the true Light of the world, Jesus.  Light it up!

A closer explanation of the translation of John 1:1 issue re: "the Word was A god" vs. "the Word was God"

In John 1:1, is one of the strongest declarations that Jesus is God.  Here is what it says:
 ¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Some religions who use the Bible as part of their basis have translated that verse incorrectly from the Greek to say this:
 ¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.


It's a simple change, but is it a big deal?  Yes.  As I alluded to yesterday at Bay West, it opens the door, that we will all be Gods, like Jesus one day, to which many concurrent beliefs have been built on in some of these religions.  That premise has been superimposed on other expressions of Jesus in the Bible and you can see where that leads.  Conflicts with God as the one true God... conflicts with the unique nature of Jesus (Him being the ONLY Son of God in the nature that He is Son)... introducing a polytheistic essence to the monotheistic faith of Christianity (not one god, but many)...loads of issues.

You can see that this interpretation doesn't synthesize John 1:1 with other Scripture, such as Deut. 6:4 (God is one) and the loads of other similar passages throughout the Bible, but instead it tries to elevate this mistranslation above other verses, by using it to "trump" them so to speak, not to  understand what Scripture, as a whole, together says.

I wanted to provide a more complete explanation than what I was able to get into yesterday, so that you can understand it.  Here is a good, concise one below.  It isn't too technical, so if you aren't a Greek scholar, you can understand it and get the point.  All you really have to have is an understanding of that boring subject that we all had to take in school...grammar, subject, verb, predicate (or predicate nominative, as I was taught in English grammar), etc.  Bet you thought all that would be useless, didn't ya? :D 

Here is a good concise explanation from Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Commentary.   I could reword it. but he did a great job here in explaining the Greek translation issue

This confused position falls on at least two grounds. Such a view is polytheistic, the belief in more than one god. Second, it betrays a misunderstanding of Greek grammar. Verse 1 of the first chapter of John reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The last portion of 1:1 is the major point of contention. It reads in the Greek theos en ho logos, or literally, “the Word was God.” God, or theos, occurs in this verse without the Greek article ho, so that some have contended that the lack of the article in the Greek text should cause the statement to be translated “the Word was a god.” The best understanding for the translation, however, as recognized by Greek scholars, is that since theos is a predicate and precedes the noun logos and a verb, it is natural for it to occur here without the article. Greek scholars are agreed that the verse should be translated as it regularly is in modern and ancient translations, clearly affirming that Jesus is indeed God.

Radmacher, E. D., Allen, R. B., & House, H. W. (1999). Nelson's new illustrated Bible commentary (Jn 1:1). Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers.