Please don't grow dull of hearing

You know, in the christian life we revisit things all the time.  In one sense we are saying and reading the same things over and over again.  It is evident by all the new christian books sold that we are discontent.  Now I know that christian books outside of the Bible can be very helpful to us, but I know at least for me that many times I would rather read a christian book than the Bible.  There are times when it is good to read other books, in fact it is good to do a lot to freshen our view and be encouraged to pursue God.  But I want to encourage anyone who might possibly read this; God still speaks in the pages of Scripture, and if you will ask Him to help you honestly hear what He says you will understand and be better off than you would by reading any other book.  I really believe this.  You may not understand the entire passage you read, but if you pray and look to God honestly He will make what you need to understand clear.  I promise.  Jesus promised that if anyone seeks he will find.  He is willing to show His wisdom to people that search like dependent children.  If you have become discontent with reading the Bible, or have never really understood it when you read, you are not alone.  I used to read it growing up and it never made much sense to me.  But I promise it is not God's inability to communicate.  Try praying then reading with the intent to really understand and follow and I promise you will not be disappointed.  Remember our christian walk begins and ends in the same place.......... Jesus.  Its only more intimate as we go.  We found this Jesus through the words of Scripture, so we must assume that we will understand Him and His will through Scripture.  This is the argument that Peter makes for us to desire the Word of God.  Read 1Peter1:22-2:3.  So please do not grow dull of hearing Jesus.  Listen to Him in His Word.  

He is!

God is and we adapt.  He is.  He describes Himself as 'I am'

The Bible states that we know inherently that there is a God that we ought to be thankful to.  I am not speaking to christians only.  This is true for every coherent man and woman on the planet.  Ok, my intention was not to defend creation.  My intention is to help wake us up!  I heard a very strong message this morning.  I was shook pretty good.  The main point of it was that the great God of the universe, the entire everything, that you see and don't, is just in all His ways.  He is.  Do you believe that?  Do I really believe that?  He is just to condemn sinners.  He is just to condemn me, but He gives me grace.  We run past the justice part to fast many times to get to the love part, but when we do we inevitably weaken the love.  God's love and mercy and forgiveness is so wonderful because of His justice.  Christ gave His life because He is just.  We need to let it sink in.  Don't just run past it.  Remember God is who He is and we adapt to Him.  It is not the other way around.  We are the created, He is the Creator.  I pray He helps us all see this as wonderful and relieving as it can be.

Ryan

A Clarification

I said something in my last post about Paul saying in the Bible that he would not even eat meat again if it caused someone to stumble.  I want to talk about that for a moment.  The context in which Paul said this was the place Corinth.  Paul was writing to believers in Corinth.  The problem was that many of the christians were buying meat at discounted prices that had been sacrificed to idols.  Undoubtably many people thought the value of the meat diminished or something.  But many of the christians had come out of a religion that sacrificed things to idols and therefore thought it was wrong to buy the meat.  So you had one group of christians that thought it was wrong to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols and another that thought it was ok.  If you would like to read about it, check out the book of 1 corinthians.  Anyway, Paul states that there is indeed nothing wrong with eating any kind of meat, but he said that the ones that thought it was ok to buy and eat the meat that had been sacrificed to idols should lay aside their right to do this for the sake of their brothers and sisters in Christ.  You see, even though there was nothing wrong with the act itself, if it caused someone else to stumble in their walk with Christ then the loving thing to do was give up the right.  The key ingredient is true love that holds a precious soul as more important than any right I have.  This is not to say that I should live my life as a mere people pleaser.  This is not that type of attitude.  A people-pleaser has as their god people, this attitude has as its God Christ.  

So how does this apply to smoking a cigar, drinking a beer, or buying on bag of chewing tobacco every four months.  The attitude of doing whatever possible to promote Christ being glorified in others has to be here too.  The fact is, here in the south especially many people think that all uses of tobacco and alcohol are sins.  I do not agree.  So here I am with a similar problem as that of the early church in Corinth.  So what should I do?  I think that I should lay aside what I think is ok, (and I truly do think that some of these things are ok) in order to not put an unnecessary stumbling block in people's way that may hinder their relationship with Christ.  I felt like I needed to elaborate a little more to make myself clear.  

