Answer Bearer: Apologetics for the Soul

2012 -- Deliverance is Coming

2012-01-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

Some are concerned that time is running out. Legend would have it that we are nearing the day of the world’s demise, December 21, 2012. It would seem, regardless of one’s view on the Mayan prediction instigated by a calendar that abruptly ends on this now ominous day, that 2012 is noteworthy year.

Many in Christendom are filled with expectation for the Lord to show His glory this year in a manner never before experienced in the Church. Some have experienced a foreshadowing of this greater glory, but the fullness is still yet to come.

Many delays, distractions, and destructive forces have been at work in previous years, especially in 2011. Some have been betrayed, trampled, attacked, forsaken, and walked all over by a number of injustices. We strain to see beyond into this new season with hope gently rising forth from its deep seeded burial place. It is like the crocus that peaks its stem above the ground as spring approaches, looking around to see if winter truly has abated.

It feels unusual to have this hope, as if it ought to have died after such an arid dry season, and yet instead we find it had hibernated and grown strong during our adversity to now rise stronger than we thought possible. This is not yet the experience of everyone in 2012, for some are still struggling with 2011. Just the same, despite what things feel like and look like, a new season has dawned. What would have been a delay last year, will be a deliberate positioning this year. The nature of what is going on has changed even when we feel the effects and fear of more of the same. It is not the same.

The Lord is doing a new thing, and it starts with us and in us. When we find that we are stable despite the shaking going on around us, we will find that we have come out into the new season even when it hasn’t manifested into our circumstances yet. We haven’t much longer to wait. Where the tension is mounting, the Lord is preparing a launching point for victory. For each this will feel and look different, but at the same time it is the same thing happening in many lives and organizations across the spectrum.

Everywhere one looks one should see or hear of things changing. Right now it is like things are all aligning from a variety of different points – all transitioning to come to a head. For those following the Lord this is going to be a great deliverance. It is not a far off as it may feel. It is just around the corner. We only have to hold on a little while longer, if we are holding on to Jesus. If we are holding on to something else, that something else will have to be shaken first, because God is not going to harm you by this deliverance, but bring you into the fullness of authority, power, and victory that this season holds for you. If there is still a shaking, rejoice for the Lord will make it all for your good.

For those who are not in Christ, this shaking will look different. It will be different. Things are still coming to a head for those not in Christ – this is happening the world over. This is why this year is so crucial – it is not just a Church thing, it is a world thing. The whole world is shifting into a new season. The old ways cannot remain. Things are going to change. People will be reaping what they have sown and some have not sown well and they will see the fruit of that – so that they will come to repentance. This shift is good even when it does not look favorable.

2012 is different. There is no going back. There is only going forward. This is a year of advancing into the next season of the journey. Do not despair. The Lord is near and He is drawing nearer. He is our steadfast anchor, our only hope. The bounty of our seed well sown comes from Jesus. It cannot come from any other source and do us any good. This is why we cannot make it happen, we cannot circumnavigate His process. We have to be obedient and steadfast and He will bring His promises about. For first and foremost He is the promise. We have to realize it is all about Jesus. Our only mandate is to do what He is doing and nothing more, and nothing less. He, and He alone, is our deliverance.

Poetry

2011-12-15T06:54:00.000-08:00

Of late I have been compelled to put my words into poetic form. Here are a few of my latest poems archived at Helium.com.

The Shift

The Promise

Unbound

A Great Hope

Freedom

Experiencing Heaven

2011-12-13T11:52:00.000-08:00

Life lived by the Spirit is an incredible journey full of adventure and intrigue. When you exercise your spirit to connect to His Spirit to hear by spirit or see by spirit or know by spirit you open a whole new world of knowledge. This knowledge takes deep root in one’s soul and the spirit renews the mind to new understanding and paradigms of thinking that produce creative freedom.

Often times we do not know we are bound until we are unbound. We don’t know we cannot see well until someone offers to clean the lenses of our glasses for us. I was once strolling through a mall with my sister when she saw the jewelry store chain from which her wedding ring was purchased. She wanted to step inside to have it cleaned. The gentlemen offered to clean my ring as well. I gave it to him, not really thinking it needed it. When he returned a few minutes later I could not believe the difference. It was stunning to look at how brilliantly it shined. I was taken aback at how dirty it must have truly been to now shine so noticeably.

Before we first start experiencing the awakening of our spirit-person we do not know that our outlook is inhibited and limited. We think we see quiet clearly, in fact, even more clearly than those contaminated with overly spiritual minded thinking. That is, until we step through the door and find a wonderful world of color and 3D experience we never knew was behind the door we carefully kept shut.

Behind the door is a world that makes our natural world have a deeper purpose and meaning. It does not remove meaning, but enhances it. It does not distort our sight, but removes the distortions. We truly step through the Wardrobe to find a world that looks a lot like our own, but this one has more substance and carries a brighter reality. It also provides a contrast to show where our world does not line up with what is possible and true, but it also provides the way to bring the true about.

That Door Way to this world is Jesus. When we step into Him we step into a whole new world for this alternate reality of which I speak is found in Him for it is an extension of Jesus. Heaven is its name, or the Kingdom of God. However, heaven has been errantly taught to be a paradise only entered upon death when in reality it is a Kingdom entered first in life. The reason some go to heaven when they die is because they were born again of heaven in Christ when they lived. It isn’t the destination decided by God upon our death, but the home chosen while upon the earth.

When we live by spirit we live from above, rather than from earth. Doing so causes a manifestation of our home upon the earth – every time we prophesy, heal the sick, raise the dead, set the captives free, or release the peace of the Lord.

The Christian life is a life lived by the spirit in the Spirit and when we do that heaven is released to be tangibly experienced by those who live by their natural five senses so that we can help them find Jesus who will in turn awaken their spirits by His Spirit.

Yes, Jesus Loves Me . . .

2011-10-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

Many are familiar with the popular children’s song “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. . .” I have come to realize that I must take issue with this line in the song, because the way I know Jesus loves me is because I know His love and that is why I also believe the Bible. The Bible testifies about Him and tells us what He did for us, but the way we truly know He loves us is because we experience His loving us. We do not need to settle for reading that He loves us.

It is by His Spirit awakening our spirits that we know He is real. I hold the Bible in high regard as it is fully inspired by the Living God. But I think the Church has often elevated the Bible beyond its intended position. We treat it as if it were Jesus instead of the book that tells all about Him. It is a book that points beyond itself to the heavenly One who gives it meaning.

I don’t know that Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so. I do not know it because I can give reasoned evidences of its veracity. I simply know the Lord loves me because I know the love of the Lord. My heart is alive to His presence and I hear His voice. This is why I love His Word, not vice versa.

The way to know His love is to know Him. The Bible is a great place to start learning about Him, but Jesus is the Way and there is no substitute for Him. The way to Jesus is Jesus. This is why we are to seek the Lord with all our heart. This is why those that seek truth shall find Him. It is the heart that seeks and the mind is renewed by what the heart encounters.

Seeking the proof sometimes sends us in the wrong direction because we are looking for intellectual reasons when what we need is a God encounter. Often no reason will suffice until one experiences Him for him or herself. I think that is why most reasons only satisfy believers, because unbelief is not a condition of the mind, but of the heart. Only when the heart has found God do the intellectual answers make much sense. It really all boils down to Jesus.

Internal Hearing of God's Voice

2011-09-13T12:15:00.000-07:00

Hearing is not only a matter of receiving physical sound waves that our brains interpret as meaningful communication. You can silently read, forming each word in your mind, as if audibly received and yet there is no sound. Similarly when God speaks to us in our spirit it is a receiving of knowledge, wisdom, or understanding that is heard from within. It is still a hearing that is happening, but one that circumvents our physical ears.

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The Day The Earth Shook

2011-08-23T12:13:00.001-07:00

It seemed like an ordinary day at the office, albeit slow and quiet. The silence stretched on for hours as I completed my work and then began to read a bit of Chesterton. I recently purchased two Chesterton books from Borders during their going out of business sales. I have successfully finished one and commenced reading the other. Interestingly the current read is entitled “Tremendous Trifles” for Chesterton uses the ordinary to expound on the extraordinary, the natural to comment on the supernatural. His aim is to cause the reader to take note of the ordinary and see what is there more so than what is not there.

While engrossed in Chesterton, my world begins to shake quiet literally. The room rocked, the walls moved, I shook about, and the 6 story building swayed as if it was no longer a solid stable structure. The abnormal occurrence passed in seconds, leaving my insides a bit unsettled. My eyes had to readjust to my surroundings just a bit as I opened my office door to discover from the testimony of others I had just experienced my first earthquake.

After an expedient Google search I found that there had just been a 5.8 earthquake in Virginia. After some expending some time on Facebook status updates and comments I decided I wished to write, now inspired both by Chesterton and the strange event of the day. Although I have no profound correlations or postulations to extrapolate from this event I wished to put it to words. Thus, I will draw this post to a close as it has served its intended purpose—a note of a short moment in time on an otherwise uneventful day.

Origin of Satan & Evil

2011-08-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

God did not create Satan, He created Lucifer. Lucifer was a mighty archangel who had charge over many other angels. He dwelt in the glory of God in the realm of the heavenlies.

Lucifer began to get proud and think He could be better than God. He rebelled against God and caused an uprising of angels to join forces with Him in efforts to go against God. Due to this, Lucifer and one-third of the heavenly hosts were cast out of heaven.

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More on God's Goodness

2011-08-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to expound on the nature of the goodness of God in a manner that describes what is meant by goodness, rather than what is not meant.

There is nothing one can point to other than God to illustrate what is absolutely good. The reason stating what is not meant is easier than stating what is meant, is that we can point to things that are not God for an example, but to speak of what is meant, I can only point to God.

Many would dismiss this as circular reasoning. What is good? God. How do we know God is good? God. To be true, it is something that cannot be proven by another measure. If God were not the supreme good, then if there is such a thing, something else would have to be that self-referencing standard.

Humans certainly aren’t absolute references for ultimate good. This is a fact we know too well. And yet, if we know it, how do we explain that we know it? How do we have a sense that we aren’t doing what is right all the time? And yet, we do know this. We know we fail to be good even though most of us want to be good and beat ourselves up internally when we are not. If we reject the Biblical reason for this conflict between our desire to be good and our failure to be thus, what are we left with?

Of course, there are many postulations by many different belief systems, but all religion puts forth the need for striving to be more moral, better people. Prayers, petitions, penance, and priest are all a part of our attempt to be better than we are and to somehow qualify for something greater than we deserve. Christianity is not exempt. In many people, churches, and cultures, Christianity is about doing the same thing – striving to be better on their own merit to earn God’s acceptance.

It’s not really debatable any longer that across the board we know we fail to be what we feel we ought to be. But where is this invisible standard that makes it impossible to do whatever we want without any guilt? Why are we guilt ridden? Why do we call those who cannot distinguish right from wrong, insane?

The Bible says the truth of God is written all around us in nature so that we are without excuse. We all know we have fallen short. We all know there is a good that we do not measure up to. Jesus came to show us the way out of our sins and guilt. He came not to condemn us for we were in that place of condemnation already. We knew full well the guilt and He came not to heap more rules and condemnation upon us, but to remove it. He came to do all the “work” to qualify for us, because work would never get us there. But He can get us there and He who was pure because impure (became sin) for us and took the wages of sin upon Himself. He took it all to the grave and He rose again leaving it all buried so that we no longer have to strive to burry our sins, for He came to bring life to whosoever will step into Him and experience His life.

The reason we fail to be good, is because we are separated from the good God. Jesus dealt with the sin so that we could be transformed in Him and know the Father just as we know Him. For if we have seen Jesus we have seen the Father. The good life is not something we can work for, but something we can be given by the good Father.

This is the essence of the goodness of God. His heart is turned towards us while we were yet sinners. We were unable to make ourselves good, because goodness was not something that is separate from God. So the only way to become good is for God to take us into Himself again and He did this through Jesus. There is no other name, no other way, and no other life that will do it for us. We have a full history from the beginning of time of man trying and failing to be good on their own. We know this full well.

Goodness is not definable because a definition denotes limitation and His goodness knows no bounds. Goodness can only be known by personal experiential connection with God directly or indirectly. Sometimes the indirect experience precedes the direct. We see the goodness of God by seeing a supernatural love demonstrated by a follower of Jesus, or we hear testimony of a miracle that opens our heart towards Him. Sometimes it is a direct experience where God covers us in His presence and we feel and know His amazing goodness and love. There are many ways to witness the goodness of God, and once our eyes are open to recognize Him we see that He was there all along and His goodness never failed us.

Worship

2011-07-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article from the June edition of National Geographic. The article conveyed that there is a new theory which is a major shift from the traditional theory about when religion arose in early civilizations. The traditional theory is that the nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down for purposes of agriculture, developed community, arts, and then religious worship. The religion was believed to be a construct of necessary social development to maintain class structure and the morality of the community.

However, archeologists have discovered a religious temple with no signs that it came after civilization, but before and then the society organized around it. Worship preceded a society, rather than developing out of a society. The writer was of the persuasion that a supernatural world was a man-made construct serving man made purposes, but the archeological theory was interesting none-the-less.

It would seem that we could agree that humanity has been poised for worship since the beginning of our existence. Even those who would see themselves as having no religious or spiritual interests can be found singing with their hands out stretched at a concert. Others relish the outdoors with a spiritual adoration.

Interestingly, it seems that many (not all) atheists are also very interested in Buddhist spirituality. This way they can have the benefits of spiritualism devoid of the religious tenants and theistic beliefs they disavow. Most it would seem will allow a place for spirituality as long as Western religious tenants are not interwoven in the package.

Worship is birthed out of our desire to connect with something greater than us whether we direct it to God, a celebrity, nature, or a favorite pass time. We also thrive on community. We want to connect with people. It’s in our nature to be communal, but we just can’t seem to get close enough to a human to satisfy that desire for meaningful connection. Often relationships fail to work because people are seeking more than a human can give. This is why a strand of three cords is not easily broken, but two cords often cannot handle the strain of seeking what can be only found in the missing cord in the other person.

Worship draws man out of himself into connectivity with God. The depths of man can connect with God in a way that it is impossible to connect with another human. When we replace that God connection with a human we have an unhealthy relationship. We seek intimacy, and we can find temporary fulfillment of that desire, but eventually all that is available to us to find connection fails to fulfill the desire. We think it is the other person and for a time we reach a new high with a new person, but again we fail to attain because we have worn through the experience and are again in search for something more.

Worship is the act of man which brings about that spirit to Spirit connection we so desperately need and awakens our being to His Being. Worship comes in many forms, not all of them are a matter of singing and dancing. Worship is also giving, and loving, and doing that which God has called you to do. Obedience to the call of God is an act of worship. But even these things cannot take the place of physically exalting God through some form of expression. Cry out to Him and He will draw near to you.

What is meant by our saying "God is Good"

2011-06-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

Trace the etymology of the word “good” back far enough and one will find “God” at its root. When one says that God is good, it is not to say that humanity has judged and determined He fits the bill for the standard of goodness. Often times, it is forgotten that man does not apply that term to God, but God reveals the reality of goodness to man.

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Becoming Un-Boxed

2011-04-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

So there was a Priest, a Rabbi, and an Agnostic on the Morning Joe Fox News program this morning. They were addressing the subject of the existence of God in conjunction the coming Easter holiday. It was interesting to see the misunderstanding each held of the belief system of the other groups. It is one thing to disagree, but it is another to disagree with something the other does not even believe. It seemed the Agnostic had much more to say against other perspectives, whereas the Priest and Rabbi mostly talked about their own views.

I review a great many articles on-line and I often see Christians misrepresenting Atheism and Agnosticism as well as Atheists and Agnostics misrepresenting Christians or religion in general. I don’t think this is done intentionally, but ignorantly.

Moreover, it is seldom true that any one person fully embodies a particular box of that belief system and yet we greatly desire to fit them into an understandable concise mold. Definitions by their very nature are exclusive and confined. When applied to a thing, a definition can be quiet accurate, but when applied to a person it is unlikely it could be thus. Describing the beliefs of a person or a group of people is probably more appropriate than defining it as a closed system.

People often ask my husband and I what denomination we are, or what group of Christianity do we call our own, or what model does our church follow as far as church structure. We find humor in the questions because it tells us much about the questioner. What is being asked is “what box can I put you in?”

My story does not lend itself to a box. I grew up in a Southern Baptist charismatic church that was affiliated with the International Pentecostal Holiness Church and often did joint events with Catholics and Methodists as well as other groups. I am now in a church that is not non-denominational or denominational, but relationally joined with an international ministry. We have no model, but endeavor to hear God and follow Him.

