Money and power

Christ is right.  We can not love God and money.  They both take our affections in different directions.  But what is it about money that is so seductive.  I think it is our desire for power and independence that gives it the power to grab us.  I know I continually fight it.  I know, I know, 'we all have to have money to survive.'  I tell myself this all the time. (many times to defend my own greed)  We love defending the necessity of something to promote our indulgence of it.  We do this thinking somehow we can fool ourselves, and many times we succeed.  The truth is though, at least for me, I love money and the thought of being financially secure more than God a lot.  I am sure this is true more often than I realize, for it always takes me a while to see where I've let myself get to.  Actually I'm typing this because I am convicted about my condition now.  The Lord is always faithful to deliver me.  I just wish I wouldn't wonder back away from Him.  This is true with all my sins.  Like the line in the old hymn "prone to wonder, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love."  Thank God His grip is stronger than mine.  I'll leave a couple lines from a man that has helped me so much.  Here is a prayer he put at the end of a chapter titled 'The blessedness of possessing nothing' in his book "The pursuit of God"  

Father, I want to know Thee, but my cowardly heart fears to give up its toys.  I cannot part  with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the 

parting.  I come trembling, but I do come.  Please root from my heart all those things 

which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that 

Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival.  Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy 

feet glorious.  Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt 

be the light of it, and there shall be no night there.  In Jesus' name, Amen.

Hard to take in

There are things in the Bible that are hard for me to take.  I'm just being honest.  If you read some of the laws in the Old Testament they seem harsh.  Yet if I want to trust in the Christ of the New Testament I must trust in the God of the Old Testament.  I can not pick and choose what parts I like to believe.  He is Lord of the whole thing or not at all, because one Testament can not be true without the other.  So what shall I do.  I can put the parts out of my mind that I don't like and just concentrate on the things I like.  Yet if I do this I am afraid I will create in my mind a God who is not real.  No, the only way to true peace that I don't have to worry about losing every time I read certain passages of the Old Testament is to accept God as He is period.  That seems hopeless at first doesn't it.  You mean that we must just take everything in the Bible about God no matter how much it seems to contradict the God we have always thought of.  Yes we must.  For this is the only way to ensure that we have not made up a god that is similar to the true God but really not Him at all.  I am not saying that we have to understand everything.  We never will.  Yet in every born-again heart there is a feeling  like Peter had.  In the gospel of John it says that after Jesus preached a very very hard sermon most of the people listening stopped following Him.  Then Jesus turned to the disciples and asked 'are you going to leave to' and Peter replied 'where else can we go Lord, You have words of eternal life.'  

You see, our God is loving and wonderful, but He is not everything we would attempt to make Him.  He is the Lion and the Lamb.

It is amazing to me

It is amazing to me that He loves me.  I am so messed up.  I may have doubted that before, but I am more and more certain everyday that anything that is ever good in me has to be from Him.  Think for a moment if God were to pull out every word of every thought that you thought today and posted them for everyone to see.  That is who we truly are.  We are not merely what others see, or what we see in a mirror.  We are what God sees.  Let that sink in.  There is no mind games with him.  He sees the mind game.  This makes Jesus' words in the gospels not seem so harsh and overstated when he said "if you being wicked know how to give good gifts to your children will not your heavenly Father give to those who ask Him."  I have always thought that statement seemed harsh.  Surely not all of those that He was teaching were wicked.  But that is where I err in my thinking.  The Lord sees our hearts. 

So have you murdered today?  Have you stolen?  Have you committed adultery?  Have you placed another god before Him? ............

Yes we have.  We are all guilty.  

But what does God say "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly"  He does not say oh your not that bad, but you know I had to die for you to save you.  NO!  He says 'you are wicked, if not in your actions in your thoughts, and since I am God of both, you are, but I still love you.  He still loves me.  He still loves you.  If that does not warm your heart then please pray that He will make it do that, because that is the greatest news of all time.  

As a line in a song I heard says "Why should I gain from His reward? I can not give an answer.  But this one thing I know for sure,  His wounds have paid my ransom."

Let the truth of the often misused yet beautiful verse sink in to your heart.  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life."

Why is it that we think thinking too much is bad?

It seems to me that most people think thinking too much about any one thing or "too deeply" about anything is damaging to a person's enjoyment.  I disagree, though I think I can see where they are coming from.  When we do first start thinking past the surface on a topic it is scary.  We may find that we have thought wrong about it for a long time, or that the popular opinion of the subject is wrong, or that we have rested our hope on something that we know little about.  I feel like this is especially true with God, or eternal matters.  I find myself all the time running from thinking about God, because I know that I have thought so little of Him lately.  Many of us have trusted in a God we know little about.  We know the main stories, but do we know Him?  That is a scary question.  I tremble even typing it.  However, I always find that when I do think deeply about Him I trade a glib happiness full of uncertainty for a strong deep-seated joy.  The process many times is scary and painful, but when I search He finds me.  There is a line in a DCB song "alone here with my doubts, afraid You'll find me out."  Yet when we find Him it is a beautiful collision.  So go increase your joy.  Think about the great God of the universe.  

I like talking

I have fought the fact of computer communication for a long time, but I finally surrender.  Since this is the way it seems everyone else is communicating I guess I'll join in.  

We finally have a computer at our home now so this will help too.

Anyway, I started this blog as a release for myself and maybe a stirring point for others.  I may not say things here that are interesting to anyone but me, but maybe a few others might enjoy thinking about some of the things I type here.  I'm love thinking and talking about life.  This blog will just be some overflow from my everyday thoughts and battles within.