Ryan

Passionate not permissible

I feel that in many ways I have backsliden to sins that I thought I was past.  I think I need to write this in order to free myself of my conscience's constant nagging about my hypocritical living.  I am being taught now that I may not have been as holy as I perceived myself at a time in the past.  This is not to say that I have been living a total lie.  That is not the case.  I have been following Christ at least in some real manner since I was 16 or 17, and there was a time when even though I was struggling with my flesh, I nevertheless was a wide-eyed kid anxious to get to know my Father and Saviour Jesus.  I had a real passion to get to know Jesus.  Well, my first year in college a whole host of things happened and I went into a real depression.  Not just a couple of day down period, but a real valley.  I call it that now, but at the time I didn't know if I would ever come out.  I though to myself many days during that time, 'so this is it, I will be like this from now on'.  I was very scared and very down and darkness was all around me.  I know in stories people tend to exaggerate, but with this I am understating because you could not understand unless you were there.  Well during this time I battled all kinds of questions and doubts about everything that meant anything to me, namely God.  I doubted my salvation a lot.  I was approached with all kinds of ideas about God that I had not heard, (at least in the manner they were being presented).  Well there was some real good that I got out of that era in my life which I finally slowly began to come out of.  I developed a desire to read that I didn't have before, because I read everything during that dark period to try to find some light.  I also learned a real-life compassion for people struggling with depression.  I also learned a good bit about doctrine.  That is good too, but somewhere along the way I lost the passion for my Saviour and filled it with a passion for understanding.  That is not a conclusive statement, but that is in large part what happened.  There were times when I felt I was still close to God, but the close father-child relationship I didn't feel.  I also have the last few years have picked up a few things that I renounced as definite, no doubt about it, sins when I first started following Christ.  But after studying I found that some of the things that I had renounced as definite sins were not in fact in and of themselves sins.  Things like smoking a cigar, drinking a beer, having a chew or a dip of tobacco.  Those things are not found condemned in the Bible, and I still believe are not in and of themselves sins.  However, I could never and still can't get past the feeling of guilt that overcame me as I tried some of those things after I was 19 and 21.  I could never press the guilt feelings out of my heart, no matter how much I talked to myself about them being ok.  Specifically, the verse in which Paul says that he would not even eat meat again if it might cause someone to stumble, kept haunting me.  You see I had gotten knocked around badly and when I began to balance back out emotionally I started to follow the doctrines of God  rather than God and what He teaches us.  I began to live a permissible christian life instead of a life sold out to following Jesus.  I am not here condemning anyone that can honestly with a clear conscience do any of the things I listed above.  I am not trying to promote another list of rules outside the Bible.  I am trying to promote a life that is passionate, not permissible.  

The things I listed above do not make a comprehensive list of all that I struggled or struggle with, but it gets the point across.  I for a long time have lived without the wonderful awareness of my great God on a consistent basis.   I have lived a permissible life, without much passion for Jesus.  But I am very happy to say that the day before yesterday I saw Him with my heart once again as my precious Saviour that died for me, that is now here with me.  I am still fighting every moment that I think about it to keep Him before me as I live, but there is a freshness about it.  I am ready to follow Him.  He is so faithful.  You can trust Him too.  If you are reading this you can have the reality of knowing Jesus Christ personally.  You can.  You may already.  Either way the object is the same: Jesus.  If you'll look to Him now and be honest about where you are, He will take you in and be your Saviour and Father.  

 

Can you see the sky?

Is it possible to know anything for certain?  Are there any things that are unchangeable regardless of who looks at them?  I think so, but the argument I keep hearing from some folks I've been talking to on a website against christianity is that, since we are all subjective beings everything we see must be interpreted subjectively and therefore will vary.  That is not the exact quote but that is the jest of it.  