I enjoy looking for truth in systems of belief others would dismiss as all wrong. I don’t think it possible for any belief to be 100% wrong. I also think that the truth ensconced in an unorthodox package can be a rare gem at times and would have been missed if the package became a deterrent.

I am not advocating pluralism or anything of that nature. It’s just that our differences do not need to define us and divide us into a box. Nor do our agreements need to be the basis of alignment. Instead our love for the truth and our love for one another should be what unite us regardless of our differences. We do not need to shed our differences or enter an understandable box in order to find camaraderie.

Moreover truth is not something that brings a confined sameness, but a unity in diversity. I can look at something from one perspective without ignoring the value of a multiplicity of perspectives. Not because two opposite perspectives can be equally true, but because my perspective, where true, is only a part of the whole. I need the other parts so that I can shed what is false and find greater truth in the unity of other perspectives. If each of us do that we all move closer together to what is real and further away from what is false.

Following God

2011-03-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

The nature of following God grows deeper in meaning the more one knows Him. For many, following God is about believing and doing all the right things and not doing bad things. It means reading your Bible, praying, and going to church on Sunday. All the while there seems to be something missing, something that doing these things does not fulfill.

We try to circumvent that feeling of lack by heaping more spiritual activities into our lives. We increase prayer, evangelism, reading the Bible. We attend more conferences, or serve more in our churches. Still there seems like something ought to be different. If anyone asked us if we were following God, we would vehemently affirm that we are. The question offends us, but awakens an internal desire to know what is meant by this question.

Too often, we equate following God with being a good church going Christian. The thing is most of the Christian life as we commonly see it exemplified can be done without any supernatural strength. Much can be done by natural effort. We do not need to have a supernatural relationship with Jesus to read our Bible, go to church, serve in the church, do moral things, and avoid immoral behavior. The world is teeming with religions that do this quiet well.

What then is the difference that comes from life with Jesus? If doing all these things is not the summation or even the essence of Christianity, how then do we follow God?

Click Here to Read This Article at Helium.com. Thank you.

Theocracy v. Democracy -- What Do Christians Want?

2011-03-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Proponents of America’s Christian heritage are often confused with being desirous of a theocracy rather than a democracy. Instantly troubling thoughts of Constantine’s intertwined papal and political authority emerge. Americans, for the most part, place a high value on freedom. We do not want any institution to set itself up to be a controlling agent, most especially any institution with a high moral standard.

The church has not been a strong presence in American society for decades. It’s most boisterous contributions have been associated with moral issues such as homosexuality or abortion. The Church has become defined by what it stands against, rather than who it loves. This is changing as a new Church is emerging, one who loves and serves without strings attached.

There was a day when Alexis De Tocqueville wrote that the churches in America were our greatest and firmest support. He found the strength of our democratic Republic rested in the churches. They aided in the self-governance of a nation by equipping the people to govern themselves. In so doing, the government had no need to encroach on the morality of the people for the good of the people for they practiced self-control.

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Jesus Is Salvation

2011-03-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

The essence of salvation is Jesus. It truly is that simple. All debatable topics concerning salvation are solved with this simple truth.

“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Jesus said emphatically that He is the Way the Truth and the Life. It is not that believing is the way, but He is the way.

Yes, we believe in Him, but that is not a matter of intellectually adhering to true doctrines concerning Him. It is more correct to say that we believe into Him. We enter Him by experience with our spirit entering His Spirit and having the fullness of the Godhead living inside of us.

Many will debate whether or not all roads lead to salvation, but they cannot. Jesus is both the salvation and the road. We cannot separate the two. It is not a matter of sincerely believing some path will take us to the good life. It is that the good life is Jesus and to have that we must have Him.

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All We Need Is Love

2011-03-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

I was once convinced of the veracity of the statement “rules without relationship breeds rebellion.” I understood that love was the missing ingredient, but I didn't realize that the need for rules would be fulfilled if love was present.

I ought to have realized this, as I would often write of how Jesus fulfilled the law. I also knew unequivocally that the two greatest commandments that fulfill all the law are to love God and love people. However, my knowledge of this was trapped in my mind and had not traversed to my heart.

My knowing was not really knowing at all. I could write all about it, but I didn't really get it. I've come to understand that I have not abandoned my relationship with the rules. My thought was that if we introduce love, then love will compel people to obey the rules.

But when a husband loves his wife, he knows what things may bring her pain, disappointment, or fear. He will not do these things, not because she has given him a rule book to follow, but because he loves her and cares about her heart. This is love. Love does not need rules, but if there were some, it would fulfill them just by maintaining the way of love. A husband who loves his wife does not need to be told to be faithful to her, he wouldn't think of being otherwise.

Just the same, love is great enough to cover a multitude of sins. If a wife loves her husband, she will love even when his love grows cold or his feet stumble into a path that does not protect her heart. Love does not keep a record of wrongs. It is always faithful and true. It always hopes and perseveres.

Many look at I Corinthians 13, famously known as the Love Chapter, as the criteria one must follow to love. Instead, it is the description of what love looks like. There in lies a significant difference. The former way of thinking lends one to trying to preform the way of love by following the rules, the latter is realizing that love is present or absent in your heart. When you see what love looks like, you can realize if you know this kind of love or not. The passage is not the rules of love to follow if love is missing, it is the fruit of love that can only come from tangible contact with God's love.

The more one has experienced His love the more their love can look like His. This is why a strand of three chords is not easily broken.

We will wear ourselves out trying to follow rules of love. It cannot be done. Such a life is inauthentic. It is a life of performance, an actor upon a stage. It is an exhausting show to maintain no matter how sincere one is. When we do what is right so the other person does not leave, or so that they do what we want in return, we do not have love. When we withhold love when they have hurt us, we do not have love.

From a young age we begin relationship with rules even when those rules were given to us by those who love us, we learn following the rules is the good life, and breaking them will hurt. We were not designed to be captives. We are created to have free dominion. The only way freedom can reign is if our hearts are healed and we live out of healthy hearts that are not afraid to love and do not get knotted up when someone breaks the rules.

Jesus did not lecture the woman caught in adultery. He protected her from the punishment of breaking the rules and sent her on her way, simply stating, “go and sin no more.” She did not need external punishment, but internal experience with love. Experiencing the love of Jesus protecting her from those who would condemn her was enough to free her from continuing sin.

The more I see what love is all about, the more I see how far away I am from that standard. At the same time, I also see how getting there is about resting, not trying. The more I rest in the Father's love, the more His love will flow from my heart.

Case of the Shoulds

2011-02-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

I have become increasingly aware of how often people, myself included, use the word "should." The word flows freely in our vocabulary of external governance. We are so quick to say what someone "should" or "should not" do. Sometimes I hear it so frequently from people, I say "they have a case of the shoulds."

It's a form of captivity that we live in and so artfully impose on others. We do not stop to think that we haven't a good reason to tell someone else they should do such and such. Nor do we know why we tell ourselves we should do this and that.

I find myself questioning should statements, whether my own or someone else's. I trace it back to ascertain if this imperative statement is appropriately placed and usually find it is not. Notwithstanding, people are often looking for advice in the form of a should statement. "What should I do?" comes the question either directly voiced or implied.

It's not that there may not be a good course of action, but it is that if a person needs to be told it by another they are most likely not doing it freely out of a place of love. So when I put my "should" on another person, I rob them of their choice. Sure they can disregard my opinion, but that obligatory should has lodged into their consciousness nagging them to do accordingly. Instead of being self-governed by the heart, they are feeling the weight of external governance imposed on them by an opinionated person.

Many should statements are well intended and come about with one person thinking the other should do this very good thing or stop doing this very bad thing. However, we often end up keeping people captive, rather than showing them how to get set free.

Many times "shoulds" abound because we want to protect the person we love. We want them to do the right thing. Other times it is not even a matter of right and wrong. The should comes out when you tell your friend they really should go to your favorite restaurant or read your favorite book. The should creates an imposed obligation that does not bring freedom and life to the recipient. Suddenly their task to go to that restaurant or read that book feels like an unwanted weight upon them, a chore rather than a fun idea.

Certainly we can share our experience with our friends of our fabulous dining experience. But we may want to do so without using obligatory language.

Once you start to think about it, I imagine, you will be astonished at how often you hear the word should. How many times do you find yourself saying it? How many times do those around you say it? And how many of those times was it really necessary to make such a declaration? I'm sure there are some necessary occasions worthy of the word.

Notice I refrained from saying one should not make should statements. I only wish to bring our attention to the matter and let people freely choose what they wish to do or not do in response.

Book Review: Letters to Malcolm -- Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis

2011-02-11T09:06:00.001-08:00

C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm—Chiefly on Prayer is a rare gem amongst his brilliant works. The difference is that these letters are written to a dear friend rather than for public consumption. Reading them gives one a sense of sitting in the living room of the Kilns where Lewis lived within walking distance of Oxford University. It is like pulling up a chair and listening in on an intellectual, yet spiritual, conversation full of candid thoughts and mysterious postulations.

Each letter, building on the last, has something to do with the act of prayer. The nature of heaven and the mystery of nature are ever present in the discussion. Some of the foundational questions of this dialog are: What sort of creatures are we? What sort of world do we inhabit? What is the proper role of religion? How will the New Earth be like and yet unlike the old? How does prayer affect us and how do our prayers affect the world? Do they affect the Lord or are we their effect?

Lewis makes bold quotable statements throughout such as, “We have no non-religious activities; only religious and irreligious.” Or that “Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.” He speaks to the eternality of man bound by a linear progression of time by saying, “For though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God’s eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.” He goes on to say that, “. . . our creaturely limitation is that our fundamentally timeless reality can be experienced by us only in the mode of succession.”

One very key component of discussion is the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Lewis laments that this is a very key doctrine for we often think that our new bodies will be only spiritual rather than also physical. But he says that this world was made for sense-beings—people who can experience the physical world and process it into our souls creating a “chord in the ultimate music.” We often think of the “new earth” as something so otherworldly it bears no similitude to our physical world forgetting that it was a physical Eden before the Fall. To remember that our physical nature is not a product of the fall is imperative to properly thinking of our connection with eternity. There is something special about humans that no other creatures enjoy.

Interestingly Lewis often comments in these letters that the things he is saying is something he feels free to say because it is in the context of letters between friends. I count it a joy to be able to peer into those private dialogues and experience a bit of Lewis behind the curtain of his public writings. “Christianity,” he implores, “essentially involves the supernatural.” The level of mystery and transcendence of which he speaks bears greater depth than my simple understanding of his words. Great truths are buried in these pages waiting for readers to unveil them for a new generation.

The Diversity of Heaven

2011-01-18T07:53:00.000-08:00

I have started off the New Year with a regained desire to read. I am presently reading my forth book of the year, Letters To Malcolm by C.S. Lewis. In it he writes a most interesting sentence.

“If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.”

This concept is not new to me, but I am always excited when I can borrow the eloquence of Lewis.

It is common to point out the uniformity and lack of diversity and creativity that exists within many institutionalized religions. Christianity is no exception. It would seem that as soon as belief becomes a religion all diversity is sucked right out of it.

In some circles I find it rare to find a person who beats to a different drum. Even when I find them, I usually find them to be the ostracized one. The misfit, the outcast, the one that is quite uncomfortable around those considered “normal” or “popular.” Even though they have this insatiable desire to be themselves, they feel they haven’t the permission from others to be thus. This is sad. Conformity is often expected over diversity.

This kind of social behavior is the story of many movies set in a school campus such as Never Been Kissed, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, or Mean Girls. Just the same, it is far too common inside one’s local church.

Even our concept of heaven is often one of multitudes of believers dressed in fancy white robes singing the same wondrous chorus in praise before the throne of God. We seem inept to think outside of pristine uniformity.

If it is true then that the reality of heaven ought to be far more diverse than the realm of darkness, why is this not reflected in the Church to a visible degree? I do know of ministries, churches, artist, musicians, and other individuals where a diverse creative flavor is continually produced. But it is still at a level of being the exception rather than the rule.

One reason, which may account for the lack of diversity, is that believers are often of the persuasion that they are earth bound and heaven hopeful. By this, I mean, we often purport that we will go to heaven when we die, but haven’t much concept of presently living from the reality of heaven. We put into the afterlife much of what is intended for the present life, to such an extent that we cannot see heaven without looking through earthly bound eyes. Instead Jesus called us to see earth with heaven’s eyes. We have the whole thing reversed. Our template has not been the creativity of heaven, but the predictability of a fallen earth.

We have turned the truth of God into a religion of man that filters that truth through our earthly perspectives instead of receiving the truth and the perspective of heaven. As a result we are very boring, mundane, conformed, and unified without real unity. We unify around doctrines and practices instead of around Jesus. With Jesus at the center there is much room for diversity, but with doctrines at the center there is only room for conformity.

If a person’s relationship with another person was based on believing a list of facts about them rather than knowing them by experience, the relationship would be stagnant and old. It would be based on fact-knowledge rather than experienced-knowing; the former being stationary and the latter being ever growing and expanding.

We can see that God is creative. I find it fascinating that Revelation mentions creatures in heaven that are unlike anything on this earth. If God is a Creator God then those who claim to know Him and have Him living inside them, should be very creative people. They should be originally themselves copying not their friends, family, church, or pastor, but the Lord Himself. We become more and more who we are without fear or wounds keeping us from being that person as we get closer to Jesus. As He conforms us to the image of Himself, we become more like ourselves than ever before and less like anyone else. That is the beauty of the diversity of heaven.

Wonder & Mystery

2010-12-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

As a writer, I do a lot of reading. As one who enjoys learning about how others think, I read a lot of different view points on a variety of topics. One thing I have come to notice is that people generally either want things clearly defined and understood in order to accept it as true, or they enjoy the mystery of not knowing and do not want anyone to remove that mystery even for the sake of truth. Some actually see truth as less important than the wonder of not knowing. A few see the benefits of both and understand that the grandeur of wonder far exceeds any defining knowledge we may have. Still sometimes wonder and mysteries are lost when knowledge is gained.

I recently read an opinion piece where someone was advocating that they did not wish to see the world through science nor religion because they wanted the mystery of the world kept alive. I thought this interesting because typically one chooses either a scientific or a religious approach. Few realize the two can work in tandem, but some are now seeing them both as instruments of modernism and rejecting them as such.

In a manner of speaking, I agree that religion and science can both attempt to be so defining that one feels the wonder sucked right out of their soul. Yesterday as a surprise snow fell, I was at first filled with wonder as I felt the joy of a child peaking out the window on a snow filled morning. Then thoughts arrested my attention of the condition of the roads and what things I might not be able to do. I thought of what the salt on the roads would do to the car. Then I started wishing I had no such knowledge of impediments to safety and other adverse affects of snow. It had muddled my affections for the winter wonder. I sought to push these unwanted thoughts from my mind and enjoy the soft white snow atop the bare tree branches.

There is a desire resonate within us for wonder, mystery, intrigue. We actually enjoy, at times, not knowing how things work, because we want to experience a magical nature. We reminisce of the days where we watched for Santa’s sleigh. We wish for the days when we had no cares about what things cost as we anticipated gifts under the Christmas tree.

The greater the knowledge the more the responsibly and the less we feel we have yet to know. However, it is wisdom to know that no matter how much knowledge we have we are far from knowing even a fraction of what can be known. Still knowledge is not something that can be measured by how many books it can fill for there is a large element that cannot be fully communicated by words on a page.

The best transcript of what snow looks like including personal accounts of what it is like to see and feel it will do little to bring real knowledge to someone who has never experienced it. The same can be said for a sunrise over the ocean or seeing mountains for the first time. The written transcript of an eye witness cannot communicate its grandeur. Even a most excellent photograph or painting could never do it justice. Copies and shadows of the real will never produce the mystery and wonder of the real thing.

We may think that knowing all about something robs us of the mystery and wonder of its actual substance, but it does not. We can allow it to at times, but it doesn’t have to. For instance, I enjoy theology immensely. Some find such a study as something that detracts from the splendor of God, but for me I see how much greater He is then the theology about Him. The more I stretch my intellectual understanding the more mystery explodes in my heart.

I think that religion as it is typically known often reduces God to its doctrines just as science can reduce nature to its theories. But neither really have this power for nature is greater than the science about it, and God is much greater than the doctrines concerning Him. When doctrines have become more vital than personal encounters with God, religion has taken shape, but where personal life with God enlightens towards a theological understanding religion has no hold.

I think that knowledge and mystery do not need to be opposites, but rather are different sides of the same coin. This is true whether we are talking about science and nature or theology and God. It’s a matter of perception and having tangible contact with what is substantially real whether seen or unseen.

A Note to Christians

2010-12-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

Christianity is often curtailed as a system of private belief relegated to pertaining only to matters of spirituality and morality. In reality, Christianity is a system of life. It is a way of living that involves every aspect of one’s life from basic beliefs and worldview to culture and family. It also pertains to how one interacts in life, in the marketplace, and in the community both inside and outside of church.

