Gen X & Gen Y / Jesus - our Picture of God

Marks depiction of the Gen X vs Gen Y parents picture and how this reflects into their views of who God is what he is like was accurate, stimulating and eye opening. It reminds me of the importance to gather our views of who God is and what He is like not from our pop culture or family but by looking at Jesus. If you want to know what God is like, then ask what is Jesus like. If you want to know what God thinks about the exploitation of the poor, the look at what Jesus thinks and did in regards to this. You see Jesus is the living, breathing, moving picture of who God is and what he like. Let us stop having our own standards or pop culture standards for living, behaviour, love, relationships and truth and let us look at Jesus' standards, life and obedience to the Father. From this we see how we are too live in and live out our relationship with our King. A couple of other random points to add in here from what Mark said...sure it's a little off the topic but I want to share it here...today we don't like words, like discipline, obedience, submission, authority, surrender, obligation - but when it comes to walking life with the Spirit, this is how we are called to live. To be obedient to God, to surrender to him, to submit to his authority and discipline. But unfortunately we want to be own ruler and our own King. May God save us from ourselves. I hope that we can bring back into our faith the understanding that we haven't been set free to be our own Kings and our own Authority, but rather, like Paul reminds us, we have been set free from the power or dominion of death to be a slave to Jesus Christ - the worlds true Lord and King. Our King and our Lord.
Finally... God is Holy, and we must balance his holiness and judgement. But I wonder if because he is Holy we have adopted the idea that God is too Holy to look up on Sin. And so we form our understandings of the atonement from this vantage point or we think that God cannot live with Sin or look upon sin. In Habakkuk 1:13 we read the prophet saying 'Your eyes are too pure to look on evil'. And at times we leave the passage there saying 'see, God cannot even look upon sin'. But what we actually see Habakkuk saying is that God is too pure and Holy to look on evil and not do anything about it. In Jesus we see him not retreating from evil but entering the world believing that he wasn't going to be contaminated by the world's evil but rather that his holiness was going to change the world and cleanse it. May we follow Jesus. May we walk by the Spirit. May our world be changed by our obedience to living in King Jesus. May we look to Jesus to see who God is what God is like.