Watch those emotions...

We are told in scripture, and from the pulpit, that trusting our feelings and emotions can be a problem. Discernment, it seems, needs to come from the Word, the Spirit of Truth and a lack of dependence on our natural human emotional responses.

There is no question that doing anything in the midst of strong emotional activity can possibly lead to a direction that would be different at a different or later time.


However, a problem arises when we limit ourselves to intellectual thinking devoid of our personal feelings, and I would suggest that the problem comes from a true inability to really know God. One cannot know God on a purely intellectual level. We can study about His attributes, we can go to the Bible and  various scripture commentaries seeking an understanding and come up lacking. Why?

Well, because God can only really and truly be understood within the framework of a personal heart relationship! God is not impersonal! God has emotions and He developed emotions in the creatures He seeks. One cannot think ones way to God. One has to love ones way to the Father.

Faith is not factual. Faith in certainly not empirical. Faith is given as a gift that pre-dates the relationship allowed and cultivated by God.

Feelings?
Emotions?

When you reach out to God in prayer, it is impossible to do so without an emotional loving understanding that Someone is listening who cares enough to give His own so that we could be a part of His family.

Yes, it is about emotions.
Feelings. 

It's all about love!
Praise God!!!

God will never give you more than you can handle....

Is NOT Biblical.

It is one of those slogans that many of us, me included, at one time or another have attributed to God's word. It happened again last evening in our small group session.

God, in actuality, frequently gives us more than we can handle simply because that is when we finally, in some cases, surrender to God as the One who can guide and love us through one of life's troubles. Let's take our end times, as an example. We all will experience physical death, and at that point, none of us will be able to overcome the fact. We will be without strength and our bodies will be in the inevitable process of shutting down for the final time. I am guessing that everyone, Christian to "atheist," will call on God to help us through this most final difficulty.

God knows us as not even we do. He will, therefore, present situations wherein we must turn to Him. We grow up being told that We can work it out, We can do it our way, etc. Yet, God will use life's circumstances to draw us to Himself. There would be no good reason to equip us with everything we need for every situation because then there really wouldn't be any reason to turn to God.

The best of all scenarios is to learn, as early as possible, to depend and rely totally on God. That's what He wants. He wants us to follow His rules, speak frequently to Him through prayer and understand that the One who created us loves us and sustains us, yes, even when times are much too tough for us to handle.

What an awesome Creator.
Praise Him!

Don't forget 3-17

Okay, let's start with a confession....
I spend the better part of my adult life knowing only one book-chapter-verse from the Bible. Bet you could guess that it was John 3: 16. The problem was that my knowing that verse came from watching NFL football games when the cameras panned in on the gentleman in the multi-colored afro holding the sign JOHN 3- 16. I am quite certain that I didn't even take the time to look up that verse in the dust-collecting Bibles on the shelves at my home.

Well, things have truly changed, praise God! I'm still terrible at memorizing Scripture, but I can finish many verses when they are started and have gained a pretty fair knowledge of the Bible.  John 3-16 Is a verse that is familiar, I would suspect, to a great many people, whether they are converted Christians or not. It is the declaration of the willingness of God to send His Son into this world to provide the only answer to the rift that exists between God and mankind.

But wait. There's more. John 3: 17:

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved. KJV

There will be a judgment. That judge will be Christ on a day when many many people will cower and be afraid. That will be judgment against those who refused to accept the reign of Jesus Christ as Kind, Lord and Saviour. 

His initial trip to this world was for the purpose of doing the will of the Father, a will that provided hope of salvation and restoration of His creatures into a relationship with God. IN a moment before time there was a covenant among the Trinity creating this plan. Jesus was the one who delivered it, giving Him sole power and authority to save His people, as His blessed name suggests.

Condemnation is basically a refusal to give up ones selfish life for adopted membership in the family of the most High God. It is a refusal of everlasting time with Him in a place we cannot see- a place too wonderful to imagine. 

So in light of John 3: 16-17, if you have not opened your heart and surrendered to Jesus Christ, I invite and implore you to do so without delay. Find a church, be baptized and repent those sins that separate you from a God who is all too merciful to refuse anyone with a heart-felt desire to be His own.

Praise our God.

Sinclination

It's always fun to play a bit with words. One of the things most apparent about us human beings is our tendency to sin. It is said that we are sinful in the womb, and though I would probably choose to debate that idea, I believe in the notion of a sin nature that we are born with, dating way back to the original sin.

If we honestly look into our behaviors and into our hearts, we have to agree that we sin. It isn't that we are guilty of the BIG sins, necessarily, but there are countless "respectable" sins, to borrow a phrase, that we deal with daily. These are, it seems to me, the ones that many find most difficult to really repent on. These sins just keep popping up, sometimes without our actually intending them.

Now if we believe that God truly abhors all sin, and we wish to worship Him with our lives, this Sinclination creates an issue. It gets even more complicated when we realize that God knows us completely- He even knows that we are going to sin before the sin occurs.
He doesn't accept any sin; yet, and this is the key, He provided for a way that our sins could be forgiven. He provided for a way for us to be in a relationship with Him through the atoning death of His son, Jesus, on the cross.

It was and is the ONLY way that our sinclination could ever have been dealt with- He became, through a plan devised before the beginning of time, the one to save us from the wrath He holds against evil, darkness, sin. He provided a light, life and an answer that only He could provide. We are blessed beyond words that He has initiated this life-saving and life-changing outreach.