Being a Christian is not just about what you believe and where you are on Sunday morning. It’s about so much more. It is an assignment, a worldview, a mission, and a way of life that stems out of a relationship with Jesus. Jesus on the inside of you causes an infusion of all that is Jesus to come out of you in all that you do. It is an identity that affects all areas of life from the smallest of choices to the largest. It is an identity of who you are when you are sitting still.

Jesus said that a good tree bears good fruit. Thus a Christian, being in a tangible relationship with Jesus, bears that reality that is inside him. That reality does not just manifest on Sunday mornings or in religious conversations, it is who you are all the time.

Many people try to be Christian. They wear Christianity on their shoulder by carrying a Bible, wearing a Christian tee-shirt, sporting a WWJD bracelet, or tuning their work radio to Praise and Worship Music to broadcast their identity. They think this is what Jesus meant when he said not to hide your light under a bushel.

However, living and breathing the way of the Christian life is living and breathing Jesus in all that you do. This looks more like going the extra mile, doing good to those who do wrong to you, talking well of those who talk bad about you, not participating in office gossip while at the same time not broadcasting your disdain. In fact, it means not having contempt for others, but instead a very powerful real love. This looks like being a cheerful giver of your time, things, and money. This looks like loving your wife, or a wife loving her husband. This looks like speaking well of your children. This looks like enjoying life with an open heart. It looks like love.

Christianity being a way of life means it is first a way of the heart. It means that one’s heart is fully immersed in Him and He flows out of you without trying. Religion is an imitation of what this looks like. Religion is trying to look like a good Christian by exerting natural effort to do the right thing even when your heart bears contempt. The way of Jesus is doing the right thing because the right thing is naturally what flows out of you.

This is not to say that there is no struggle. Paul had the struggle, so do we. We do the things we know we ought not to do, but each moment is a new moment to remember we are of Christ and we are dead to sin and alive in Him.

We have to understand though it is not a matter of doing, but being. If we try to do or even try to be, we will be copying, imitating, promoting rules and religion because we want others to try as hard as we. Relax. Rest in Him. The only striving we are called upon to do is to strive to enter His rest. When we rest in Him, our effort is light and His is strong. He does all the heavy lifting.

If only a few thousand Christians in a nation realize who they are in Christ thereby having Jesus be their way of life, we could transform every nation on this planet in a matter of years to reflect the glory of the Kingdom of God. Will you be counted among that number?

Book Review: Socrates Meets Kant by Peter Kreeft

2010-11-11T06:16:00.000-08:00

What if Socrates and Kant could be brought to life to engage in a dialogue about key philosophical questions? Peter Kreeft creatively resurrects the two noble philosophers and transcribes for us their fascinating discussion in his book Socrates Meets Kant.

In full iconic style, Kreeft, creates a book where the Father of Philosophy, Socrates, meets his most influential modern child, Immanuel Kant. Naturally using the Socratic Method, Socrates gives an insightful cross-examination of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Even more intriguing is Kreeft’s way of giving Socrates an understanding of modern life enabling the conversation to be relevant for today’s readers. In contrast, the portrayal of Kant stays strictly within the confines of his own time period. Thus when Socrates analogously refers to a computer, Kant has no idea what he is talking about. This helps add to the humorous nature of the book.

It is truly a creative idea to bring Socrates to life because students of philosophy and the academy at large thrive on the Socratic Method. Learning about Kant through a fictional dialogue with Socrates is quite ingenious. Kreeft sets the dialogue in the realm of the afterlife where the two meet for the first time.

To Read the Entirety of this Review Click Here.

Hearing God

2010-11-08T08:16:00.001-08:00

While even many Christians profess that they cannot hear God, God is speaking and once we learn how He speaks we find that we have been hearing all along. Even those who do not see themselves as people of faith often have had experiences of hearing Him in some form or fashion. Once they are awakened to His reality, they realize just how much He has been with them before they even knew Him.

God has always been a relational God. The Trinity is proof of this. God is all about having intimate community and that involves communication. When He created the first couple, He spent time walking with them in the cool of the evening through the Garden of Eden. This was the ideal to have His creation have personal communion with Him. When sin entered the world it became difficult for us to hear Him. Our connection was no longer pure and unbridled by the bondage of sin.

Now, for most, our hearing is faulty and we do not perceive well the voice of the Lord. However, the good news is that He is the way back to that communion with Him. Jesus did the work necessary to redeem what was lost and open up the communication again. When we live in relationship with Him we learn His voice just as a baby learns his parent’s voice and can distinguish it from others. Just the same, we learn the sound of our Father’s voice. The more time we spend with Him the more fine tuned our hearing gets.

God is speaking to each of us to come near and receive His grace and love. He is also speaking to help direct our path to the good path. We do have a responsibility to listen. He doesn’t make us listen. Sometimes people will hear of the rare story where God really jolted their hearing to realize that He was talking. But most the time it is a partnership of relationship. To hear without the relationship would not usually be beneficial to us. The greater the relationship grows the greater He can trust us with what He wants to say.

Just like a little child cannot learn all the wisdom from his parents while he is learning to walk, but as he masters walking, talking, and takes on more and more responsibility of being alive the more he can be trusted with the wisdom of living. The key is not to blame God or ourselves for not hearing. Blame was dealt with once and for all at the Cross. Blame need not be shouldered upon ourselves; we just simply need to start today afresh. Start today spending time with Jesus. Start today listening.

Listen not with your natural ears, but with your spirit. Listen with your heart. What is He saying? Don’t try to see a vision, or hear audible sounds. Just wait and reflect quietly upon Him. Ask the Holy Spirit to come and wash you in His love. Just sit, listen on the inside. You may not hear right now while you sit, but that time spent will be instrumental in hearing later when you least expect it. You may be in the shower or writing a composition and suddenly knowledge will fill you that you know is coming from an external source right into your being. Listen and then write it down. This helps you to later remember God is speaking to you. Don’t try to hear, just rest and His presence will carry to you His words for you. He is speaking, just rest in Him and listen.

2012

2010-11-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

The world has experienced many ends since its birth, 2012 is no different. Many life cycles have swept the world for a time. They meet their death and a new cycle, a new season is born. For new life to come, the old must pass away to give way to it.

The old that passes is not all that exists, but all that exist in an old paradigm. The things that end are the things that are out of alignment with the new season. It’s like a spiritual surgery of culture, systems, and people. However, there will be those who hold on to the old and prevent the new from affecting their lives. They will not experience the ending and this will not be healthy for them as the new will be out of their reach as it will be beyond their sight.

The cessation of the Mayan calendar in December 2012 need not be seen as the end of time, but the end of a time. They could not see beyond into the coming years because something so fresh, something so new, something so amazing was coming. The world needed to have an awakening to the coming of this end and beginning, thus, the calendar stopped with no explanation. This created a world that is watching.

It is possible the season would pass us by otherwise. But yet we watch, wait, anticipate, and talk amongst ourselves of what awaits humanity. This is not a time for panic, but a time for reflection and foresight to align oneself with what is being released in the new season.

With any birth comes pain. Labor is involved. Preparation is involved. Holding fast to that hope of the new that is coming will help align ourselves with the forward season rather than allowing fear to keep us bound to the dying season.

For those who are already seeing what is coming they can begin to walk in it now. Others will do a fast adjustment and have a premature birth into the new. This will cause some difficulties in transition, but the transition will come though they will have more growing to do on the other side than others. Still others will be still born always living like the change never happened. The only affect of this change upon them will be negative rather than positive because it goes against their positioning instead of them riding its positioning.

2012 does bring an end, but a good end. The change is already in the air. It will not be the end of the physical world or of humanity. But it will be an end of an age and the beginning of a new age for the world. This is something to celebrate rather than to fear. Good things are coming for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

Revisiting Moral Subjectivity and Absolutism

2010-10-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Arguments pertaining to moral subjectivism or absolutism are difficult to navigate. Both positions have elements of truth weaved throughout to such a degree that is difficult for some to pick one. Others hold fast to one ideal or the other without ever conceding any validity to the other position.

Any conceived idea always has an element of truth. Some are closer to what is real than others, but each have a truth mixed into the concept. Approaching the topic with this in mind one can navigate the waters of moral philosophy with greater ability to perceive a more accurate perspective on the matter.

The extremes always lend themselves to showing their flaws. On one extreme is the moral subjectivist who maintains with absolute certainty that morality is one hundred percent subjective. This position is usually maintained by those who believe it is impossible to know anything for certain from any external compass and therefore it is imperative to be certain that we cannot know anything for certain. The philosophical trappings are apparent.

Notwithstanding, the tendency to discount the entire proposed philosophy due to this error of extremes does an injustice to the topic. Many throw out the baby with the bath water and refuse to allow any acceptance of subjective morality.

Read the rest of the article at Helium.com by clicking HERE.

Link to Article by Paul Copan

2010-10-05T07:19:00.000-07:00

God of Love & Old Testament Killings

Check out the above link. I've never heard this before, it's a fascinating theory.

Love: The Highest Virtue

2010-10-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

American culture has a high regard for practicing tolerance. This shows a shift in culture. In part that shift brings a cultural freedom to allow people to be themselves without fear of being discriminated against. Of course, we, as a culture, haven’t reached that ideal, but it is rapidly becoming a social norm.

In the past, people still did the things that were not socially acceptable for whatever reason, but did them in secret. Somehow we thought this preferable because we can ignore what we didn’t approve of and go on our merry way. Now a new wave of cultural tolerance continues to take shape. Enough time has not passed to see what the affects will be on society.

C.S. Lewis once commented that church attendance at Oxford had been compulsory. He preferred the change of it not being mandatory, because now people could be themselves and not pretend to be something they didn’t want to be because society demanded it. He said the former was helping no one, and the later created conditions for real change for the right reasons.

A shift is happening in the Church as well. Not in all churches, but in the environment of many churches across the nation and globally. This shift can look like tolerance to the untrained eye, but there is something deeper something more life changing in this shift. It’s a shift of love and freedom.

A culture of freedom is being issued forth within some key international ministries. This freedom is one that wants people to be who they are without fear of punishment, ostracizing, or discrimination. It is a freedom that loves enough to not require people to hide their junk. This is accomplished through love.

Perfect love cast out all fear. Love is a value that is higher than the value of tolerance and requires more of the giver than tolerance. However, true love is not something you have to work up for people it is something we acquire from experiencing God’s love. Our heart gets filled up with His supernatural love and it pours out to people. That love doesn’t expect people to hide their junk. It also rejoices in the truth. It doesn’t call bad good to make a person feel better, but it also doesn’t point out the faults of others. It points out the truth about the real you.

In contrast, tolerance leaves people in their bondage by celebrating it with them. It says, not only do I have no right to call anything you do wrong, I think it is totally awesome that you do what you do and I hope you keep it up and that you never listen to anyone that says it isn’t right.

Love says I’ll be your friend no matter what your hang ups are. It quietly waits until the person wants to be free from those hang ups and asks how that could happen. All the while, love speaks out the truth about that person. Love releases kindness, compassion, and peace to that person. Love builds them up, rather than tearing them down. Love makes their heart fly. Love gently cuts the ropes that bind them.

It points out how special a person is. How good they are. How delightful they are to the Kingdom of God and how much God loves them. It doesn’t rejoice in their faults, or tell them all about how much they messed up. It rejoices in who God made them to be and helps by coming along side them and walking out that true life moment by moment.

There are times when rebukes, justice, punitive actions, have a place, but these would be few and far between in a culture of freedom and love. These would be akin to the rare times a child would need a spanking rather than the predominate response to the junk in the lives of those living in our community or in relationship with us.

Tolerance has been a response society has vied for in contrast to the religious legalism that was once predominating in America. Now such people are looked at as fundamental fanatics are not seen in a good light by most anybody. This is a good shift. There was an error in the response of the Church to people in and outside of church community that caused society at large to take measures contrary to that sentiment.

The Church should have been the one to lead this charge of the way of love rather than needing a movement of tolerance. I apologize on behalf of the Church for the necessity of a tolerance movement. If we had been practicing love, there would have been no need for this. I am excited to see and be a part of the shift that is happening in the Church to build a culture of freedom, honor, and love that will not only change churches and ministries across the globe, but the home and marketplace as well. Great things are coming.

Back to Basics

2010-10-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have never paid too much attention to my handwriting. In recent years it is more of a hybrid of cursive and print. Last night, I was helping my 7 year old niece with her homework. She had to write two sentences and I was writing down the words for her to copy as she developed the sentences. She found the formation of my letters to be lacking and proceeded to correct my sentences before copying them onto her page. Although my “t” was shorter than a capitol letter she demonstrated to me that a lower case “t” should not have the horizontal line at the very top of the vertical line. I attempted explaining to her that once one had the basics down of writing her letters that there was a creative freedom for developing your own style. She didn’t buy that.

My thoughts have returned to last night’s conversation several times this morning. Handwriting is like riding a bike or driving a car, you don’t think much about it after learning it. We rarely revisit the basic mechanics of how we do something that we do frequently after it is learned. Even how we think is often just done, not thought about.

In contrast, my nephew struggles in reading. The school has placed him in summer school for reading, tutoring for reading, and other reading classes without ever going back to the basics. When asked, he tells me the reading teacher reads to him. Or they set up a computer for him that reads to him as he reads along. Instead of taking him back to start fresh with a foundational course of phonics, he is expected to start reading by being read to.

I think it is good, every so often, to go back to the basics. Then we can rebuild on a refreshed foundation. We can find the simplistic again and reduce the complexity in our lives. We can also find creative expression by starting fresh. It’s easier to be creative with a new sketch book and brand new box of crowns than it is trying to find a fresh page and work with dull crowns.

I think this week I will reexamine things that are often second nature and intentionally practice or make note of the simple basics.

Kingdom Freedom

2010-09-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to be free. America was born on the shared value of freedom that ran deep in the hearts of the first patriots and Founders. Most every nation in the world desires the freedom found between our shores. A grassroots rally cry has been sounded in recent months for a return to greater levels of freedom while rejecting current policies that would restrict freedom.

The Founders, and the philosophers that influenced them, had a very unique idea to build a nation where the people would be free. Thus, they set out to build a limited government by the people and for the people. A government that would not be the granter of freedom, but it's most ardent protector for this government would be elected and held accountable by the people.

The Founding Fathers were very clear in their thoughts concerning the nature of such a free people. They encouraged, with great enthusiasm and urgency, that the education of the people always include instruction from the Christian Bible. Now, in these days there were no public schools. There was no Department of Education. There were only community schools usually tied into the local church that shared the one room school house facility. There were also home schooling and private tutoring depending on ones economic status.

The Founders view on this is evidenced by these quotations by James Madison:

“It is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

The Founders saw it as instrumental to securing a free nation that the citizens of this nation govern themselves. The only way they could be free, is if they did not need a governing authority to make laws guarding their conduct. Thus they frequently wrote that people be instructed in Biblical morality and to make that and the law of nature (what they saw as the unwritten laws known in our conscious) our external guide to maintaining our liberty. In their opinion, if we behaved ourselves we would have little need of the government keeping us in order by excessive laws and punishments.

However, as good as this plan is it stopped short of the freedom that is available to people. The Founders way would ensure a great deal of freedom never before established on a national level to this magnitude. They took it as far as it could logically go at the level in which they were speaking about it.

The Bible

2010-08-24T07:42:00.000-07:00

The Bible is not THE Truth. How’s that for an opening statement? Let me explain, before some get upset and others get excited that I’ve finally seen the light.

The Bible is not, by itself, the essence of Truth. It is only bound paper with words on the pages that speaks of something greater than itself. When people believe that its words are the highest revelation of Truth they hold them so high that God and their neighbors come second to the words and the readers’ interpretation of them. Even in the day of Jesus, this was happening with the Torah. Jesus told them, “You search the Scriptures because you think in them you will find life, but it is I who these Scriptures are speaking about.”

Jesus is the One who is the full presence of Truth. It is He, not the Scriptures about Him that is life. Some may argue that the way we know what is true about Him is via the Scriptures that speak about who He is. However, this is not fully correct. It is true that the Scriptures are valuable and have an important role in revealing truth. The Bible does tell us true things, but it points beyond itself to the Truth itself which is not itself.

The Bible does tell us many things about Jesus, but a book illustrating a few years of His life, teachings, miracles, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension does little for us if we do not connect tangibly with the One it speaks about. The Bible is there to draw us away from natural earthly existence to open our awareness of Someone who can open our heart and spirit to a new world; a world we where we were always meant to have access.

The Bible does tell us true things about history, living, the future, and God Himself. But it was never meant to be idolized and revered over God Himself. This is why the words of Scripture without the Spirit of the Lord can be death rather than life. This is why someone can quote a Scripture that is supposed to be full of life and love and it feel like venom.

