Grace Communion Melbourne Fellowship Group
Melbourne, Florida

Dear Church family,

 “Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home;

all is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.

God our Maker doth provide for our wants to be supplied;

come to God's own temple, come, raise the song of harvest home.”

    So begins the first verse of this Thanksgiving season classic hymn written by the Rev. Henry Alford, Alford, Henry, (1810-1871). Living here in Central Florida with a climate so vastly different than that of Alford’s homeland in England, we can appreciate that our “Fall storms” seem safely behind us this year. With that said, we have contributed to the work of Samaritan’s Purse as they are actively on the providing food, shelter, and medical supplies to those in Jamaica who have suffered the worst of Hurricane Melissa.

 Please join us today for our annual Thanksgiving Meal together starting at 1:30 followed by a time of sharing God’s goodness in our lives. We will spend some time considering the beauty and wonder of God’s attributes highlighted below as excerpted from Kevin DeYoung’s Daily Doctrine.

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Daily Doctrine - A One Year Guide to Systematic Theology, by Kevin DeYoung            Incommunicable and Communicable Attributes, page 44-45

 There are many ways to categorize the attributes of God. Some speak of the absolute attributes (those properties God has in himself apart from anything else) and relative attributes (The properties he expresses in relation to his creation and his creatures).

 Some use the language of constitutional attributes and attributes of personality, that is, those attributes that are natural to God, and those that are moral and personal. Others prefer the categories attributes of greatness (those qualities that highlight the grandeur of who God is) and attributes of goodness (those qualities that highlight the Excellency of what God does).

     We can see in each of the formulas the same impulse to distinguish between attributes that God would have on a desert island (so to speak) and those attributes that manifest themselves towards others. This sort of distinction can be useful, but also potentially misleading. We don’t want to think that some attributes are more essential to God or that God needs other creatures in order for certain attributes to be actualized. All of the divine attributes are predicated of the divine nature, and all of them belong to God eternally and absolutely.

     The most common approach is to distinguish between God’s incommunicable attributes and his communicable attributes. The incommunicable attributes are those that cannot be “communicated” to us.  Immensity, eternity, and infinity, for example, are classified as incommunicable because nothing analogous to these attributes can be found in God’s creatures.  Likewise, love, mercy, and goodness are deemed communicable, because we can also be loving, merciful, and good. When we speak of a communicable disease, we mean the disease can be caught. That’s one way to think of communicable attributes - they can be caught by God’s creatures in a way that incommunicable attributes cannot.

     Of course, this distinction is not perfect either. Even the incommunicable attributes -though not strictly communicable- are analogous to human qualities. We may not be immutable, but we can possess a degree of constancy. At the same time, in another sense, none of God’s attributes are communicable as God has them. When we speak of God as love and mankind as loving, we are using the language of love analogically, not unequivocally. Only God possesses the attributes infinitely and perfectly. This is why Jesus can say that only God is good (Matt. 9:17).  Obviously, the Bible is full of positive descriptions of all sorts of human beings, but man’s goodness is dependent, secondary, and accidental (in the philosophical sense).  Only God‘s goodness is independent, original, and essential.

     Despite these reservations, the language of “incommunicable” and “communicable” is too common to be discarded. Besides that, the categories hit upon an important distinction. The incommunicable attributes help us to glory in the bigness and otherness of God, while the communicable attributes shine with more splendor when we consider what sort of God it is who deals with us so kindly and so graciously.

 Grace Communion Melbourne Fellowship Group

1^st, 3^rd, and 4^th Sundays at 2:30 p.m.

2^nd Sunday 1:30 p.m.  Luncheon & Bible Study followed by Communion

Meeting @ Pineda Presbyterian Church 4650 N. Wickham Rd

Your Pastor and brother,

Steve Schantz

Grace Communion Melbourne Fellowship Group

1^st, 3^rd, and 4^th Sundays at 2:30 p.m.

2^nd Sunday 1:30 p.m. Luncheon & Bible Study followed by Communion

Meeting @ Pineda Presbyterian Church 4650 N. Wickham Rd

Charities

1. Food Bank @ Advent Lutheran (13) Advent Lutheran Church | Facebook
2. The Children's Hunger Project the Children’s Hunger Project l Homepage (thechildrenshungerproject.org)
3. Outreach Program for IHB School Supplies (13) City of Indian Harbour Beach Police Department - Posts | Facebook
4. Family Promise HOME | FPOB (familypromiseofbrevard.org)
5. GCI Grace Communion International (gci.org)
6. In His Steps Learning Academy, Inc.
7. Youth Summer Camps
8. Durham NC Start up GCI Church