You see, one particular post on this site stated 'If God speaks, why can't He get His story straight?'  They were talking about how there are so many different interpretations of Scripture.   I replied something to the extent that it is possible for the story-teller to get his story right and for the people reading it to twist it to the way they like it.  I said that I think this is why we have divisions.  After several statements from many of the people on that site and many statements back from me, someone finally said what I stated above about everything being interpreted by a subjective being must come up with a subjective interpretation.  I disagree.  We all look up and see the sky if we have eyes.  We all see our hands if we have hands and eyes.  If we look down we see the ground beneath us.  We may call it different things but reality is what it is.  It does not change because of what we call it.  Reality around us is what it is and what we call it does not change it or change the reality we see.  A chair's substance does not change if you call it a table.  Ok so you may ask, 'what the heck are you arguing about?  We all know that.'  Well if we believe that the Bible truly has multiple interpretations or a new meaning to different people we are believing that chairs are turning into tables because we call them that.  This is serious for many reasons, one of which is it will cripple our ability to witness educated people.  (by educated I mean by secular universities)  We continue as christians to talk in terms of this is what it means to me and such like we do many times when talking about the Bible.  In doing so we prove that we are reading the Bible the same way existentialism teaches to, which is the foundation of all non-absolute thinking.  We therefore weaken the Bible's power by adding our meaning to it.  At this point I will let someone who has helped bring this idea home for me speak, for he is much clearer on the subject.

"If there is only one life to live in this world, and if it is not to be wasted, nothing seemed more important to me than finding out what God really meant in the Bible, since he inspired men to write it.  If that was up for grabs, the no one could tell which life is worthy and which life is wasted.  I was stunned at the gamesmanship in the scholarly world as authors used all their intellectual powers to nullify what they themselves wrote!  That is, they expressed theories of meaning argued there is no single, valid meaning in texts.  Ordinary people reading this book will ( I hope) find this incredible.  I don't blame you.  It is.  But the fact remains that to this day well-paid, well-fed professors use tuition and tax dollars to argue that 'since literature does not accurately convey reality, literary interpretation need not accurately convey the reality which is literature.'  In other words, since we can't know objective reality outside ourselves, there can be no objective meaning in what we write either.  So interpretation does not mean trying to find any objective thing that an author put in a text, but simply means that we express the ideas the ideas that enter our head as we read.  Which doesn't really matter because when others read what we have written, they won't have any access to our intention either.  It's all a game.  Only it is sinister, because all these scholars (and small-group members) insist that their own love letters and contracts be measured by one rule: what they intended to say.  Any mumbo-jumbo about creatively hearing 'yes' when I wrote 'no' will not go down at the bank or the marriage counselor"  (John Piper in "Don't Waste Your Life")

This is not just a subject for a certain few, its for all.  When you talk or write you want to be understood for what you really mean.  God does too. 

Scared to death

I am going to bare my honest thoughts about a subject we do not normally like to talk about... Death.  You may already be discarding this as morbid, but I hope you will hear me out on this.  Ok, here I am honest.  Death scares me.  It does.  My faith tells me not to be, but I am a lot.  So what do I do?  A habit I have tried to implement in my life is that if something scares me, face it, hit it head on.  The truth is true regardless of my efforts or lack thereof, so if I want any lasting joy I have to deal with things that scare me.  Before I go any further, I am not morbid.  I love life.  I love living.  The fact that I am scared of death points to this.  I also am a christian.  I believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God.  I trust Him to be true.  Yet once again if I am honest, death scares me, and I think it scares all of you too.  

