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Beautiful Good News
I just wanted to thank Greg and everyone involved in this ministry from the bottom of my heart. I’ve devoured the media content from ReKnew and the Woodland Hills Church website, and it has revealed a God, and a Jesus, that seemingly for the first time in my life I am falling in love with. I’m 30 years old, and I’ve been going to church in hopes of learning about God for 15 years. God has always seemed distant, and my nagging doubts about his existence have been hard to overcome.
I am a heavy reader, and I felt like if I just learned enough – if I read enough books on theology – I would find Him. He’d be sitting there in the pages… Maybe… When I was exposed to Calvinism for the first time in college, I went into a depression. How could this be my God? I found intelligent, scholarly, and well-thought-out literature explaining how Calvinism is biblical, and it drove me deeper and deeper into this pit of despair. It wasn’t good news, it wasn’t beautiful, and it scared me (and still does) to the core of my being. I can’t emphasize with words how much this concept of God grieved me. It was a perfect little theological box, and the Internet is full of sources that want to establish Calvinism as the true illustration of God. I can’t believe people believe this stuff. I mean, there were periods of time where I couldn’t intellectually overcome Calvinism, so I’d just throw up my hands and say “fine God, if that’s who you are then I’m going to hell! I just can’t support this… I can’t be okay in my heart with this. This scares me, but it goes against everything I feel inside, so if I’m damned because of that then I guess you predestined me this way.”
But Greg Boyd has blown that up. He’s provided a framework through which I see a beautiful, too good to be true version of God. In the beginning, I thought, “this has to be a trick… Greg must be misrepresenting reality here!” But no, the more I open my heart to this, the more I can’t resist the beauty of this God – perfectly represented by Jesus dying on the cross for the very people who crucified him. It’s the most powerful, most awesome news… It’s giving me chills just thinking on it.
Bless you… Thank you thank you thank you!
Ben