Our Lighted Path

  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 ...

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 ...

  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...