home about After Blood Crib Sheet Declaration of Dependence Employment Life Open Bible Study
Oneness an Outline of the Bible A Word for God Sunday School for Young Adults Thanksgiving

A Crib Sheet for Church


A group of young adults I met, had the excellence to ask for a 'crib sheet' for church, some words common to churches and their meanings. I hope this will be satisfactory.

God

God is One Person, who is in fact multiple People who live and love and joy together as a perfect One. One of the ways to conceive of this, is to use the modern word "telepathy", and to think about how we are different than God. We have such evil inside us that we would tear each other apart if we were in constant total telepathy; but They have no evil at all, they have total love and joy and appreciation of and for each other, and so their togetherness is very different and far better than anything we have. We have three such Persons of God named in the Bible; these are the Father in Heaven, the Son of God called Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
ref. Deuteronomy 6:4, John 12:44-45, John 6:45, John 15:26, John 1:1-18, Mark 13:11, Matthew 28:19.

Son of God

The Son of God is one of the Persons who are God. He has always existed; there was never a time in which He did not exist. God caused Him to be born as the baby called Jesus, born of the woman named Mary, without any man having touched her, in Nazareth; later, He was falsely accused and convicted as a criminal, and executed by being nailed to a large wooden crosspiece which was then secured high on a larger upright post. Three days after He was dead and buried, He was resurrected, and from that moment on He has sat at the right hand of His Father. The Father in Heaven required these things to happen for a variety of reasons, one of which was the need for the bloodshed of a person called the Lamb of God. When we do wrong against God, a little bit of death happens in our souls, and the only way God has made it possible for that death to be healed, is with an injection of life. Because the Son of God was sacrificed on the cross and His blood spilled, the all-powerful life of God is in the world, and can be put into us to heal us of the death of our souls. All we have to do, is ask Him, to talk to God and honestly desire to be healed of the evil within us.
ref. John 1:1-18, Luke 1:26-35, Luke 23:1-4, Luke 23:18-21, Matthew 12:40, Matthew 26:64, Leviticus 17:11, John 6:53-54.

Father in Heaven

The Father in Heaven is how Jesus, the Son, referred to God. When we honestly desire God to heal us of the evil within, and ask Him for the help, the Father in Heaven begins to adopt us as sons and daughters. Before this adoption, we are not sons and daughters of God; the Son Himself called us "sons of vipers", referring gently to the snake of the Garden of Eden. Our connection to the spiritual is evil, not good, until God responds, after we humble ourselves to God and ask Him to make us better. One of the ways in which Jesus made this clear, it to state that only God Himself, is good.
ref. Matthew 7:21, Matthew 5:45, Galatians 4:5, Matthew 12:33-34, Mark 10:18.

Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost)

The Holy Ghost (the words "ghost" and "spirit" are identical in original meaning), is one of they who are God. He is described almost exclusively by what He does. One of these is to give comfort; the Son calls Him the Comforter several times. Another is to "fill" the sons and daughters of God. If a person is truly a son or daughter of God, the Holy Ghost has filled him or her. This is not too different than the way a demon filled a child in The Exorcist, but in the case of the sons and daughters of God, it is a very good thing, not an evil!!! Very often it happens that a very bad man or woman learns of the badness he or she is, talks to God, is filled by the Holy Ghost, and then begins a very long walk towards knowledge and participation in the good things God does in this world. But people who have very little badness to be aware of, also experience a tremendously good change, when God comes in, because God is tremendously better than any of us.
ref. 1 John 5:7, John 14:26, Romans 8:9, 2 Corinthians 6:16.

Bible

The Bible is words God Personally delivered to us, using quite a few different human beings in the process. It was written in many stages, starting on the order of 4,000 years ago, and ending about 1,800 years ago. The book of Job is often thought to be the oldest, being probably written in the time of Abraham, one of the people discussed in the book of Genesis; the Old Testament was complete as of approximately 300 B.C. (300 years before the birth of Christ), and we have handwritten copies of several books from 300 B.C. which match the current ones. The books of the New Testament existed in written form by approximately 70 C.E., but they were not brought together in a rigorously approved collection until the mid-200's or so, when major attacks upon the testimony of the coming of the Lord began to appear in written form.
ref. 2 Timothy 3:16.