The Bible says that man without the Spirit cannot understand things that are spiritually discerned. There is a veil of sorts upon the wisdom of Scripture that only becomes unlocked when seen through ones relationship with Jesus. The Kingdom of God is then revealed and able to be experienced and released in a way that does bring life and love to others.

However, if people could access these things without the Spirit of God they would not be in a place where the things they find would help anyone because without the Spirit it would all be corrupt and damaging to the person and the world around them. Just the same, there is an understanding that comes from reading things at face value that can lead one to the path that unlocks the deeper understanding.

Sometimes, even believers, live from a place of naturally reading Scripture and by their own power and strength trying to live it out and that usually ends up hurting themselves and other people.

The Kingdom of God cannot be lived out by natural strength. It is impossible. Only by being in relationship with God, experiencing His Spirit, and in turn His power and love can the Kingdom of God be demonstrated. When this is happening the deaf hear, the blind see, the dead come to life, the crippled walk, and the love of God is experienced. When this happens people can speak and release peace to calm storms or freedom from bondages. Emotional wounds are healed. Dreams are realized and achieved. Heaven becomes a place on earth when a community of believers walks out the supernatural Kingdom of God in their lives.

My Thoughts On Mosque At Ground Zero Controversy

2010-08-20T09:07:00.001-07:00

Until yesterday I had not really been paying much attention to the Mosque being built at Ground Zero controversy. I knew it was in the works. I had thoughts about it, but did not realize the scope of the details concerning it.

My primary thought was that the same rights that protect any religion from building anything protected them as well and to forbid one risks forbidding all. However, I now see that there is more to the story.

Apparently, according to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, it is possible that funding for this project is coming from terrorist groups in the Middle East. Moreover, New York officials have asked in an effort to promote healing and good will for the Imam to come to the negotiation table regarding the placement of this Mosque. The request has been met with silence.

Moreover, this Imam stated in a 60 Minutes interview that while he could not say that America was responsible for the events of 9/11, we were an accessory to the tragedy. On Sean Hannity’s show, last night, Giuliani and the Attorney General of New York expressed great concern about this project continuing at the designated location.

They agreed that unless there was proof of illegal activity in the funding of this building that it was well within their rights. However, just because you have the right to do something legally, it doesn’t make it ethically right. Respect for the families who lost people on that infamous day ought to lend to renegotiation of the location of this building.

Just the same, the actions of one Imam and those associated with him, ought not cause anger towards other Muslim people who would not think of trying to build there. Giuliani even said, if it was any other Muslim group from the many who have Mosques in New York, he would not be as concerned. There seems to be something peculiar in the spirit behind this choice that has Americans across the political spectrum quiet disturbed.

At the same time, Jesus said to love your enemy and to do good to those who persecute you. So if this is a strategic placement to further unsettle Americans, then while there is a place for publicly expressing our dismay and, for some, even anger, there is also a greater place to do so with respect and love. That does seem to be the ultimate paradox, to love your enemy and to do good to those who do wrong to you. What would that look like in this situation? How does a nation, not just an individual, practice this wisely?

Note To Readers

2010-08-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

I have been busy writing, just not here on my blog. I have been working to increase my articles at Helium.com as well as polishing some writing for other potential publishing.

I have also been busy caring for my niece and nephews while my sister-in-law works. My husband and I enjoy having the three of them over several nights a week. It’s been a learning experience, and a lot of fun including a trip the zoo, the beach, and the movies.

Needless to say, my blog writing time has been suffering. As I do not have a topic in mind to write about, I thought I would just give a life update explaining my silence.

Feel free to visit my Helium link for my recent articles, although the majority of them are written in the Christian channel to a Christian audience. Still you may find some of interest. I have about 230 articles to choose from dating back two years.

As soon as I finish one of the several books I am reading I will do a book review. I think I picked too many intellectual books to read at once. One is a fictional dialog between Kant and Socrates, one explores mythologies of the world, and one is of a theological nature. Just the same, I should be posting here again soon.

Musings on Mythological Origins

2010-07-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

I am reading a book entitled Parallel Myths by J.F. Bierlein. I have only read the first couple chapters. It is fascinating to discover how many everyday words are derived from mythology. Common words like cereal, chaos, chronology, days of the weeks, months of the year, and even the number of days in a year all have a mythological origin.

While stories are seemingly given preeminence in today’s postmodern culture, it is really only a reemergence of what as been common to humanity for centuries. We live in a culture that values creatively weaved stories over cold facts. Lectures, essays, research papers, and the like, pale in comparison to those who can weave their message into a creative story or recounting of a personal experience.

Just the same I have a love for both forms of communication. I enjoy the lectures, essays, and research papers as well as the eloquently fashioned stories and personal testimonies.

The etymology of many a word has a story behind it that gives it greater context and meaning than the definition found in a dictionary. These words traveled down through oral stories of mythic proportions into words we have no context for other than our common usage.

Pouring a bowl of cereal we do not give any thought to the Roman god Ceres meaning Mother of Barley. Nor do we think of the Muses (the patroness spirits of culture) when we enter a museum. Just the same, these words bear a history worth investigating.

The romantic as well as the brainiac in me beckons me to learn about the origin of words. Thus, I read on to discovery their history as I delve into a fascinating book concerning world mythology.

Causes of Atheism

2010-07-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

There seems to be some interest in my Helium article on the causes of atheism. The link to this article is here.

Note: this article is not speaking in reference to individual reasons to align with atheism, but with great brevity addresses the cultural and historical context of atheism and new atheism. This is by no means a comprehensive article.

I chose to address it in the historical movement context rather than citing various reasons individual people are atheists for those answers are diverse and I would do them an injustice to lump them into a handful of reasons.

Just the same, all feedback is appreciated.

True Hope

2010-07-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

True hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is a product of faith in God. The first verse of Hebrews chapter eleven elaborates that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Scripture also records that Jesus is our hope of glory. All these eternal things are not ethereal concepts, but substances of the nature of God personified in Christ. Hope, faith, love, truth, life all of these are in Christ.

When I say these things are in Christ, substance of His substance, I am not referring to wishing, blind acceptance when there is no evidence, emotions of romance or affection, doctrines, or biology. I am talking about eternal substantial hope, faith, love, truth, and life. I am talking about them in their true form. A form that is available for us to experience tangibly in Christ.

We do this when we encounter Him. Each encounter with Him reproduces what He is eternally into us. Thus, we have hope because we connect with His substantive reality of being. Our hope is not wishful thinking, but something so real it resonates within us and awakens us to the eternal reality.

Christians believe with such tenacity because we have been made alive on the inside and our inner man knows the reality of that which we profess.

Growing Healthy Children

2010-07-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

My 7 year old niece was a bundle of energy the other night. She would not settle down to bed. My husband asked her if she wanted to settle down, or if she needed something to do. She ignored him and continued her rambunctious actions. He calmly requested she accompany him into the other room where she would be given something to do. Somewhat confused at the request, she followed, unsure of what awaited her. He picked up a broom and dust pan and handed it to her as she pensively looked up at him. At his request, she began to sweep the kitchen. He checked on her in about five minutes and asked her if she was tired now or if she needed something else to do. She was tired now.

Danny Silk’s book Loving Your Kids on Purpose provided the illustration of how to lead children without resorting to threats and punishment. He teaches how to avoid the “I’m bigger than you, so you have to listen to me and do what I say.” My husband and I have borrowed from the instruction we learned in this book on multiple occasions with our nieces and nephews. The difference is astounding. It really works.

The two biggest principles illustrated by Silk are to give children safe choices rather than telling them what to do. Secondly, he advocates allowing the consequences to be received by children rather than punishment. For example, his daughter leaves her lunch at home that she was given the responsibility to pack and take to school. She calls her mom. Guess what? Mom is going to allow the consequences to fall upon the child. She will not drive the lunch to school. The child now has to learn how to procure for herself a lunch by either speaking to the office about loaning her money for her lunch, or sharing lunch with a friend. She chooses the latter. Moreover, she never forgets her lunch at home again.

She never had to face an angry parent who was displeased with her. She never had to be grounded. She simply endured the consequence of her action.

Adults primarily live in a world of consequences rather than punishments. If we fail to pay our electric bill, the electric company will simply turn off the power. If we fail to show up for work, we will lose our job, not as a punishment, but as a consequence.

Children are fast learners and they are very smart. Allowing the consequence to befall them will enable them to learn early in life that each action has either a positive or negative result. If they are sheltered from the consequence they will not learn to develop maturely in that area. If they are met with disdain and punishment they will only fight harder to do the thing which is forbidden. Such is the rebellious human nature.

If however, they are met with unrestrained permissiveness where all behavior is permitted unchecked and without consequence, they will become unruly undisciplined adults. Consequence is good and helpful in maturing a child into a responsible adult fully capable of managing their own freedom, hence adept at self-governing. Such an adult will not encounter the consequence of the law of the land, for he has learned to govern himself without need of anyone parenting him any longer.

There is a proper place for punishment, but it is typically reserved for out right rebellion rather than child like behavior. Rebellion is not something that is good for the child and proper punishment fitting to the level of rebellion should be delivered out of love for the child struggling with this in his heart.

The job of the parent is to prepare the child to live in freedom thereby being one who does the right thing when no one is looking. Moreover, the parent is to cultivate this into their child’s very being rather than just their external behavior by protecting their child’s heart. They do this by having their child’s trust and respect, for a child who honors and respects his mother and father will enjoy a long and prosperous life. This attitude of the child speaks both to the parents’ and the child’s character and heart nature.

The atmosphere the parents cultivate for the children will be reproduced in their lives. If the parent cultivates an atmosphere of royalty where each child is a Prince or Princess in training to be a King or Queen they will grow up to be thus. However, if an atmosphere is created where the children are managed as inferior members of the household and are seen as more trouble and hard work then that will be the reality that defines their identity.

The parents set the tone for what kind of atmosphere will be reproduced for many generations onward. Many times, parents have their own atmospheres that need adjusting before they can extend a healthy atmosphere around their children. In order to make this adjustment they need to take time to get their own hearts and perspectives in line with what is true first.

Children are treasures from heaven. If you cannot look at them and have hope and joy for who they are and who they are growing up to be, something needs adjusting and that something starts with the parents and then is reproduced by them into the children. Today is a new day to start fresh with a true perspective and right heart.

Retiring the Term Open Minded

2010-06-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

I leafed through a News Week magazine today and read the cover story on Sarah Palin’s evangelical following. The story itself is not what started the thinking that led me to writing this post. Near the end of the article the word “open minded” was used in the author claiming that evangelical Christians have not become open minded concerning abortion.

This post is not a post about abortion or Sarah Palin, but a post about the often misappropriated words “open minded.”

I looked up the definition of “open minded” on dictionary.com. It means “having or showing a mind receptive to new ideas or arguments.” It also means “unprejudiced; unbigoted; impartial.”

It would seem that this word is often misused. How is someone who is firmly against something less open minded than someone who is firmly for it? Is it not more accurate to say that both parties have a prejudice towards their way of thinking or else they wouldn’t hold to it so adamantly?

This seems to be a term thrown against those who have traditional values. Because the values are longstanding and traditional rather than new, hip, and revolutionary, the bearers of these values are seen as closed minded rather than open minded.

A person can be open minded and still be more wrong than a person who is close minded. The level of commitment to the idea has no bearing on whether it is true or not, thus such terms are not helpful or accurate.

I think it would be better to cease the use of such terms that only carry negative connotation and do not aid in accurately evaluating a value or idea as good, bad, valuable, useless, etc. To throw in words like “closed minded” or “open minded” creates a false perception that avoids the actual issue as to if something is sound wisdom or a harmful idea.

What do you think?

Thoughts On Oil Spill

2010-06-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on the current oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, I am reminded of how people want someone to blame. In the midst of a crisis and well after there will be much discussion of whose fault the crisis was and whose responsibility it was to prevent the crisis.

I do not think we have even begun to understand the magnitude of the current oil spill crisis nor its lasting effects. To see so many pictures of birds struggling for breath trapped in the oily mire makes me not want to turn on the news. However, my desire to not be ignorant of the unfolding tragedy and to try and find my roll in contributing to the solution compels me to watch.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about how people are proclaiming a boycott against BP. We agreed this response could hurt the situation more. If BP does not have the money to pay to clean up this mess and provide relief for those who lost their livelihood, then this will become a further burden upon the victims and the taxpayers. The government is overburdened enough. It should be the responsibility of the business to clean up its mess and this requires a sufficient flow of funds.

I can’t even imagine what the executives of BP are going through trying to deal with such a large disaster with the public opinion railing against them every step of the way. It is not that the public doesn’t have a right to be outraged. It is just that any person or group of people with this kind of pressure and responsibility must have an enormous weight upon their shoulders with little hope of relief in sight.

I applaud the thousands of volunteers offering their assistance. It is frustrating for all to see that they are not yet being well utilized as no one has ever organized such a large clean up before. The legalities and red tape do not help the situation.

It is the duty of an organization, person, business, government, etc. to own up to its mistakes, but it is also the responsibility of the rest of us to forgive them and move beyond the blame casting to solutions. While more mistakes are sure to be made in a situation so mind boggling, we need to have an attitude of grace and look for ways that we can be part of the solution rather than adding to the problem.

We are not under the pressures that the leaders of BP and their consulting scientists are under. Most of us are not living in the areas damaged by the oil spill and are not standing looking out at the devastation knowing America awaits them to do something about it. The loss of life, jobs, and wildlife weighs upon them as what may be the greatest ecological disaster in the world continues to grow as they struggle to find solutions.

It's All About Jesus

2010-06-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

I just read an article on Helium.com by an atheist on the topic of how atheists view apologetics. I agreed with the writer’s assessment for the most part of the failure of at least the majority of what is classified as apologetics.

Apologetics is typically a method of addressing philosophies and religions of the world from a Christian perspective with an attempt to overcome the arguments with Christian arguments. One of the good things about Christian apologetics is that it shows that Christianity is open to being challenged and has thinkers who want to address the challenge. Instead of meeting someone’s questions with violence or condemnation, we meet them with reason and explanation.

This is not to say that you will not find Christians ill equipped to give any reason for what they believe and emotionally angry and unreceptive to any criticism. This certainly happens way too often. Some will act like the questioner has mocked or blasphemed their God just by asking an honest question.

However, I am trying to think of another belief system that utilizes a philosophical defense such as apologetics. The only one that comes to mind really is atheism. I know atheists don’t call their philosophy “belief.” The point is atheists have many books and teaching DVD’s giving reasons for why they are atheists. I can’t think of any group outside of Christians and Atheists who do this on any kind of large scale.

On one hand I think being able to give an answer about what a person maintains as truth is very important and thus this is a good reason for apologetics no matter what philosophy is being presented.

The term “apologetics” comes from the Greek word “apologia” meaning to give a legal defense. This is why Socrates gave his famous Apology. He wasn’t saying he was sorry, he was giving a reasoned defense for his actions and beliefs. Thus, any person can give an “apology” for what they hold to be true and this is a good thing.

However, the problem that arises with Christian Apologetics is that Apologists often spend so much time defending doctrine and theology about God we often lose sight of the Person that doctrine and theology points to. If it is mere argument without the Presence of God filling the words, it really matters not.

“The fundamental truth about reality is truth about a Person,” wrote Alvin Plantinga is a book I am reading. I would revise that statement to “The fundamental truth about reality is the Person of Truth.” The truth isn’t that which is about the Person, but the Person Himself, who is known by the name of Jesus.

You can memorize every verse in the Bible and believe in your head every one of them, but it profits you nothing. The essence, the nature of Truth is not the Bible, but the one the Bible points to.

I could spend decades giving a description, and defense about the truth of Jesus and it have no consequence as it gives the illusion that people need only to know the right things in their mind rather than connect with the Right Being Himself. Apologetics has limits for it is not the way to Christ. It is a method of reasoning about Him, but is not the path to Him. The path to Him is Him. Nothing can substitute for that.

Ravi Zacharias, a well-known apologists/Christian thinker, says that his ministry is to clear away some of the confusion and cobwebs about Christianity so that intellectual arguments do not stand in the way of someone’s heart connecting with Jesus. But he makes no claims for apologetics being a substitute for the Spirit of God. The only way to Jesus is Jesus.

Substantive Faith

2010-06-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

(This article is designed for a Christian audience, but all are welcome to read and consider the content. It's something I composed because I saw something this past week about the nature of faith that I did not understand before and this article comes from that revelation, so to speak, but it is the first time I transposed it from my heart and mind to "pen and paper.")