So it is also important, I believe, to understand that even after we accept this Gift, come to believe upon His son and become 'sons' adopted into the church family of God, we will continue to battle this sinclination. We need to work with the Holy Spirit to guard against the problem of sinning, but we also need to be secure in the fact that God has forgiven our sins, past, present, and yes, future. They were forgiven, are forgiven and will be forgiven because God has chosen to love us sinners, not our sins.

Sinclination- a problem, a reality and a battle. Alone, we will not make a lot of progress. With the Spirit, we are on a journey to eradicate sin, a journey of sanctification, a journey of love.

Praise our God!

To Whom Do We Belong?

Well, in my seventieth year, I have become the only surviving member of my nuclear family. My parents and both brothers have gone on from this existence to, I hope, wait for me in Heaven. It is truly a weird feeling.

When one thinks about it, every situation we find ourselves in, as members, is truly temporary. My career was teaching in public schools which I did for thirty-four years before retiring. How weird it felt to walk out of that building realizing that the school would go on without me as a member of the faculty.

I have been blessed with a daughter I truly love, her husband, my son-in-law,and a glorious grand-daughter who I just wish you could meet. I so enjoy being in their presence; yet I get grumpy when I do not see them enough. Yet, I know the time is coming, it is inevitable, when we will no longer be together.

You know the old saying: I cane into the world naked and alone, and I will be leaving in much the same way.

Let's face it- belonging is probably a primary need for almost any person. Being loved and giving love to people who we value and to whom we wish to be of value, in return.

Feeling lonely? It is a bit hard to comprehend.

Yet, we really belong to the One who created us. We are His because He formed us in the womb, stamped His presence on our hearts and sustains us from conception to our last breath. Nothing temporary, here. In some magical way, through the greatest love ever known, He holds us in His hands and brings us, eventually, to Him simply because we
are His children.

As His children, each of us must accept a return to His presence. We must reach out to belong to the One who was always meant to include us. We weren't created on a whim; we were created with a purpose, designed by the Potter. It's all written. It's the eternal
promise and purpose. WE belong, in the end, to Him.

Praise our God!

Being like Jesus

We often hear that we need to be like Jesus, grow into being more like Jesus, be Christ-like.
I need to be careful, here, because the above would be so very wonderful and, obviously, different.

Jesus was and is counter-intuitive. One only needs to read His words in the Bible and follow His actions during His ministry, right down to the very last words to see that He doesn't operate at all like we do. No one has been like Jesus!

The issues are two-fold. One, He is GOD! God, by His own definition, is OTHER. He is totally different from His created to the point of being quite impossible to define or even clearly understand. We simply cannot be God. There are some people who walk this world with the misconception that they, in fact, are like God, but that is not true and leads to a serious set of problems, eternally.

Two, He is sinless and perfect. Sin is in our bones, if you will. Even the most wonderful Christians in this world continue to sin because of the nature of the flesh. Try as we may, we will not eradicate sin from our lives while we walk this planet.

So, here is the rub. To set a goal to be like Jesus is to set a goal that cannot and will not be achievable. I would suggest, and this is just me, that even at the point of Sanctification, we will still not be like Jesus because we will not be God.

The point is that we need to be careful not to define our walk by such an unreachable set of expectations. Do we need to wonder in awe at the very way Jesus lived? Yes. Do we need to pray to the Spirit that He will work with us to be more loving of our fellow man and appreciative of God's blessings? Yes. To emulate is not to be equal. 

The wonderful truth is that we will someday, through no work of our own, be face-to-face with a God who loved us enough to send His Son to die so that we might abide and live in His presence.

Glorious! Praise God!

We all need to Go Back....

Referencing an old Byrds tune, "Going Back." The song essentially refers to returning to the simplicity and innocence of youth. 

If we take Jesus at His word, it appears that we are in need of being like children even to gain the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus frequently admonishes his disciples to allow the children access to Him.  Our church contains a print of Jesus, looking very European, gathering a group of children to Himself. The point is that there most be a set of characteristics found in children that we would want to emulate as adults.

The terms child-like and childish are obviously quite different. For an adult to be childish, one must return to behaviors that I am sure Jesus isn't championing, here. We all know that there is a wearing down of characteristics like trust, surrender, lack of concern and worry and unconditional love that accompanies getting older and dealing with the stresses and responsibilities of this life. 

We cannot say that little ones are not affected by sin; yet, it would seem that their sins, especially at an early age, are innocent of pre-meditation.

So how is it that we can revert or turn back to a more child-like existence, as the Lord Jesus seems to be stressing? I would suggest that those who have accepted Christ and been ind-welled by His Spirit are well on their way to being more Christ-like and, I would add, child-like in their hearts. The Fruit of the Spirit are, in many ways, representations of a heart that thinks like a child. These are wonderful sign-boards that point toward Sanctification of those who are a part of God's blessed Kingdom

Can we make these changes on our own? I would suggest that the answer is 'No." Like so many things, God must be the One who initiates and supports a changed heart and a desire to love others and worship God.

So let's Go Back. We don't give up adult responsibilities and issues. We do look backward to
a living style that is more full of hope and excitement, joy and love. It's not so very difficult.
Just takes a desire to be like a child.

Praise our God.