Posts

Heaven with Us

Image
  This is going to be a mashed-together post. This will not be a post that makes everything crystal clear. This will be a thorny post that rebukes but leaves it up to someone out there to seek, ask, and find. This also is with prayer that someone is going to go to a mature Christian church, at least for a little while, to study the Bible, to listen, to learn, and then to sometimes ask questions, especially if there is a mid-week Bible study. This post comes at a truly troubled time in the life of our nation, in the life of the church, in many of our lives as individuals and families. When we look at a Bible book like Judges, a book that chronicles a time when everyone among the Hebrew people had begun to do as seemed right in his or her own estimation, we see a time of struggle: struggle, at that time, because ancient Israel, beginning to turn to their own understanding, was less attentive to the prophets, and, more importantly, less attentive to God alone. Israel was beginning to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's Reason Together

Image
I have never been to Fishers, Indiana, the home of Heartland Church.  But, oh my goodness, they're a church congregation who seem so free ! Their baptismal feelings are popular, in that many congregations feel baptism is public confession that we've been saved in Christ. But that popular feeling forgets the day the Ethiopian man wanted his baptism right in the middle of nowhere, in a roadside lake or pond, where the only witness we know of was the Holy Spirit in the person of Philip. But then, how great the Father's love for us, that Heartland Church has free will in the Spirit, and can make baptism part of public witness. When a Bible study group, a group of church elders, hit a snag in discussion, one elder turned to an old way of resolving questions. The elder said that some things about God are a mystery to us. Indeed, the apostle Paul said, in effect, "Now, we see as through a glass darkly, but, then," in the heavenly realm, we will know more fully. And yet ...
Post a Comment
Read more

They Lead Me to Repent and Feel Supported

Image
  When David wrote the 23rd Psalm, he could not have been a young shepherd. He had to have been up in years, possibly at the time he was running from a son who was trying to kill him. (David, and some of those loyal to him, ran from a son of David, rather than kill the son.) David's psalm is rich with an older man's wisdom in God, especially when he is saying that God's rod and staff pretty much support him. When various Bible translations say, "Your rod and staff, they comfort me," I think something spiritual and well learned is lost in translation. I think it helps to look at some of the root meanings of the translation "comfort," using Bible concordances. Clues in concordances are a little strange, aren't they? Concordances bring forward feelings of sorrow, repentance, but also compassion or support. So as an older man, possibly isolated in a wilderness, David is telling God that His  rod and staff (in the unseen) have helped guide David's lif...
Post a Comment
Read more

Christian Freedom Does Not Sin (1 John 3:9)

Image
In no way, not under any circumstance, has God's sacrifice of His own body meant no more covenant law or no more of the ten commands Heaven gave us through Moses. With His own life in earth, with Jesus, God paid the penalties for people breaking the ten commands. Yet, He still says today, "If you love me, keep my commands." That is a choice: a choice to accept true life, in Jesus, or a choice to live and die in hard ways; a choice to accept that Jesus paid a hard penalty for whoever will accept Him, or a choice to try paying for mankind's sins oneself, to no good end, or to outright perish for lack of faith in Him. He lived God's plan to pay the written penalties for man's sins. That's why His body, the church, suffered beginning on the cross, continued suffering with the stoning of Stephen, and continues to suffer today. But the truth, the consequences, remain. God's commands are a firm anchor: You will not enter a place of residence or a workplace ou...
Post a Comment
Read more

God Knows Every Detail

Image
I will not hop a plane to far away. And, my, has God helped me grow to know He didn't mean for me to marry but to testify for good. I just wish problems would soon end, that ungodly pressure would go away, and that, like most of us probably feel right now, every day could be a peaceful drive to and from home to home, to and from sanctuary.
Post a Comment
Read more

We Never Talk about Paradise

Image
  We never talk about this as Christians, but many churches hold to the Catholic confession that Jesus descended into hell before God raised Him bodily from death. There is no singular  scripture that tells us so, but we know, from Jesus' grief over Lazarus' death, that experiencing death without Jesus was was difficult to bear. We also know that death before Jesus made the way to  Heaven (before He ascended to Heaven), was grievous in more than one way. In some cases, the grave itself was a horror,  with souls like the demon-possessed  man dwelling there, among remains buried in deep caves. Having established all of the above, let's talk about something we never discuss; and that's what Jesus meant by "paradise." Although we know the spirit of a soul who is committed to Jesus today is present in Heaven as soon as the spirit leaves its bodily home, that wasn't so when Jesus himself died in body. Jesus agonized even before He was crucified, knowing not only...
Post a Comment
Read more

Not by Bread Alone

Image
  In the Easter season*, I remember all the more how Jesus compares His body, or His words, to unleaven slabs of bread, the kind of bread we don't see anymore, really anywhere. Modern flatbreads are made with bleached flour, instead of with whole wheat or other brown-colored edible grass seeds. Modern flatbreads also are made a lot smaller than in the ancient Middle East. Modern flatbreads don't really remind us of how Isarael's painful history, and of how God's own words (different from Solomon's words as part of Israel's teaching itself and learning lessons the hard way), began to be written: on leather, on skins of cattle that had been killed. Remembering and still suffering the near constant turmoil of all of the Christmas season, makes it difficult to cherish and look forward to the lament and great joy of Easter this year. For me, it's hard to believe the Lenten passage to Easter is beginning. Monday, I ate the last of chicken I had in store, keeping i...
Post a Comment
Read more