We were created for a Kingdom of faith and belief not of doubt and fear. It wasn’t that Adam and Eve needed to doubt Satan, it was that they needed to believe God. Satan was presenting a false reality, if they were living the true reality and believing accordingly, the deceptive offer would have been inconsequential in comparison. The thing that got them into trouble was doubting God, rather than, believing Satan. They could not have believed the lie, if they had not doubted the truth.

Christians are often conditioned to be skeptics rather than believers. We are fearfully skeptical of being susceptible to anything false—so much so that we live according to that fear reality instead of the true reality. More than fear of being taken in by a false religion, we fear being taken in by a false doctrine or a false prophet.

It is the Holy Spirit that leads us into all truth. If we are living in a place of believing God and being led by His Spirit, His Spirit will witness to our spirit the truth in which we are to abide.

We ought to be able to see truth in all things in all forms because Satan cannot create anything, he can only distort what is already real. It’s like opening a clam and finding a pearl. It may need a little cleaning, but a real pearl is still there.

Bill Johnson often states that under the old covenant you touch a leper and you become unclean, but under the new covenant you touch a leper and the leper becomes clean. I think this principal holds true for other things as well. We can touch something false and the falsity will fall away to reveal the true glory of the thing.

Click here to read the full article at Helium.com.

"A Republic, If You Can Keep It"

2010-05-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

When Benjamin Franklin emerged from the The Constitutional Convention that convened from May 25 to September 17, 1787 to address the problems facing the post Revolutionary War America he was asked by a passerby what was the outcome of the assembly. Franklin responded, “it’s a Republic, if you can keep it.”

The great American government created by those men in 1787 was not anything akin to the current or past governments of the world. It was not just a democracy, it was a republic, and there in lies an important distinction.

The best source on the meaning of the Constitution and the authority on the government created by the Founders is a collection of essays written in 1787 to the average American, posted in the newspapers of the day. These essays were written under the pseudonym of Publius by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

The essays were written in explanatory defense of the newly drafted Constitution because a group of people, known as anti-Federalist, opposed the creation of a centralized government were giving speeches and writing articles which caused the Federalists to compose and publish the essays in defense of the Constitution. The Constitution required ratification by the States. Therefore the Federalists essays were an apologetic, a defense for this Constitutional Republic form of Government. Today these documents are compiled into one book entitled The Federalist Papers.

It is very clear in the Federalist Papers that the American government was designed not to mirror the Democracy of the Greeks. They had great concern that such a government would be detrimental to America. Moreover, they discuss with brevity the various nations using the term “Republic” or “Democracy” with ill regard to the actual meaning of the terms. They illustrate that no government exists which accurately exemplifies what they have in mind to create for America. While the Greeks were a pattern of democracy and England a form of a representative government, neither nation truly modeled a real Republic.

For the rest of this article follow this link to Helium by clicking HERE.

The Christian History of the West

2010-05-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

Europe has been far removed from her cultural Christian mooring for a long time. To the best of my knowledge, one could not in any sense of the word consider the European culture a Bible culture. The days of the prominence of Christianity have disappeared into her history.

America had Christian prominence in her heritage that does continue to this day. However, while there is a huge presence of Christian churches in America, there is currently little to no affect upon culture at large. Christianity has become a private faith with a few leaders championing public issues from a Christian perspective, but by and large it is not the denominate public worldview of the nation today.

Just the same, both Europe and America have in their history a Christian heritage that did influence much of the progress of the West. In America specifically, our Republic was fashioned by men who had a strong Christian worldview. They built the Constitution upon the principals that man was created to be free and from that freedom we can choose to elect representatives that we permit to govern us. The need for checks and balances of those representatives into an Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branch was because the Founders believed in the fallen nature of man. They believed that people ought not to be permitted to rise up to be long time rulers of the people for the propensity of power to corrupt is in the hearts of man.

Alexis De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, visited America to learn about the strength and prosperity of a post Revolutionary War America. He found that America’s strength was not where he expected to find it, but in her churches, in her citizens who labored to self-govern themselves to protect the freedom of future generations.

There are a myriad of quotes by the Founders of the importance of the people to adhere to Biblical morality in effort to protect the Republic form of government for this government can only work for a people who are intent upon self governing themselves without the need of overbearing laws which restrict citizens due to the numbers of people who do not practice self-governance.

The reason we look at the past today with eyes that cannot see the Christian heritage, is that it so ingrained in our culture without the education of how it came to be that it appears to be common sense rather than a way of life influence by a revelatory book. In fact, Jefferson’s wording of “self-evident” in the Declaration is rather in correct, because these principals were not ones they devised, but ones they accepted from Scripture. The reason for the “self-evident” wording was that the prominent philosophy of the day said that things that were true were self-evidently known, so that word was used to emphasize the truth of the principals rather than how they were derived.

The way to see the stark difference between the principals accepted as “self-evident” in the West and the rest of the world is to observe the non-Western cultures. In India, equality is not self-evident—there is a cast system that does not value equality. In China, the retiring head of state in 2002, Jiang Zemin, was asked what he wanted to see for the future of China. He responded, “I would like for my country to become a Christian nation.” He could see that the West was Christianized and he wanted the results we have.

I, however, think our results, while good as America is the nation of hope to many nations, can be better. I think the Church in America is not very involved in helping her become strong again in a way that is full of love and not full of moralizing rebuke. In a way that provides viable solutions to the problems of this nation rather than just being focused on a few moral issues such as abortion. If we really believe we are in relationship with the living God and have Him living through us we ought to be more relevant to our current economic and national problems than we are. We ought to be able to come up with answers that really make a difference and help stabilize the nation without any hidden agenda—just as a gift—and not as a method of evangelism.

Secularization will not stabilize the Western culture. The Kingdom of God can do this, but there is not much reason to say it if the Church can’t show it and show it in a way that is respectful to the other cultures in this nation and to the government of this nation. We need to come along side the people who are in power and ask how we can help, instead of throwing stones from the safe distance of our homes via our facebooks and blogs. We have to be willing to help at all levels starting with the neighbor next door and working our way up to serve Washington in an honorable and helpful manner.

A shift in this direction is already sweeping through the Church in this post-Christian era that has great potential to become a healing balm to the nations. A Church is mobilization to not just aid the American nation, but to be for all nations to come into the freedom and equality that is available in the Kingdom of God. This won’t be a movement of the “religious right” but one marked by honor and love like never before. What a different world this can be when people express the love and honor of the Father without reservation.

Justness of the Judgment of God

2010-05-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

The question of how God judges those who do not know Christ has been on my mind for quiet a while as it has been repeatedly requested of me to provide just reason for the basis of His judgment.

I realize that not knowing Christ is not the same as rejecting Him, because if a person does not know there is a real Jesus to know, they cannot be justly judged for not knowing Him. However, the judgment that comes from God is based on our own moral standard that we hold others to, which we ourselves have failed to uphold. While His standard is higher than our own, He judges the one who does not know Him based on the laws that person holds to be the moral standard.

So let’s say a person’s value system says that intolerance is wrong and makes judgments against people who are intolerant. Then that same person is intolerant in some way, they will be held accountable to God for breaking their own moral standard.

Romans 2: 1-6 You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God's judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God's judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance?But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God "will give to each person according to what he has done."

Thus God’s judgment is not based on holding someone accountable to some standard they didn’t know existed, but by holding them accountable to their own standard that they practice as true. This is affirmed in Revelation when it is talking about that ultimate Day of Judgment.

Revelation 20:12 “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.”

The judgment then justly comes based on what is justly deserved according to what is known. The wording of “the dead” refers to those who are not in the life of Christ. The good news though, is that none of us have to pay that debt to sin. None of us have to come under judgment. We can instead be justified—having Christ death be substituted for our death—joining with Him in His Resurrection, being fully made whole without any debt to sin. We do not have to earn that redemption; we simply take hold of His hand that is extended out towards us. It’s like reaching up with an empty hand, knowing you have nothing to offer, but receiving Him forevermore.

Conforming to the Real

2010-05-10T08:03:00.000-07:00

Man wants truth to bend to him, instead of him bending to truth. We want truth to be as we create it to be, rather than we being created by it. We want it to conform to us, instead of us conforming to it. However, truth is not an “it” that we can create, but a Him who created us.

We cannot have the world where truth is sacrificed on an altar of tolerance. That world will always be a false unattainable distortion rather than a true reality from which we can live. The true reality is exclusive of that which is not truth.

Francis Schaeffer writes, “There is that which is true God, and there is that which is no god. God is there as against His not being there. That’s the big antithesis.” Ultimate reality is an antithesis rather than a synthesis. God is not all things. There are things He is not and things that are separated from His good nature, hence the things that are not good.

For anyone to deviate from the goodness that is God, a separation has been caused in the very fabric of ones being setting one apart from God. We are to be set apart unto God, not from Him. Yet we enter this world separated from God and in need of a rejoining with Him.

That which is good can only be that which reflects or is aligned with His Truth as presented in the Person of Jesus.

All else is a distortion of that true reality and therefore false. Bill Johnson aptly stated “The devil is not the opposite of God! He's the opposite of Michael, God has no opposite!" The devil has no power to create truth; he can only distort the truth God created causing an untruth rather than a competing truth. He distorts something causing that path to lead away from God, not toward God.

We want that path to be the same as the path to God. We want to head whatever direction we choose and still be okay with God. If we cannot have our cake eat it too, we blame God for not doing His due diligence to accept our way instead of the way that is true.

We put God on trial instead of realizing we sit before the Judge. He takes off His robe and becomes our defense paying our debt to sin for us. We can receive that payment by receiving Him who is the payment. We can only bear what is true if the Truth is first born into us by Him who is Truth. This is the nature of the rebirth of the person into our new identity as Sons and Daughters of God fully adopted as heirs with Christ to the heavenly Kingdom of God.

It is key to understand that salvation is not something Jesus gives us, but something Jesus is. This is why it is not based on something we earn, but something we are given by being given Jesus Himself. He infuses us with Himself; therefore we gain His eternal life.

Final Authority and National Identity

2010-05-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

In a court of law the legal counsel will present a case often based on precedent. This means that the attorney will consult prior cases where the same or similar facts of the case were dealt with and ruled upon. The attorney will present that prior ruling, or a collection of prior rulings, as a justification for the plea he is making before the court. Similarly the opposing counsel will seek to find prior rulings to support his position in the matter.

At the Supreme Court level this presentation of established precedent is also the common method used to win a case. However, something has changed in the worldview of this culture that does not presume the past ruling to be justification for a present matter. It simply does not matter to the Court if the Justices of old ruled a certain way and interpreted the Constitution a certain way. What matters is how they see the matter today and what they decide today is an appropriate ruling. The wealth of history is often sacrificed to modern ideology.

I began to consider this situation. On one hand the abandonment of the authority of history seems like a dangerous thing. It is like building a house on sand with no sturdy underpinnings leaving the power of the justices to be a matter of political position. However, on the other hand, if the past were blindly accepted as always accurate authority then errors of the past would continually be perpetuated to future generations with no hope of course correction.

Thus it would seem that precedent alone should not be sufficient justification for the Justices to decide a matter. Just the same, their own opinions are not satisfactory to making such important decisions that affect a nation.

How then should they rule? On what basis should their rulings be made? If historical precedent has no ultimate authority, then on what authority is their authority based upon? If none, why should their authority matter?

If there is no final authority, no place for the buck to stop, how can any court of justice actually do justice?

There was a day when it was commonly acknowledged that the final authority was God and that any justice we employ in this nation ought to be aligned with the Justice of heaven or else the ruling was not worth the paper it was written upon.

This is why this nation has a National Day of Prayer. It is a day of commemorating the subservient position of our nation to our God. Of course, this ought to be lived out all year through, but it is still good to have a day set aside where we remember our national identity in light of His Sovereign Identity.

It is precisely because of our subservience to God that we enjoy the freedom and equal value of life that we do in this nation. This is why this Day is so very important to America and why it ought not to be taken lightly. Nor should its purpose be overlooked in light of the current controversy. Moreover, let our observance of it not be undertaken in such a way that we trample on the freedom of others who do not wish to participate. Let us not get caught up in whose to blame for the current disregard for this holiday, but let us exercise our freedom to pray for our country to the only One who can restore our heritage and renew our nation.

Book Review: The Philosophy of Jesus by Peter Kreeft

2010-05-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Philosophy of Jesus by Peter Kreeft is an outstanding and unique book. Peter Kreeft being an astute Philosophy Professor at Boston College adeptly demonstrates how Jesus ought to be considered amongst the great philosophers. Moreover, he illustrates how Jesus is not just a philosopher, but the key to all philosophy, being Himself the person of Truth.

Philosophers study metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, anthropology, and ethics. Yet few philosophers look to Jesus as the metaphysician, true being, true knower, anthropos, and being of righteousness. Kreeft leads his reader through a new consideration of Jesus. He looks at the worldview Jesus gives us and the answers to philosopher’s greatest questions that He provides.

For the rest of the article written for Helium click here.

The Absolute Eternal Nature of God

2010-04-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

God is absolute rather than relative. It is us who are relative to Him. He is the Subject, and we the object. God relates to man according to man’s relation to God. God’s action may be different in relation to one man versus another man, for it is men that vary and God that is stationary. God is constant, but we are not. Thus God responds consistently as Himself, but we being relative to Him are responded to according to our positional relation to Him.

Men change, God does not. Therefore if God still responded to man like man was yesterday, then God would be operating according to the past rather than the present. However, God is always the eternal now, having no past and no future. He doesn’t exist in time, but is the Creator of time. His existence is outside of time, distinct from time, separate and above that which is created. He only enters into time by choice, but does not have His habitation within time. This is why man being united with God has a new eternal home for our nature rises to have relationship with Him because He has already descended so that we may ascend. God doesn’t come and join us in time, but has us join Him in eternity releasing us from the bounds of time. This is why Jesus went to prepare a place for us in heaven for us to have our being in His Being in His home which is now also ours.

We were born eternal and were subjected to temporal existence when we fell from our relation to God. Peter Kreeft writes, “Being became a being, the Subject became an object, God became a man, I AM became He” expressly to release us from our fallen existence to a place of being sons and daughters of God.

Kreeft writes, “Jesus was not God represented, but God presented, God made maximally present, God known by sight and even touch as well as by faith. Heaven had come to earth. It was not a new concept of heaven but a new presence of Heaven.” Moreover he explains, “In all His encounters, He becomes in time what He is eternally.”

God does not manifest in time differently than He really is. He is always Himself weather as the Father or as the Son. He enters time to reveal Himself to us, for we could not know Him unless He manifested His identity in a way we can know. He has done this in creation, in the Incarnation, in the revelation of Scripture, and He does this forevermore through Christ.

Christ, now having habitation in us since we are lifted up to also be in Him, reflects through us to the world. We become the agents of His body manifesting His heavenly reality, where we have our being, to this earth where we live as foreigners. The cross is both horizontal and vertical. It bridges heaven and earth, but also distributes heaven to earth making the latter reflect the true glory of the former.

Book Review: Moment of Truth by Marc Nuttle

2010-04-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

Moment of Truth by Marc Nuttle is a practical guide, catered to the everyday person, to getting involved in politics.

Marc Nuttle is a living historic figure having worked in the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin as well as Pat Robertson and Steve Forbes. He has been an advisor on major government projects in the United States and in China, Russia, Ukrain, Bulgaria, Sudan, Jordan, and more. Nuttle is highly qualified to write this book on political issues and the necessity of involvement of the average person in the political process.

Nuttle, while openly a Christian conservative, adeptly illustrates the issues of our day and how a person can determine for themselves what side of the issue they want to endorse. Moreover, he enumerates how to ascertain the values one holds dear and use them to develop a political voice. While expressly conservative, he is very fair to the entire system of politics.

To read more of this book review click here to follow the link to Helium.com where this article is posted.

Goodness of God Revisited Again

2010-04-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

From the time I started this blog, discussions on the question of God’s goodness have been of primary prevalence. Therefore I find myself thinking and writing on this topic far more often than any other topic.

The most common objections to God’s goodness are the actions recorded in the Old Testament, the existence of evil, and the doctrine of hell. The problem anyone encounters with the first two is that one has to have a different point of reference for good outside of God in order support an argument that God’s actions are not good. Not to mention, if God does not exist, and is not available as the point of reference for goodness, then there is nothing to contend in the first place, for there were no such actions by the hand of God.

To argue against His goodness rather than His existence allows, for the sake of argument, for Him to indeed exist. Now if the Bible God exists, the Bible God has certain attributes that describe His nature. God, being one, rather than a sum of parts, is not a collection of His attributes. We speak of His attributes separately at times, but they are one, just as He is one.