I think there are several reasons for this.  We are sinners.  We know of our very recent sins.  Sin distorts our vision of life and makes things seem dark.  Our conscience also condemns us.   Another reason we fear death is because we have never experienced it, and it doesn't seem pleasant.  We also love our family and friends.  We don't want to leave them or them to leave us.  I am sure there are other reasons I am leaving out.  Here is one though that scares me maybe more than all the rest;  if I were to leave this life right now and enter into eternity, do I really know this Jesus that I am about to see.  I do not mean know the facts about Him, or know what He said.  I mean do I know Him personally, like say the way I know Emily?  Do I really know Him?  These questions are tough.  They are not yes/no answers quick feel better answers.  They are the real life questions, that will truly affect you if you take the time to ask yourself them.  Sure you can push this out of your mind by remembering a past date or past period of time, but the only thing that we have for certain is the present.  This does not make the past unimportant.  It is.  But we live from moment to moment.  From faith to faith as the Bible says.  But now you say, 'great now here I am depressed.  I could have been a lot happier if I wouldn't have read this.  I would have not thought about this dark subject and I wouldn't have these nagging questions about my faith.'  (I am sure this is not the exact response but it sums up the idea)  But let me ask you this,  " Would you rather live in mostly uninterrupted peace here and never be asked difficult questions and find out in the end you never really knew Jesus, or would you rather have your peace interrupted for a period of time to come away with the lasting peace of knowing that you have brought your soul bare before Jesus.  Remember, Jesus never turned away genuine doubters and questioners.  His only requirement is your need of Him.  He did not come to save righteous people.  He came to save sinners and make them righteous.  

I do not want to make anyone have unneeded doubts about their salvation, however some are needed.  Remember, He promised that all who come to Him will not be cast away.  Bring all your questions, doubts, fears, sins, and He will take you in and love you.  I am convicted as I type this, because I have not done this completely lately.  I know when I do He always comforts me and He will comfort you too.  Your doubting will not make Him not real.  Remember that.  He is what He is.  He does not depend on your thoughts.  I don't know exactly why, but thinking about that always brings me comfort.  

In conclusion, Be real.  Be candid.  Be brutally honest with yourself and God.  This really is the only way.  Do not be afraid of bringing Him everything that scares you.  He cares.

Let this sink in  "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your cares/anxieties on Him for He cares for you" (1 Peter 5:6-7)  

Hurt

I watched the Johny Cash music video 'Hurt' earlier.  I think that was the second time I've seen it.  It pulled me in.  Or maybe I was already there.  The opening line is powerful, "I hurt myself today to see if I still feel, I focus on the pain the only thing thats real."  It goes on "try to kill it all away but I remember everything."  I don't know if he wrote the song but I know he felt it, and I do too.  I can't help but remember everything, whether good or bad, its all still here with me.  Emotional pain is something that can not be put on a scale, so I can not here say that I can relate to all.  We find in sharing that it all ties together.  People loving and losing people.  People hurting and being hurt by people.  People, thats our common bond.  Like it says later on in song "everyone I know goes away in the end."  You see losing things doesn't hurt us accept as they remind us of the people we love.  "And you could have it all, my empire of dirt.  I will let you down, I will make you hurt."  I also really believe that we want to be loved by someone that won't let us down, someone that will be there once everyone goes away, if we live that long.  All of the ones we hope to always be there may not, either by choice or death.  I believe like A.W. Tozer said that in each one of us, though we strut around like we are so secure, there is within us a sense of cosmic loneliness, a feeling that nobody really cares for me in a way will last forever, because they all might go away.  He tells a story about a homeless man in one of his sermons that has impacted me forever now that I have a boy.  He said 'that old homeless man sitting there has no one left who loves him here on earth.  His parents that once watched him crawl across the floor with dripping chin and picked him up every time he fell have been long gone, and his sweetheart of his youth has left him, and there he is all alone.  Everyone has deserted him.  And as he sits there he thinks, no one is left to love me.  At that moment the christian evangel comes to him 'hey there you, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever and that included you may not perish but have everlasting life.'

We are all cosmic orphans until we come to Christ.  Thank God He is a 'Father to the fatherless.'  

I know that does not solve it all.  We still have these memories and attachments that are good.  But now I have Someone here with me in my darkest and brightest memories and my darkest and brightest moments.  Trust Him with all of you.  He will not turn you away.  Be completely honest with Him.  He knows it all anyway, and He still cares.  God cares about you.  He loves me, so I know He will love you.  He knows about all my darkness but He still stays here with me and loves me.  He won't leave you.