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God and Moses - God present in people's lives

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It is not easy to put a faith experience into words.  Often when words fail we use comparisons or metaphors to describe the experience.  This is also true with religious experiences.
The bible uses metaphors to describe Christian initiation - baptism is like being born again, dying with Christ, seeing things in a new way.
When we try to describe our experience of God we speak in metaphors because "human words always fall short of the mystery of God". But that does not mean that it is impossible to talk about our experience with God - we can use his perfections as our starting point "for the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator"

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Abba is not a title, it is a term of affection

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The first major influence comes from the Jewish world that people perceived God was present in their lives.

The second influence was where God was perceived to have made the world yet existed apart and lived in "heaven" like a King.

All of the images help us to get to know God in many ways

The more images of God that we explore the more we learn about God

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Jesus' experience of God as Father  is reflected in his preaching through stories , e.g The Prodical Son.
Jesus knew that the father's love is unconditional;it is not dependent on the good works of others.
The risen Christ gives us the Spirit of Confidence, the Spirit of Peace and Reconciliation.

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* Jesus first came to know God through the faith of his parents.  The faith of parents, their love for him, the way that they mothered and fathered him, shaped and rooted his early experience of God.
*  Jesus' understanding of God is described in his Baptism. He knew, with every fiber of his being, that God was his Father and that he was loved!
* The assurance of love and protection was a childlike confidence in parental love. The resurrection was the ultimate experience of Jesus.  Being raised from the dead affirmed Jesus' conviction that God is Father and that he is loved.  Everything is the gift of the Father's love - God can be trusted, the Father is ever faithful.
*  Through story and parable Jesus announced his Father's kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field.   This experience of God forms the core of the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.