As discussed in the previous post, God is not just in one situation and merciful in another. He at all times is doing or saying the just and merciful thing. At the same time, His goodness is one with His justice and mercy. His actions come from His nature. They cannot be different than who He is. God is not like us in that He chooses to respond differently than He wants to. He always does that which He wants for His will is one with His nature. To use His doing all that He wants as a refutation that He is good is illogical. For His want is one with His nature which is good. Doing whatever He wants, is precisely doing that which is good. In contrast, we have a duplicitous nature and we often do the things we ought not to do because we want to do that rather than what we know is good and at times we do the good thing by choice even when we want something we ought not want. This is not so with God. He always does according to His nature which is good. There is nothing external governing Him. There is no authority greater than Him.

To move from the philosophical to the illustrative, the next common contention against the goodness of God is to point out particular actions of God as evidence that He is not really good for a good being would never do such and such. The problem in this is that we ourselves are not infinitely good and so we cannot be the point of reference for goodness. Thus we have nothing outside of God to declare something He did as wrong. If the Bible God is real, and the Old Testament records are true, we were created by this God. Thus our idea of what is good cannot supercede His.

Now as to the question of evil, if there is evil then there must be good. And if there is both good and evil then there must be a way to differentiate between the two. That way cannot come from those who are doing the evil and the good; it has to come from a good source that is not corrupted by evil. A source that is good infinitely or eternally. The evil then is that which is different from that good and the only way anyone can call something evil is to have some idea of something else being good and knowing that this evil thing is not that good thing. Hence, a point of reference outside of us is required. Now, that point of reference does not need a point of reference. Nor can that point of reference be an abstract theory of man or an abstract form in the cosmos, it needs being to have realness. A supernatural eternal being that is absolutely good and gains His existence from none outside of Himself is necessary to support a worldview that says there is good and evil.

However, if one is not maintaining such a worldview and there is no evil and no good, things only are amorally then this view would not need such a foundation. Naturalism will do nicely to support this view of things, but few are willing to abandon certain actions as being amoral rather than down right wrong, unjust, or evil. Such a worldview is difficult to live out for as soon as someone does something “wrong” to you the view ought to be quickly abandoned and a call of injustice issued.

Lastly, there is the doctrine of hell. The argument is that a good God with such infinite power and love ought to have come up with something less revolting than an eternity in torment for those who do not have relationship with Him. However, God is the source of eternal life. Being outside of Him is being outside of that eternal good life. That is a tormenting existence when all is said and done and one has passed on into eternity. It cannot be otherwise, God’s life isn’t in that existence. His Presence is not manifested there. Therefore, it is tormenting, it is destructive, it is horrid. This is not a place where God wants any of us. He sent Jesus so that all would have the opportunity to be pulled out of the existence that leads to such perishing. The door to the good eternal life—the heavenly reality—is Jesus. It is in Jesus therefore He is the only way. Hell is then not something God is doing to us, but something He has made the way for us to avoid for it was never a place meant for mankind, but a place created for Satan and his demons to be bound for eternity. God does not send anyone to hell. He opens His to us to find life in Him as we are designed to, but gives us the freedom to continue in our own ways apart from Him which will sadly separate us forever from His life.

God’s goodness cannot be proven by weighing God’s actions and commands and finding them to fall short of Himself. There is not another standard worthy of being an instrument of measurement against God. He is the good authority. There is no authority greater than Him. God is always Himself. If He is, then He is good. If He is not, then the entire discussion is irrelevant for there is no one to judge.

Justice & Mercy: Philosophical & Practical

2010-04-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

God's attributes are not parts of Him, they are each the whole of Him. He is all His attributes at all times. He is one, thus His attributes are one. We speak of them individually, but we err when we extract one without reference to the others. For instance, God is just and He is merciful. He does not choose to be merciful in one situation and just in another, He is equally just and merciful in every situation. To us we might see His response as more of an action of justice rather than mercy, but in reality it is just as merciful as it is just. This is why King David, when given a choice between being punished by being given to His enemies or being punished by God, he chose God for he knew that God's punishment would be exactly right, good, and merciful.

In the same way, our actions ought to be that which lines up with His goodness. Therefore, when our mercy does not include justice or our justice is not constrained by mercy then we are not in line with what is good. God is also love. Love is not unrestrained mercy. In fact, justice and mercy are not at odds with each other or with love. Perfect love is perfectly just and merciful at the same time for God is all of these attributes eternally. They all are anchored together in Him as one.

Any of these attributes lived out apart from the rest would be harmful and not a true representation of the attribute. Love without justice is not real love. Justice without mercy is not really just. Mercy without justice is not really being merciful. True love is not just a balance of justice and mercy, but is a full composite of both for the two cannot be rightly separated.

People who are recipients of constant mercy devoid of justice are not helped, but hindered from attaining personal responsibility. They cannot mature into the people they ought to be if they are saved from every just consequence of their choices.

People ought to be allowed the freedom to be irresponsible, but at the same time it is good to not remove the consequences of the actions. In Danny Silk's book, Loving Your Kids on Purpose, he explains that we all have choices. He encourages parents to give their children the freedom to make those choices while they are in the safety of the parent's home so that their lessons are learned early in life and do not become perpetual problems into adulthood. A child forgets her lunch at home, and Mom does not drive it to her, for she would now experience a lesson in consequences as she decides how to acquire lunch for herself due to her forgetfulness. The action was both one of mercy and one of justice. It was just for the child to not have the lunch she forgot, and merciful for the mom to provide her the opportunity to learn this lesson.

Today's society has elevated tolerance as a virtue and personal irresponsibility as a public problem rather than a private one. This nation was founded to be a place where people are free to make their way in the world with their property and life protected by the enforcement of laws enacted for this purpose. However, it was never intended to be a place where the poor and unhealthy are enjoined from being thus. It was never to be a place where the those who are responsible are forced to surrender their hard earned goods to those who are not. Today freedom has been encroached upon to aid the whole by requiring the few to not only be responsible for themselves, but for those who are irresponsible as well.

In a world where personal irresponsibility is protected by a removal of due consequences, people are apt to become more irresponsible rather than less. It is human nature not to take care of oneself when someone is willing and able to do it for you. Why would a child learn to tie his shoe if mom and dad never stop doing it for him? Why would a child learn to feed herself, if mom never expects them to do it and does it for her? Why would someone who knows how to fish, choose to fish when fish are abundantly handed to him?

I once had a professor who said, if he had enough money in his estate to enable his children to never have to work again, he would bequeath it all to charity rather than to his children. He said he did not want to create lazy children by giving them what it ought to take hard work to acquire.

I used to struggle to understand why the Bible says that if someone in a community is not working they ought not to be able to eat the food. The same Bible says to give to the poor. Then I realized that the “poor” being spoken of are not those who choose not to work or who squander their earnings, but those who are physically incapable of providing for themselves. The “poor” were not those who didn't have money because they were not working, but those who couldn't work and thus justly needed provision. Still this was a voluntary giving out of love and compassion and not a giving out of compulsion of a national law. One is giving, the other is legalized stealing.

While it is good to be a cheerful giver, it is not good to produce ravenous takers. Giving when there is genuine need will produce the fruit of a grateful receiver. Becoming a provider of a person who is able to provide for themselves creates an unhealthy dependency the sucks the life out of the relationship making one the master and the other the slave regardless of the best of intentions. This steals the integrity of the person receiving such aid and makes them feel lousy and unable to be productive keeping them in bondage. The way of freedom is the way of responsibility and the way of irresponsible people experiencing their consequences. This way the consequences act as a motivator to correct ones course.

If we are to live according to justice and mercy there must be a justice and mercy by which we conform. If there is no supreme Justice then there is no injustice. In closing, consider the following popular quote by C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

My Fairytale Story

2010-03-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

The whole of my life is poised in such a way that if God were not real, my life would be a great mystery. My husband and I have been on a course since before we even married of doing what we see God doing and saying what we hear God saying.

Our lives are fully invested in His reality. If He was not, and there was no such reality, our lives would be very strange indeed. For we have dreams that come true. We have direction from Him that are coming to pass with greater fruition and favor than we could even imagine.

We planted a church some time ago with one motto: hear God and do what He is doing. Over the course of two years or more we have had multiple dreams that have already begun to come to fruition (some more fully than others), we have seen incredible miracles of healing, we have had people join us without any effort on our part. People we had in mind to invite would call out of the blue after years of not seeing the people at the very time that was precisely right.

We turned down an incredible opportunity afforded to us when we were just beginning because we felt God wanted to build this His way. His favor has been evident. Notwithstanding, there have been struggles and lots of hard work, but every time we have something major happen, it happened with no effort of our own.

The prophetic words spoken about our ministry are numerous and even though they come from a variety of people and a variety of ways they are all harmonious to the purpose God has given to this ministry.

A pastor from a foreign country even contacted us after people in his small home church had a vision of our church and wanted to connect with what we are doing here in the States. Our website, was the first that presented itself when they were trying to locate the church they dreamed about even though the website we had at the time was 100 pages down in a google search if you typed in all the right words. Today, over a year later, the small home church is now a network of over 60 churches covering three African countries. My husband visited the pastor and his church last summer and spoke to a group of pastors for several days that had assembled from the 60 churches. These people experienced over 30 miracles during a Sunday morning meeting praying for each other as they were taught.

Even in the traveling arrangements my husband had extreme favor. He was set to travel alone into a foreign land he has never been to when just weeks before he met man who was traveling that very week. The man had already chartered a plane that would land less than an hour away from my husband’s destination. Before meeting him, he would have had a day’s journey by truck to the church. Now his time with the pastors was increased and the traveling made much easier. Moreover, the contact provided my husband with a mobile phone where he could contact me daily whereas before it was likely I would not hear from him except possibly by e-mail for several days.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the amazing things that have happened in a way that shows God’s hand in our lives. I know people could just say it’s all coincidence, but the excessive level of coincidences I have seen in the last couple years would be miraculous just the same. As I said, if God isn’t real and we are not hearing Him, I live a very strange life indeed. It would be something of a fairytale, albeit a true one, if I wrote a book telling the story detail by detail of the last few years of my life. All I can say is it is exciting to follow God.

Click here to view video from my husband's Africa Trip

Thoughts On House Vote Regarding The Health Care Bill

2010-03-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

[I rarely address political matters on this blog, but today I feel the need to voice my thoughts on the current event of the passage of the Health Care Bill by the House of Representatives]

It is astounding that the House could disregard the desire of a large portion of the American people who they are obligated to represent by passing the Health Care Bill. Thirty-Eight States are poised to contest this legislation which is proof of an America that does not want this bill.

It is further unconscionable that President Obama can make a statement that this bill is what all Americans have been praying for. Either he is completely out of touch with the American people, or he does not consider those who oppose this legislation Americans.

Regardless of anyone’s position on the health care bill, we ought to agree that our representatives ought not to be able to succeed in circumventing the desire of the people they represent. Just think, if this can happen, then other legislation could bypass the checks and balances and be passed upon the desire of the legislators irrespective of the desire of the citizens.

I honestly have little knowledge of what those 2000 pages of this bill contain. It is too laborious a legislation to warrant passage into law. I do know it is a bill antithetical to freedom. I do know that to take taxes from the “rich” to pay for the bill is legalized stealing. I do know no one has a right to good and services. These things costs money and cost labor and people need to be responsible for themselves and not dependable upon any institution, especially a government.

Of course, health care needs an overhaul in this nation. But let the people hold the drug companies and medical doctors and institutions accountable by removing health insurance all together. Let us drive down prices by having a competitive laissez-faire market. Let us not need to pour money into health insurance companies when we are healthy and not need the service just because we might need to pay thousands for medical care in the event of an emergency. If we are going to use health insurance, let’s just have emergency health care coverage to lower the premiums and the necessity of expecting health insurance companies to cover our basic health needs. This will drive down prices.

Most of all let us not endorse a plan that would take from others to pay for our needs. A need does not obligate another to fulfill it. Someone needing to eat does not mean he ought to steal food from another who has a surplus. If the person has a real need, people who are in relationship with this person, ought to rise up and give aid out of love, not obligation. Citizens should be serving in their community and helping those who can work get to a place of freedom by helping them become a responsible adult not dependent upon others for their basic needs. Communities should be ensuring those who are unable to work, such as the elderly, or handicapped, are appropriately taken care of for this is the right thing to do.

No one is helped by supporting people into adulthood that ought to have learned to be responsible for their own needs and the needs of their family. America affords every opportunity to people to succeed freely. Sacrificing the freedom of the entire American people to help the few who cannot afford insurance is a gross misappropriation of the government’s mandate.

Nancy Pelosi erroneously stated that the Founding Fathers are honored by passage of this bill. I cringed at her words, for she has little if no knowledge of the Founding Fathers and their high regard for liberty at all costs. Benjamin Franklin said that those who would forsake liberty for a temporary security ought to have neither liberty nor security. The Founders risked all for this nation, and it was a sad day to see their sacrifice trampled upon by representatives who failed to represent.

I applaud the 212 representatives who stood fast to their convictions and to the will of the people in voting No to this bill. I do understand that there are Americans who do want this bill, but I do not accept that it is anywhere near enough people to warrant passage of this bill. If there is still such a large debate on the issue, the vote on the bill ought to have waited until there was more consensus and more time to work out something more bi-partisan.

Yesterday, was indeed, historic, but not in the positive manner in which it is being hailed. Americans lost yesterday in a major way. Time will prove this true if this legislation is not stopped. The states ought to rally together to resist any federal imposition of this unconstitutional legislation.

The Nature of Belief

2010-03-19T07:04:00.000-07:00

There are a few different terms used in the New Testament to referrer to a follower of Jesus. One term was “Christian”, which literally means “little Christ” this was used derogatorily, but caught on as a positive label. “Followers of the Way” was another label used, this time by the followers themselves.

The term “believer” was used also at times, and is commonly used today interchangeably with the term “Christian.”

However, I am finding that the using the language of “belief” and “believer” has created a misconception regarding our relationship to God.

Consequently, I looked up the word in the Greek to further research the original meaning behind the term. The Greek word translated as “belief”, “believe”, or “believers” repeatedly throughout the Gospels and Acts is “ pisteuo” which is defined in detail below.

BELIEF, BELIEVE, BELIEVERS

A. Verbs.

1. pisteuo (pisteu/w, NT:4100), "to believe," also "to be persuaded of," and hence, "to place confidence in, to trust," signifies, in this sense of the word, reliance upon, not mere credence. It is most frequent in the writings of the apostle John, especially the Gospel. He does not use the noun (see below). For the Lord's first use of the verb, see 1:50. Of the writers of the Gospels, Matthew uses the verb ten times, Mark ten, Luke nine, John ninety-nine. In Acts 5:14 the present participle of the verb is translated "believers. See COMMIT, INTRUST, TRUST.
(from Vine's Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, Copyright © 1985, Thomas Nelson Publishers.)

John 1:50-51
Jesus answered and said to him, "Because I said to you that I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You will see greater things than these."
NASU

Therefore, the word is not just intellectual assent, but confidence, trust, reliance upon, not mere credence. The same Greek word is also translated as commit, intrust, and trust. Therefore, a believer is not one who accepts certain truth claims as fact in his head, but is one who trusts, commits, has confidence in, relies upon, Christ. It is not a passive word, but an active word.

God isn’t looking for people to believe He is real and that His word is true. He is looking for people who rely on Him because He is reliable. For people who have confidence in Him, because He is worth their commitment. For people who trust in Him, because He is worthy to be trusted. Moreover, all of these things are good for the person.

Man is made to have this symbiotic relationship with their God. We are made to live, and move, and have our being in Him. That is where we thrive and experience the fullness of the good reality, the Truth that is not an informational fact of knowledge, but a Person that can be known intimately.

It can be truly stated that believing is seeing, because believing is not mere intellectual assent, it is to be fully invested experientially. Moreover, this is why we find when we seek. Seeking isn’t an intellectual exercise, but an act of experience. We seek with our being to connect with God. It does something in us to seek to find God, for we are positioned to find when we are seeking.

This is why I agree with those who say they need an encounter to believe. Or when it is said that a believer who makes a claim of hearing God speaking, or a claim of seeing miracles, ought to be able to demonstrate this reality and not just tell of a past story when it supposedly happened. I have absolutely no contention with this request. Not every Christian would make the claims I am making that God can personally talk to us, and that we can say what He is saying, and that we can do miracles like Jesus did. Many Christians would want to see this evidenced as well.

There are people on the earth today that are moving in extraordinary revelation and extraordinary healing power. This ability is not relegated to a few, but so many Christians do not know who they are. We have identity crisis, and we do not live like we have God living through us because our idea of that is something different than the fullness of what being in Christ really means. We trust in what we see with our physical eyes, instead of living out of our new identity. We really, myself included, are not much different sometimes than those who do not believe in God at all, because we make claims we do not live because our belief is head deep instead of heart deep.

Some would object instantly and think I am making some kind of attack against the authenticity of their faith in Christ. I assure you I am not. I am speaking of myself as much as of any one else in Christ. Jesus often told the disciples they had little faith, and yet they lived right there with Him. They saw the miracles, but their faith continued to rest in their natural reality rather than the supernatural reality.

