TheyCallMePastorBryan

Just the writings of your stereotypical pastor / programmer / writer. Bryan Dormaier is a leader of Sacred Roots, a small church in the Foster-Powell & Mr. Scott Arleta neighborhood areas. If you are looking for more information about what Bryan is doing or how you can help, click here

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• August 29, 2010

  A Passionate God

  Edit: I extended the quote, as Weston pointed out it could be misleading

  Excellent article from Ron Frost(title above is a link to the original article), who was on faculty at Multnomah Seminary when I started there, on God as passionate. Here’s a money quote from it on God’s relation to glory.

  Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, gives us a God who can only think about himself; but the Bible portrays a God whose glory is displayed in a self-giving love that pours out of the Triune heart.  In John 17, for instance, we discover that Jesus spoke of glory as the environment he shared with the Father before the creation, and as a place he wants to share with all of us who believe in him.  It was a glory given by the Father to the Son because, as Jesus put it, “you loved me.”  So it boggles the mind to think that a God whose glory consists in the selfless giving of love is mainly driven by self-concerned glory-seeking.  Of course for all who know and love him we find joy in expressing our delight in his glory.  Glory is the offspring of love: the flower, not the root.

  This expresses well the uncomfortability I sometimes have with some takes on the Westminster Confession’s statement “the chief end of man is to glorify God.” Not that we aren’t to glorify God, but scripture is clear that God has created humanity to love it and not as a mechanism for giving Godself more glory.