Archive for the ‘peace’ Category
Who’s the Liberal?
Hear O Israel, the LORD thy God, the LORD is one, and thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. The second is like unto it, that thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two hang all the Law and the Prophets.
It has been said that if a young man is not a Liberal he has no heart, and if when he is older he is not a Conservative he has no mind. In the Church we may have the opposite trend.
The young Christian finds it easy to believe the most hidebound dogma from whatever the tradition he finds himself. A Brethren convert will most adamantly support that group’s teachings, and a Pentecostal theirs. Their Bible was delivered from God in just that form, leather binding and all.
As time passes, young Christian hears and reads a lot of differing opinions: The Bible is a contradictory collection of outmoded tribal traditions and priestly forgeries. Jesus learned His teachings from Indian Buddhists. All roads lead to God, however you imagine “God” to be. Sometimes young Christian believes that claptrap, and falls into all kinds of despair, even enlisting to spread that claptrap to others out of anger at being told that simplistic first story to begin with.
So who, really, is at fault here, and what can be done to change things? The first culprit, of course, is the one who started the first dogma. Does God demand Read the rest of this entry »
Life as we (Don’t) Know It
We last looked at the principle of the New Birth. One thing about Jesus’ teachings that impresses me is that if something were a parable, a story offered to illustrate a point, then He would say at the first, “the Kingdom is like thus and such. If there were a true story that He used, then, “There was such a man…” If He was saying that something is this or that way, then that’s what would come out. Like when a group of Jews “believed on Him” as far as opinions go, but still cherished their own sinful attitudes and ambitions, He told them that “You belong to your father, the devil.” God, the Father, has no part with such deceits, and those who hold to them have no right to call Him, “Father,” because it is the devil that is “the father of lies.” So, then, if we are to belong to God, and hear from Him, we need to be born again, by His Spirit, by faith. Faith, in this sense, is more a continuing process than a momentary decision; and the New Birth is, like natural birth, an event that marks a life, and not the whole life in itself.
Because of this, we don’t say that the New Birth is the Main Point, or the Final Experience, for anyone’s life. Two terms Jesus used for the New Life Read the rest of this entry »
Planet of the Walking Dead
Dead inside? Did INXS sing, “..every single one of us is dead inside,” or did I just keep hearing it wrong? If they did, they were right. Almost. When Jesus told the Jewish elder, “You must be born again, ..of the Spirit, to enter the kingdom of Heaven,” He wasn’t just using a figure of speech. Sure, for years the Jewish Establishment had been using the term for when someone of the goyim (nations) became a Jew through mikveh (water immersion), that he/she was “born again” as a Jew, but that’s another story for another time. When God warned innocent Adam that if they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (well, evil, really. They already knew good!) they would immediately die. When they were still walking around the next day, we guess God was just kidding, or making some kind of parable that really meant something else. Nope. God has a wonderful, original, sense of humor, but death and sin aren’t funny. Their very next encounter with God shows something had changed drastically. A careful read shows that to that point they were wise, happy, and fearless. Now they were stupid (wrapping themselves in gummy, prickly, fig leaves!), miserable (hiding in the bushes), and cowardly (shifting blame). When God made Adam, He breathed His own Spirit into the man, Read the rest of this entry »
The Payoff?
Continued from “Invisible Sidewalks” (below)
So then our goal in all this- What is it? To drop our blessed backsides into a holy hammock and catch a Son tan? Not likely. We so often speak of “Our Heavenly Reward” as it were some kind of trophy home on high that we have earned by our own religiosity. No matter if that religiosity had more to do with the number of prayers we prayed, or the number of sinners we prayed with, or just that we did, one time, pray a “sinner’s prayer.” Short answer to a long question: It ain’t about us! Glory is not about personal gain any more than it is about a jihadist’s dreams of an eternal orgy. John wrote in 1st John 3, “..We know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” A Christian’s hope, though yes there will be “joy unspeakable, and full of glory,” yet all that will be a fulfillment of what has begun here in this life: Our hope is that we will see Jesus, face to Face, and be changed through love for Him to be like Him Whom we see! If that is the goal, then where is the road? Is that is what we are hoping for, what we are seeking now, or is there some kind of “sanctified selfishness” in the picture someplace? Could we ever hope to gain more than Jesus? Pearls Big Enough to Walk Through!
We read in Acts that Paul’s gospel was that “that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.” A pearl only comes from patiently dealing with trouble. A piece of grit gets up under a clam’s neck and troubles it, and the way the clam deals with the trouble produces something of lasting beauty and value. In order to get into that city, to see Christ, it will take perseverance. In fact, in we read that God, “will give eternal life to those who persist in doing good, seeking after the glory and honor and immortality that God offers. But he will pour out his anger and wrath on those who live for themselves…” Jesus said, “The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to (eternal) life, and those who find it are few.” So those that see those gates of pearl will be the ones that know what the pearl is all about.At about this point, some will be asking if we’re talking about our own hard work saving us, or impressing God so much he’ll just have to let us in. Short answer- not even a little bit. Come back for the next installment to see what kind of road we’ve got for the journey!