They shook with fear as the storm raged in the boat while Jesus slept. They woke him, begging Him to do something. He stands and speaks to the storm to still and it obeys Him. Where was their belief? It was in the natural circumstance of a storm. Where was Jesus’ belief? It was resting soundly in the reality of God where there are no storms raging. He didn’t need to stop the storm to rest; He calmed the storm for the disciples. He was already resting confidently secure in a heavenly reality. He made that reality manifest for the disciples to see it once again in their natural circumstances.

Jesus said that we could bring that Kingdom reality (the supernatural heavenly reality) to the earth. The Kingdom is not a matter of word, but rather a demonstration of the power of God. Jesus demonstrated that power by calming the storm. There really isn’t any reason for people to believe at this high level of experiential belief when there is no demonstration of His Kingdom. Believing is seeing, because when you experience it, you will see.

I do not expect sight before experience. I write to help clear out some of the misconceptions out there about God’s Kingdom. I do not expect my words to persuade the sort of belief of which I speak. I hope that they can come to remembrance when the time comes that experience occurs to help aid in the transition that may follow once someone has seen the demonstration of God’s Kingdom.

Thus, I do not aim to pressure anyone to intellectual assent or experiential belief. I am confident that His words are true that any who seek after the truth will find it. From what I observe atheists are looking for truth, real truth, something solid and sure and right. I applaud that resolute determination not to be swayed by anything less.

Hearing God

2010-03-08T07:34:00.000-08:00

Many people ask how does one hear God? How does He speak? To whom does He speak?

There are a variety of ways that God speaks to us that is often all expressed as “hearing God.” Almost always when one says he has “heard” God, he does not mean that he has audibly heard God speak. He means that God communicated to him in some fashion and he has received that communication to the point where he can articulate what was communicated by God.

A few of the many ways people commonly “hear” God is as follows.

Dreams: A person has a dream that they perceive to be a communication from God about something. It may be vague or specific. My husband had a very specific dream about starting the church we have started years before it was started.

Visions: This can be a daydream of sorts, or an actual seeing something play out before you as if you were truly watching it happen.

Pictures: This is when you see something in your minds eye. If you were to close your eyes and picture an Elephant—it would be like this sort of communication. Where you are thinking about someone or praying for someone and suddenly a picture of something comes to mind out of nowhere. Maybe you see this person crying and you call them up to see if they are okay and you find them troubled and yet very encouraged by your unexpected call.

Feelings/Impressions: This is when you think of someone or something and an unexpected feeling or impression about the person or place or event rises up within you. God might be trying to give you insight on whatever it may be. Ask him for more revelation of what He is showing you.

Words/Thoughts: This is when a thought comes into your mind that shouts out “louder” than the other thoughts and seems to demand attention. Sometimes it is more subtle, but is not knowledge you could have had otherwise. You might suddenly know a stranger’s name or where the person works or what their hobby or passion is. It is some kind of knowledge you could not of known other than by a supernatural mean.

Bible: God speaks through the Scriptures. He can bring a verse to mind for yourself or for another. He can illuminate a passage or a verse while you are reading the Bible and it can speak right to your heart. It is like the words come alive and penetrate you with clarity of meaning.

Manifestations: Sometimes people feel something physically in their body when God is speaking to them about something. They might suddenly feel a shoulder pain that was not previously there and ask if anyone has such a pain. If someone does, pray for them, God may be making you aware of it to bring them healing. I have had this sort of thing happen from time to time.

Audible Voice of God: Very rarely does anyone give testimony of having actually heard the audible voice of God. Those who do give testimony of this speak of an incredible experience of great magnitude. Most speak of it as physically unbearable because of the majestic power of His voice. That it just rocks you so completely you are unsure if you want to hear Him again that way. I have never had such an experience.

These are not the only ways God communicates to people, but other than the audible voice, they are common ways people receive from God. Typically, no matter which way the person “heard” God; they will call it “hearing from God.”

We are fallible and we will make mistakes. The Bible says that each person is responsible to take what is thought to be from God and check it out for ourselves to see if it lines up with His truth. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pastor or prophet telling you they heard God say such and such about you – it is your responsibility to take that and ask God about it yourself and not just take someone else’s word about it. When the Spirit of Truth inhabits you, He leads you in all truth personally and we do not need to depend on another person as a mediator for what God is saying.

We can encourage, comfort, and exhort one another by sharing what God is saying, but each person needs to take that before the Lord and see if they should accept it as true.

God is speaking. It takes time to learn how to hear Him and to learn what is Him and what are our own thoughts or what is some other spiritual force at work. Jesus said the sheep know the voice of the Sheppard. As you get to know the Lord more and more the better you will recognize Him speaking. He wants to reveal Himself to us in greater and greater measure the deeper we go into Him the greater we see how infinitely deep one can go. We can have as much of God as we want to, His door is always open.

The Condition of Man

2010-03-01T06:47:00.000-08:00

God’s greatness is not threatened by our importance. God formed man from the dust of the ground; however it is when He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life that the man thus formed became a living being. The physical body of a man is made from the substance of the earth, but the life did not come from the dust, but from the eternal living God.

Moreover in John 17:22 Jesus talks to the Father and says “the glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one. . .” Therefore, the glory of Jesus has been given to us.

Consider I Corinthians 15:46-48 “The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.”

Notice this verse does not says “as was the man from heaven” but “as is the man from heaven so also are those who are born of heaven.”

In the Church there is the view that man is unworthy perpetually even when the fullness of God inhabits man, he continues to see himself as the unworthy scum of the earth. Or another view is often maintained that brings the greatness of God down to the level of a “buddy” completely stripped in all practical purposes of His magnificent greatness so that we can have the intimate relationship with God that the Bible promises.

However, I think it is much more accurate to continue to see God’s greatness as that which surpasses all understanding. Also that this same God lifts us up out of our earthly born nature and sets us in the high places in Christ as Christ fills us with His glory and makes us heirs with Him giving us His righteousness.

Ephesians 2:4-7 “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”

We who are in Christ are already raised with Him and seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. We are in Jesus and He is in heaven so we are also now born of heaven, not of earth. We were not worthy of our own earthly nature, but we were made worthy by His heavenly nature.

God can have such an intimate relationship with us because He already stepped down into the depths with our sin and rose without it. We now are raised in Him without blemish fully made righteous for it is written “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)”

Being v. Behaving

2010-02-25T08:41:00.000-08:00

Most people generally live by some kind of moral code regardless of its believed origin. Most of the time Christians are also striving to do what we believe to be good and to not do that which we believe to be bad. The only difference between most Christians in this respect and non-Christians is that we claim to know Jesus and have His help in managing our behavior.

On the face of it, we are still striving to do the right thing even if we are truly striving to do it with the help of God. In addition, Christians often live in the place of having an increased list of what is right and of what is forbidden and sinful. Just the same, the evidence will usually show that the Christian is not achieving the doing of good things in any different strength than anyone else.

As long as Christians try to do what is right we are trying in the same way anyone else is trying. God then becomes more of a motivational reason to do right rather than being one who has made a difference in our ability to do what is right.

However, what is happening is the person who knows Jesus is still living in the same construct they were living in before they knew Jesus. This is the construct of laws. We say we are no longer under the law, but we live as if it really is all about behaving rightly by following laws. Some of those laws are truly good things like loving your neighbor as yourself. Laws, though, are not for those born of God, but are a temporary aide to point to the need for a new nature in God.

At the moment one’s life is given to Jesus, he or she is reborn as a son or daughter of God. Our nature is no longer the nature that did not know God and needed to strive to follow rules for our good. Our nature now bears a new identity as having His nature birthed on the inside. The only “work” of a Christian is to rest in that new identity. It is about being who we are in Christ. It’s about realignment with His nature on the outside that has already occurred on the inside.

“Good works” are produced because there is a good being, and not because one strives to live according to a good versus bad dichotomy. A good tree bears good fruit. If we have the nature of God on the inside we will exemplify that reality on the outside naturally with ease. This is why Scriptures says that people will know those who are in Christ by their love. If Christ love is inside it will overflow and be seen on the outside in such measure that it is obvious God is in that person’s life.

Yet we Christians live like we still have to try by our own efforts to behave in a pleasing way to God. In reality we please God when we wake up in the morning before we have done anything at all because we are His beloved children already.

I remember when my sister gave birth to her son and she said she was so proud of him. While he is a new born baby, never having done anything at all he pleased his mother and father. He only needed to be their son to do that. He never at any point had to try to be their son. He was born thus.

The Christian life is inherently supernatural. If we are not supernaturally reborn as a son or daughter of God we cannot do anything more than strive to be good by following rules no matter how noble we think those rules and traditions to be.

I think anyone who has asked Jesus to live in them, has truly received the life of Christ and the ability to live in such a manner. But just like a natural baby needs to learn how to live the human life, so does a supernatural baby need to learn to live the supernatural life. However, the learning process is in discovering who He is so that we discover who we are thereby being the fullness of who we are.

Eyes of the Heart

2010-02-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

There is a popular worship chorus widely sung in the church for years. It goes “open the eyes of my heart Lord, open the eyes of my heart, so I may see you.” It may appear at first glace to be nonsensical as there are no physical eyes affixed to the organ of the heart, but the imagery is designed to speak to the idea that there is a self deep within us that awakens to “see” the Lord. Many use the words heart and spirit interchangeably referring to that deep inner self that is within us. When we experience God we experience Him in Spirit and in truth. Both in spiritual and physical experiences as well as in truth that engages both our deep inner self and our mind.

I have been writing primarily of late to engage the mind as I have been avoiding use of non-physical terminology. However, I am leaving out a very important element in doing so.

I recently watched the 3-D IMAX sensation, Avatar. In the movie the Avatars have a tail with receptor tentacles on the end. They use these to connect at another level with the animals, nature, and even each other. The imagery suggested a spiritual connection with the world around them and the divine elements of that world. They communed with the beings or the divine respectively on a non-physical level—or rather a supernatural level.

Humans are also able to experience both the physical and the spiritual world. I have been mostly writing on this blog about those instances when the spiritual world births something physical. However, we also have the ability to perceive things that are not physical at all via our spirit and this ability is increased when our spirit is rightly aligned with His Spirit.

In a fictional comparison consider when the Avatars connected to the Tree and experienced a connection with reality in a whole new level. In comparison, I am speaking of Christ being the Tree of Life and we are the branches when our life merges with His.

There are some things that cannot be discerned until a person’s spirit has been renewed in Christ—some things that simply will not make sense. But there are still many things that a person can experience and understand before that happens. I began to realize that I ought not to avoid writing about some of these things simply because they are not physical. Thus, I may from time to time begin to write more about spiritual things and the nature of our spirit even though I fully understand that many of you do not believe we have a spiritual side to our being.

Demonstrating Truth Claims

2010-02-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

Repeatedly I have made the claim that I am as certain that God exists and that I have relationship with Him as I am that my husband exists and that I have relationship with him.

What I do not mean by this statement is that I experience both relationships the same way. I only mean that I personally am equally assured of both being true relationships with real beings, one human, and one divine.

No one is going to ask me to prove my husband exists or that I have relationship with him as every human whether they have been married or not has an understanding of what I mean by this and has no need for evidence. It’s an everyday thing to claim and not all that peculiar or out of the ordinary.

Now someone who had never known what it is like to have someone love them may need a great deal of explanation of what this thing called love is and how it is experienced. There are such people who have grown up in isolation, maybe in an abusive home and subjected to a life without love. To them this concept of “love” would need explaining. But could it be explained sufficiently if it were not demonstrated? Could a person who had never had anyone love them identify with what is being described? The word would have little meaning if any and hold no value without some frame of reference of experience.

They could be educated on love, but still not know love. Reading a story where love is portrayed would be more helpful than reading definitions and descriptions of this phenomenon. Still with no one there to love them would love really be known? They could still come away from all that learning and say this thing called “love” is so unreal and probably does not exist. Maybe they see that it would be enjoyable to experience such things as was told them, but the person may hold little hope that such could be true. They may see it as safer for them to leave behind any desire for its truth, then to live with unfulfilled desire.

Is it too presumptuous of me to assert that the skeptic is the person who is hearing all about this person called God and has possibly heard many a story of people experiencing life with God? Moreover, that the skeptic does not have a grid for this data and these stories as there has been no experience with this fantastical Being that could give any credence to all that is being described. Thus, the skeptic awaits proof with little expectation that any proof will be forthcoming that could overcome not having personal experience. Still more, that there is little hope that personal experience would be attained when there is little hope that there is anything there to experience.

Working with the assumption that I articulated the previous paragraph with some degree of accuracy, I see it as not the fault of the skeptic to be in that position. I see it as the responsibility of those who claim to have had the experiences that correspond to their assertions, stories, descriptions, claims, etc. to be themselves demonstrators of that truth. If our lives do not show any thing at all that this is true, honestly, you have no reason at all to listen further to anything we have to say.

The difficulty, however, on an on-line forum is that my life is pretty much hidden from the readers I do not know personally. Most of you live many miles away and I cannot invite you to see my life up close as we only know each other through the words that are typed upon this page and in the comments. So I am at a disadvantage to fully demonstrate what I claim.

Maybe these dialogs that only serve to give description and tell stories about this God I speak of can do little good until after experience is established. But maybe it will help provide a framework for a future encounter with demonstrations of what I talk about. Maybe you will meet Christians that are living out these claims and you will see these demonstrations. I do not know how else to demonstrate what I speak of in this forum other than sharing my accounts of my experiences and the intellectual reasons which I am continually providing. If my content here serves no purpose for you, then maybe there are other bloggers out there that would be more worth your time. I see time as valuable and do not want to misuse anyone's time.

The Christian Claim of Truth

2010-02-04T10:06:00.000-08:00

Christians, myself included, often make the statement that we know the truth. In a world of a multiplicity of competing truth claims that statement is incredibly and brazenly bold. However, what is meant by this statement, while still very bold, is not that we are deluded enough to believe we know the truth about every matter under the sun. We do not claim to have mastered such knowledge of the world. Though there are some who may act as if this were true. It is far from true.

What we mean when we say “we know the truth,” is that we know the Being of Truth. We mean precisely that we have relationship with Jesus. That He is the ultimate eternal absolute truth, being Himself God. We use the term “know” to mean “have relational experience of” not just “to know” something factually though that is included. You cannot have a relationship with Someone who does not exist. Included in the “know” is the intellectual assertion that this person of Truth does factually exist, but is more than a fact of life, but is Life Himself.

As my very first post to this blog explained, I use the term “Answer Bearer” as a name for my blog, not because I think I know all the answers, but because the one who is Truth dwells within me. And it is that Answer, the Answer of Life, of Truth, that is the one I bear forth. Therefore the title is not an arrogant claim, but a humble one. One that says that His Life is what it is all about.

I am just here to share what I have learned, and to learn what I have not yet learned by engaging in valuable and respectful conversation with people from various worldviews and experiences of life. I am thankful for each and every reader who uses their valuable time to read here and to converse with me here.

Severity of God

2010-01-25T12:53:00.000-08:00

My thoughts have been focused for some time on the topic of the goodness of God. Any perusal of my blog will lend itself to seeing this theme coming up again and again. There seems to be a way of thinking both in and outside of Christianity that ascribes ultimate goodness as something that would never, in any way, cause suffering, harm, destruction, or death. While Christians often avoid any seemingly awkward discussion of the severity of God, it is something that is an indispensable attribute of The Most Holy. Consider the following passage.

Romans 11:22 (New American Standard Version)

“Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God'skindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off.”

God invites us to partake of His kindness, but that does not mean He is not also severe and that some meet justly with His severity.

God’s goodness and His justness are not at odds. He is one and He is always Himself. He is fully good and fully just at the same time. His omnipotence – His power—is also aligned with His goodness as well as with His holiness, and justness, and all His other attributes. Thus there are things God cannot do. He cannot lie for He is Truth and the Truth cannot also be non-truth. He cannot do something that is not good for that would be contrary to His nature. His mercy and His justness are not at odds, but are perfectly expressed rightly. (See the previous post which is an excerpt from A.W. Tozer for more on this).

Some argue that if He is the standard for good that goodness becomes whatever He wants. This is true because His actions are in line with His nature. There is no wrestling between what He wills and what He does for both are equally and ultimately good. Thus all that He wants is good. A good tree bears good fruit. God is the ultimate good Tree. He always bears good fruit. His actions always line up with His nature.

In light of the conversation at hand, I recall one of my favorite passages from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. In The Silver Chair, Jill and Scrubb are whisked off into an adventure in Narnia. Scrubb, otherwise known as Eustace, had been there before, but for Jill this was a new experience.

