Aly read my post about the Holy Ghost and the Smoky Mountains. The Vineyard Movement is connected with the Pentecostal Movement. This understanding of the communication between God and us as individuals through the Holy Spirit echoes back to the beginning of Christianity.
The Holy Spirit unites us as a People. We are the Church, bound together and enlivened by the Breath of God.
The Holy Spirit gives us the power to die to ourselves and live out God's Love.
Unfortunately my notes were erased when I tried to publish.
When approaching the Trinity, remember these three things:
1. Jesus was unexpected.
2. Jesus is God made near.
3. Jesus is subversive.
In paintings, the hand gestures of Jesus mean something. An open hand means peace. Holding two fingers up is more complex - the two fingers represent the dual nature on Jesus - human and divine. The lower three fingers represent the Trinity.
Jesus is what God has to say and is what the Holy Spirit has never stopped talking about.
Greek philosophy views the divine as distant. Jesus is not only God with us; but, in Jesus, God is one of us. The Joan Osborne song comes to mind ;)
Jesus lived a life of empathy, not pity. If you want to challenge yourself as an empathetic person, then travel. Travel changes who you are.
Jesus understood grief. Always remember the humanity of Jesus. He laughed, he loved, he suffered, and he died.
This concludes the Timebound and Timeless series on the Bible. Gordon Fee is a Pentecostal and one of today's top biblical scholars.
Fee wrote that God gave us His word in a way that locked in ambiguity.
We need to understand the timebound nature of the Bible in order to understand its timeless truth.
If the Bible is bound by culture and time, then how can we say it is trustworthy? Because the Holy Spirit is bound in its creation. The Holy Spirit inspired the authors. The Holy Spirit brought the Bible to fruition through a historical process. The Holy Spirit speaks to us today through the Bible.
2 Peter is either the last, or one of the last, books written in the Bible. It is written "in the tradition of Peter" but not by Peter. It was written after the deaths of Peter and Paul. The author mentions Paul's writing in such a way that we know the Church already considered his writings as inspired scriptures.
Paul's struggles in real life model how we should let the Spirit move in our life, connect with us, and work through us.
A "divine drop" is when scripture - such as the Koran and Book of Mormon - come to and through only one person. The Bible is not like that. Its construction took centuries.
Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible and The Lost World of Scripture are good references.
Faith is not simply believing the unknowable. Faith is an act of will. Faith is leading a meaningful life.
The Holy Spirit speaks to us through the Bible. We can hear the Holy Spirit through Bible study.
