Since we know that ALL of us have fallen short of the glory of God, the church needs to recognize that there are NO second class Christians. It is God’s grace alone that enables us to strive for the goal set us. Greg discussed ways that God works for healing and growth in both your genetic and spiritual families.

No one can fully comprehend the mystery of Jesus Christ. God became a human being so that we might become reconciled with God! Greg described some of the ways that the Bible communicates this profound truth.

It is important periodically to step back and assess how things are going. More specifically, we need to make time for God to speak into our situations and reveal what improvements need to be made. Dr. Boyd took an opportunity to do this at Woodland Hills Church in St, Paul at the end of the year 1996.

The relationship of Christianity to the culture in which it is found has always been complex and strained. Perhaps no event illustrates this problem better than our national celebration of Christmas. When the radical message of Christ gets mixed in with civic religion, the result is a trivialization and Domestication of God.

The image that we have in our minds of God radically shapes how we think about God and more importantly, how we relate to God. What does your picture of God look like? The place where God is most fully revealed is in the person of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ. When we grasp the truth about Christ, we can have confidence that we are drawing near to a true and accurate picture of God.

Perhaps the most universal fear is the fear of dying. We abhor the decay of our bodies as we age and we have anxiety about our death. It is amazing then to see that the Son of God came to Earth precisely to die and he did so willingly! In Christ, God takes our sin, death, and despair and in return God gives us Eternal Life, peace, joy and righteousness. To borrow a phrase from Martin Luther, this is indeed a “happy exchange”!

The Bible teaches that Christ was perfected through his suffering. Christ suffered because of his radical obedience to the Father in this totally corrupt world. We live in this same world and are called to the same obedience.

The Kingdom of God is truly among us in one sense, for the forgiveness of sins has come and is available to all! But the Kingdom of God has yet to come in another sense, we await the Lord’s return when finally, peace will truly abound on earth. The Kingdom of God will come suddenly and God will salvage what can be saved. But there will be a final judgment that reveals the true status of our relationships with God.

There is something of a paradox at the heart of a human being. On the one hand, we are totally deprived sinners before a holy God, but yet our destiny is to reign with Christ in the Kingdom of God! It has been said that the corruption of the best is the worst. This is profoundly true of humanity which, though the crown of creation, is capable of the most destruction.

Our lives are often riddled with contradictions: we can be singing praises to God one minute and swearing the next. There is something about us humans that makes this possible. Dr. Boyd will discuss humans as beings created in God’s image as he continues this series on the Letter to the Hebrews. If God created us in God’s own image, what happened? Why do we fall so far short of God’s glory?