To set the stage for the passage quoted below, Scrubb and Jill become separated and Jill encounters Aslan for the first time. Jill was very thirsty and saw a stream where she could drink, but next to the stream lay the Great Lion.

“If you're thirsty, you may drink.”

They were the first words she had heard since Scrubb had spoken to her on the edge of the cliff. For a second she stared here and there, wondering who had spoken. Then the voice said again, “If you are thirsty, come and drink,” and of course she remembered what Scrubb had said about animals talking in that other world, and realized that it was the lion speaking. Anyway, she had seen its lips move this time, and the voice was not like a man's. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice. It did not make her any less frightened than she had been before, but it made her frightened in rather a different way.

“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.

“I'm dying of thirst,” said Jill.

“Then drink,” said the Lion.

“May I - could I - would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.

The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.

The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.

“Will you promise not to - do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.

“I make no promise,” said the Lion.

Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.

“Do you eat girls?” she said.

“I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting,

nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.

"I daren't come and drink," said Jill.

"Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.

"Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."

"There is no other stream," said the Lion.

(Passage from The Silver Chair – Chapter 2)

God does not answer to us. We answer to Him. We do not judge Him; He is the good Judge of us. He will not move out of the way for He is The Way. He will truthfully tell us “there is no other stream.” We can drink of His life, or we can die in our thirst. But this life He offers is found no where other than in Himself and He invites us in. But to be on the outside of that goodness, is to live in an alternate non-good state of being that has consequences that are right and just despite their unpleasantness.

Modern culture has embraced the idea that tolerance is the highest virtue. That good cannot allow for suffering or harm. Part of this view is true in the context of a world without sin. Good then would not have suffering, destruction, and death. But this world is not the good world that was first created. It has been altered by sin when we allowed the enemy to have power here. A day is coming where there will be no more tears, no more death, no more suffering. But sin is a reality and it does come with consequences. Evil must be reckoned with. At the heart of almost every story ever told is the battle between good and evil and the triumph of good over evil. But in that triumph comes much cost and those who are on the side of evil do not fair well. God is not a tolerant God; He is very much a good God.

Tolkien eloquently depicts this universal battle when evil enters the peaceful happy village of the Shire through the greed of a Hobbit who took a ring for himself that did not belong to him. Consequences ensued as evil showed up at the doorstep of the shire commencing a great journey for a little Hobbit who inherited the ring and his fellowship to see evil overcome. The costs were great, but good fought back the evil and the evil forces were overcome. Pain and suffering including death happened also to those in service to good, but it was the costs in overcoming the evil that had infiltrated the land.

Good must be understood to not trifle with evil. God does not play around when it comes to evil. We ought not to expect Him to be a Lamb in the face of evil, but a Lion. The fullness of His gentle kind persona is still in the Lion, but He acts in severity when it is good to do so and in mercy and kindness when that is the good response. Even His justice is merciful for He never ceases to be merciful when He is just and never ceases to be just when He is merciful.

When John encounters the glorified Christ, he fell at His feet as though dead because of the Holiness that stood before Him in full unveiled glory. We must not consider God without His Holiness. That word holds little meaning for most. Many a scholar will define “holiness” as the absence of sin, when in reality the Eternal God was Holy before any sin ever existed. Holiness has a mysterious triumphant glory that is greater than we could possibly imagine. God invites us to come and be holy as He is holy. He wants to clothe us in His righteousness, but we cannot tame Him, He will not fit our boxes. He will not be judged by us, but He will give us all that is His if we come and drink. There is no other stream.

A.W. Tozer on the Justness and Goodness of God

2010-01-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

“Knowledge of the Holy” By A.W. Tozer (excerpt page 61).

It is sometimes said, “Justice requires God to do this,” referring to some act we know He will perform. This is an error of thinking as well as of speaking, for it postulates a principle of justice outside of God which compels Him to act in a certain way. Of course there is no such principle. If there were it would be superior to God, for only a superior power can compel obedience.

The truth is that there is not and can never be anything outside of f the nature of God which can move Him in the least degree. All God’s reasons come from within His uncreated being. Nothing has entered the being of God from eternity, nothing has been removed, and nothing has been changed.

Justice, when used of God, is a name we give to the way God is, nothing more; and when God acts justly He is not doing so to conform to an independent criterion, but simply acting like Himself in a given situation. As gold is an element in itself and can never change nor compromise but is gold wherever it is found, so God is God, always, only, fully God, and can never be other than He is. Everything in the universe is good to the degree it conforms to the nature of God and evil as it fails to do so. God is His own self-existent principle of moral equity, and when He sentences evil men or rewards the righteous, He simply acts like Himself from within, uninfluenced by anything that is not Himself.

All this seems, but only seems, to destroy the hope of justification for the returning sinner. The Christian philosopher and saint, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, sought a solution to the apparent contradiction between the justice and the mercy of God. “How dost Thou spare the wicked,” he inquired of God, “if Thou art all just and supremely just?” Then he looked straight at God for the answer, for he knew that it lies in what God is.

Anselm’s findings may be paraphrased this way: God’s being is unitary; it is not composed of a number of parts working harmoniously, but simply one. There is nothing in His justice which forbids the exercise of His mercy. To think of God as we sometimes think of a court where a kindly judge, compelled by law sentences a man to death with tears and apologies, is to think in a manner wholly unworthy of the true God.

God is never at cross-purposes with Himself. No attribute of God is in conflict with another. God’s compassion flows out of His goodness, and goodness without justice is not goodness. God spares us because He is good, but He could not be good if He were not just. When God punishes the wicked, Anselm concludes, it is just because it is consistent with their deserts; and when He spares the wicked it is just because it is compatible with His goodness; so God does what becomes Him as the supremely good God. This is reason seeking to understand, not that it may believe but because it already believes.

A simpler and more familiar solution for the problem of how God can be just and still justify the unjust is found in the Christian doctrine of redemption. It is that, through the work of Christ in atonement, justice is not violated but satisfied when God spares a sinner. Redemptive theology teaches that mercy does not become effective toward a man until justice has done its work. The just penalty for sin was exacted when Christ our Substitute died for us on the cross. However unpleasant this may sound to the ear of the natural man, it has ever been sweet to the ear of faith. Millions have been morally and spiritually transformed by this message, have lived lives of great moral power, and died at last peacefully trusting in it.

Respecting People

2010-01-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

The following post is distinct from the conversations at hand, but something that I have been thinking about. I have a view of people that each person is due respect and honor regardless of their behavior or belief system. While I believe in treating a homeless drunkard with the same curtsey and kindness as I would the President, I also see those who are in leadership in a community or nation as people I ought to honor with what I say about them.

There was a day where I said plenty I am now not proud of regarding a particular President from years ago. However, I realized the error of my ways. I thought freedom of speech lent me the moral right to speak disrespectfully of the President since I disagreed so vehemently with the way he ran the country. In my opinion, I was wrong.

I do not share the political worldview of President Obama, but I aim to always speak of him with respect and for the respect to be something not that I just show publicly, but how I internally respond as well. I aim not to be duplicitous in my rendering of honor and respect.

In so doing, there are a variety of leaders in the Church. These leaders are not perfect and make mistakes, some more often than others. I can only think of Billy Graham and Mother Teresa as those who I have seldom if ever heard any complaint. You will find me speaking well of these leaders even if I do not share all their doctrine, or all their ideology, or all their way of doing ministry. I will also speak well of them if they have made a big mistake even if I see that mistake as a real character flaw or sin issue. This does not mean I ignore the issue, if I think something said was wrong, or mistaken, or if I see something they are doing as sin, I won’t say it isn’t when it is. However, I will still speak kindly and respectfully of each person. I don’t wait for someone to earn respect, they have it at the start.

I also try to remember that everyone says something they shouldn’t sometimes and everyone says something that is not popular sometimes or just plain wrong. Anyone, church leader or not, who is in the public eye constantly will inevitably say something that will not be well received. If I had such a public following I am sure to make a mess of things when I’m talking from time to time regardless of whether what I said was true or not true.

Anyone should have freedom to disagree with anything anyone has said, even if the President of the United States said something. We live in America with that freedom. And while we also live with the freedom to mock a person or publicly call someone out for their issues it does not seem to be good character to do so. It would seem to reflect more on the character of the one pointing the finger then the object of the rebuke.

In the same way, I always speak well of my atheists friends. Disagreement regarding matters of truth do not lend themselves to me thinking ill of anyone who doesn’t see things they way I do. I know my readers all ready know this. However, I know this isn’t always the norm coming from a Christian, even though it ought to be the norm. I have seen documentaries by Richard Dawkins that shows even prominent ministers treating him in a less than noble manner. This greatly saddens me. I have, however, also seen him speak very well of how he was treated by other Christian leaders when he has been invited out to churches for debates or other events.

I hope one day to invite him to my city and treat him as I would a President. Not to earn any brownie points with him for Christians, but because it is how he ought to be treated as a guest of mine.

Honestly, I write this post more for Christian readers than I do for my atheists readers. I just felt it needed to be written as it’s been on my mind for a while now.

Square One: Goodness & God

2010-01-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

Now that the tests of a worldview have been somewhat agreed upon, I will attempt to address the main topic of the comments in this post. The topic of discussion has revolved around the goodness of God.

My position is that if God exist, He is necessarily good. God being the greatest of all possible entities would necessitate His being the greatest good. Also, God being the greatest, hence the perfect absolute eternal being, would necessitate an unchanging nature for perfection doesn’t get more or less perfect.

Moreover, if goodness exists it needs an ontological form. It necessitates an eternal absolute being to even be a meaningful concept. It must be more than an abstract concept, such as Plato’s forms. The alternative argument is that goodness as such does not exist and all good and evil constructs are culturally determined and do not correspond to any greater concept of “good.” One culture’s assertion of good cannot be any better or worse than another culture by any outside standard that can be appealed to by both cultures. If the competing standards lead to war, the winning nation sets the standard because they have the power to do so, not because there standard is more right, just more powerful.

Now the tendency of those who disagree with the philosophy above is to retort with instances of the Bible God’s actions recorded in the Old Testament as evidence of His not being good. The actions of God brought into the argument are third level (see last post) evidence without regard to the first level philosophy. I would like to see a philosophical – non anecdotal – response to the above philosophical position before bringing the discussion to the third level. In so doing, let us suppose no actions of said God have been recorded and we are only looking at the philosophical.

The question of where “good” is rooted and what “good” means must first be established before judging any practical data as good or evil. The above is both an argument for God’s goodness, and for His existence because whether we start with the existence of a real “goodness” rather then the existence of God my argument shows that this leads to the necessity of an eternal being where that good is rooted. If however, you are a proponent of the view that “good” is culturally determined and does not line up with an idea of “good” itself then it will not lead you to the conclusion of God’s existence. In that event we would have to examine the later view of good in greater depth to see if that lines up with reality and works in the practical level just as we would have to then look and see of God being good measures itself out in the practical. But let us start in level one before illustrating in level three if possible.

Furthermore, some discussion has revolved around this topic in the comments in the first level with discussion of whether a God that can be only good can be all powerful. For would not all powerful necessitate the ability to do something not good. To that I respond that if the greatest state of existence -- perfection -- is goodness than God being fully good and incapable of being less than good, would not be a limitation but an attribute of perfection.

Worldview Development

2010-01-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

If there is no agreement on how a truth is measured and added to one’s worldview then there cannot be much progress in talking about particulars of truth. While it is very true that establishment of the existence of God logically precedes the details about who that God may or may not be, I think we need to delve further back to epistemological principals before traversing through the potential truths.

If some commonality is not found at that level then it is like trying to play chess with the game rules for checkers.

In developing a worldview we must remember that it will always be developing, adapting, and evolving to encompass more and more truth as we learn it. There has to be room for revision and removal of inaccurate perspectives as we grow in truth and knowledge. I propose that one needs to measure all things that make up ones worldview by three tests of truth.

First does the thing line up philosophically as true? This is the ethereal, but important level of examining a worldview. Is it logical? Is it true? Is it right? Is it consistent with other known truths? Or are their logical inconsistencies? Are there fundamental philosophical problems with the hypothesis?

Secondly can it be communicated rationally or is it too ethereal and abstract to even be able to express? If the former move on to the third test, if the later there needs to be some work done in the level of the first test. Or possibly if it is reexamined at the first level and found sound, then it may need some work at the second level. If it cannot be illustrated by story or picture or dialog it needs further work to find out why and to determine where the problem lies. Maybe it needs revision, maybe it needs to be abandoned, or maybe you will learn a way to express the thing.

Thirdly, is it practicable? Does it work in the real world? Can it be pulled out of the ethereal, communicated, and implemented as truth? If not then go back to test one, because most likely there is a problem there.

I often hear people think only in the third level even when it violates the first. For example, someone may argue that they have need of food therefore they have a right to the food others have to fulfill their hunger. This way of thinking quickly leads to either stealing or communism as it violates the first level and only reasons in the third level.

One would need to think in level one about whether it is right for one person to take from another person what does not belong to them or if someone has a right to what they did not work to earn. Because if stealing is wrong in the first level it is still wrong in the practical level and the need does not overcome the morality problem. But when we only think according to the third level we give no thought to ethics or truth, but to personal need and survival irrespective of truth and righteousness.

However to respond to a person’s practical need by philosophizing in the first level without a solution in the third can be just as wrong. Often people take a philosophical position and leave the person in need at the mercy of their philosophy with no practical help for them. Something only being pertinent in the first level, but having no value in the third is just as errant as something thought out only in the third with disregard to the first and second level of development.

I started this essay delineating the philosophical need for a worldview and philosophically proposed how one can test a thing before adding or retaining it in their worldview. Next, I illustrated the point with an example using the second level of the test.

Now for the practical it has to work beyond my theorizing and illustrating and can only be tested by practical use of the method for any who agree in the first and second level of thought to take it to the level of practical trial.

The Character of God

2010-01-11T11:26:00.000-08:00

It seems that one of the prevailing arguments against the goodness of the God of the Bible is the actions of God cited in that very book. To use these actions as evidence against God's nature, one is accepting the testimony of Scripture as a valid source in supporting this argument. Presumably if the Christian God exists then the Bible tells about whom this God is, and as such the testimony of this book is used to invalidate the claim of God's goodness.

In all fairness, one should look at the whole testimony concerning the nature of this God and consider the following.

King David, after sinning against God, was faced with the choice of being punished by the hands of his enemies or by God himself. To which David responded, "let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for His mercy is great; but do not let me fall into the hands of men" (2 Samuel 24:14). David, a contemporary of the Old Testament, fully knowledgeable about the events of his day and the actions of God said wholeheartedly that he would rather face God's judgment than man's. He believed God to be more merciful than man.

Moses who saw God's actions time and again cried out to God, "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here" (Exodus 33:15). He did not want to lead the people anywhere without the Presence of God going with them.

Both David and Moses are contemporaries of the days when God unleashed judgment in the earth by way of calamity or war, and yet both saw the Lord's mercy is great and that His Presence is greatly desirable.

These are only two of the many examples of the men and women who trusted in the Lord and spoke of His goodness and mercy. While Christians often do an injustice by depicting God as a Being who is tolerant of sin and who would never exact judgment upon people due to their sin, it is just as inaccurate for atheists to champion God as a vindictive genocidal maniac. If we are looking at the same Bible we ought to be able to see a God who is holy, good, and just.

C.S. Lewis gives the imagery in The Chronicles of Narnia of a good, but not a tame Lion. God is good and merciful while at the same good and just. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. It also says that Jesus came to give life to those trapped in this sin; to provide mercy and righteousness to the sinner by offering to become united with us thereby making us clean as He is clean. Jesus took on the wages of sin for us. What greater mercy and love can there be?

Wishing You All A

2009-12-24T19:33:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas!

AND HAPPY NEW YEAR.

365 Days of Christmas

2009-12-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

The magic and wonder of Christmas time seems surreal at times as if one has stepped out of reality and into a world that exist for only a few glorious days. The house is perfectly clean and wonderfully decorated in full Christmas splendor. The shopping malls and neighborhoods are winter wonderlands. Joyful melodies float across the radio waves and fragrant winter scents of apple cinnamon and ever green trees tantalize the senses. Even more, people’s hearts are filled with merriment and the joy of giving. Bright colored packages are exchanged and time stops for just a moment on Christmas day giving the illusion that all concerns of life are suspended and nothing matters except this wondrous atmosphere of Christmas.

Some may think that all of this is merely an illusion life grants us for a short period of reprieve each year. However, what if instead of seeing it as an escape from reality, we see it as the first time we really stop to taste reality each year? What if all this creative wonder and spirit of joy is not an illusion, but a taste of something we ought to be enjoying all year. What if our lives are consumed with an illusion of reality, and Christmas is the time where we allow ourselves to stop and smell the roses?

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