On the Danube River Create? Imagination and what else? Materials are necessary but so is glue. Thoughts and words must meld in a way that has continuity and also sensible relatedness. There needs to be permanence, stability, link, no interruption. Abstractions? Unless somehow connected to sanity, these are illegitimate in my opinion. Why? Because any idiot can build oblivion by non-thinking, but true creativity requires a mind applied, inspired, with vision. It is constructive and not destructive. Reflections are interesting as they expose the negative side of a positive. For example, wholesomeness reflects as decadence on the pessimistic side, decency becomes immodesty, integrity becomes fragmentation, and benevolence becomes offensiveness. Cmon, friends, you want to uglify beauty and call that art? Instead, let’s turn it around and beautify something hideous; now that’s creativity! See, true creativity requires some givens, namely love. The higher the degree of love involved and understood, the…
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Christmas got a lot of voices ringing. Fa la la la la, la la la la. We got your angel voice, we got the shepherds, we got Mary herself, we got the wise men, and we got Herod and the bad guys too. We got a gross amount of sayings, and these give us a strange wonderful feeling each year. Most of the utterances we gloss over till they come up in a Carol or two. Here we find the third named angel with Michael and Gabriel. His name is Herald, and we discover him in the hymn,” Hark the Herald angel sing.” Ho ho ho! Frankly, all this fun stuff rings our bell, and permits itself, as long as we don’t get carried away. These days, Christmas remains the same joyous time with one big exception; the depth of the story took a home in my soul one year…
Is America becoming a post-Christian society? What does it mean for us Christians? It directly affects believers who try to win lost souls because an unsaved person’s ground of decision making may be skewed or obscured in the river of modern relativism. See, much of contemporary thought leans toward “fate” and “fatalism.” This “higher knowledge” quaintly un-hides itself in the colloquial phrase ” history repeats itself.” People who practice “fate” as a lifestyle live in idolatry and this God-demoting practice has many variations. It starts when some find it convenient to blame other persons, things, and events for their own sins. Adam and Eve originated this trend in Genesis 3. They duck blame and skirt responsibility. They use “wisdom from below.” We fall into the sucking vac hose called stupor. Rolling snowballs accumulate more snow, lies beget more lies, and hell is never satisfied, so says the Bible. God…
God’s healing of his people contains serious aspects. I am not certain what they all mean; perhaps we must all reconcile mentally with God’s planet-wide cursing after Adam and Eve’s sin. Life at times dishes out toil and little fun; I really don’t get it. Nobody will argue against the reward found in making an honest living and raising a family; building a house etc. Ecclesiastes 9:9 says “live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which He hath given thee under the sun all the days, of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun”. Necessary degrees of resistance sharpens the face; what else can we deduce? At last, life’s puzzle bullies us into figuring it out, and as we yield to it, more…
Can a person come to experience their position in Christ to any degree? “If any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, all things are become new.” “you are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God.” These verses describe a position or standing and salvation revealed these pregnant truths, beautiful children, yet unborn. Obviously, the verse refers not to physical death, but a death which agrees with the truth that “Christ died for all, so we are all dead,” 2 Corinthians 5:14. Can we experience it, however? Furthermore, can we let not sin therefore reign in our mortal body? Paul says forbid it in Rom 6:12. How do we do this? These are all great questions. “Neither yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness—yield yourselves to God and your members instruments of righteousness,” is another. Romans 6:12-13. I must become a bit abstract. God’s…
Josh and Matt My inward me exists truly a kingdom. The ultimate happens when the total of what I know about God’s nature and His redemption becomes self- governing in there. A “perspective of the highest” saturates all of my faculties; perception, understanding, wisdom, feelings and senses. It can overcome the worldly kingdoms Explain more? See, the eternal building blocks of my little realm under God, supersede anything the temporal realm can throw at it. In a sense, when I invest heaven into my heart of hearts, I become a heaven’s kingdom representative on earth. When God Himself saturates our mind (with unconscious, subconscious and conscious parts), and our will, emotions, conscience and self consciousness; our whole programmed computer gains a ministry of simply sharing its wealth Effectiveness What does this person/kingdom look like? This person has discovered effectiveness. In other words they realize they have the ability to have…
With His arms wide open He rescued you and me; with His arms wide open…This line from a song rings in my heart much. When I was 25 years old He came and rescued me; from what? He rescued me from me. We fished off the sea wall on our breaks at work. Folks caught carp and cat fish and some of these grew pretty big. Workers gathered there to eat lunch. I cared not much for the fishing possibilities this day. “The Crack in the Cosmic Egg,” I had been reading a book called “The Crack in the Cosmic Egg,” I really lived cracked in my own cosmic egg is why I read this book. I liked the book as it came from the ideals of some far-out mystical religious teacher and captured my attention. He was teaching about Jesus walking on the water and how we can…
We find with Jacob’s story his challenge of handling his own value fluctuations —secondly, his forming of deep personal convictions. We find this even more than with the stories of Abraham and Isaac. Another way of saying it is; he was made to stand, in the midst of circumstances and relationships, while these pressed against his inward citadel, gradually forcing a determined-fight mentality in Jacob. He fought the war between belief and unbelief. For healing, Jacob gives us, uncensored, stark reality in living color. We have looked at the fallen nature of man worked in, now we look at the “reversing” plan of God; and it too, chiseled into a soul. Jacob’s adverse challenges arose from a flight of fear. Brother Esau had threatened to kill him, leading to a miserable tenure under uncle Laban. So, he is made to deal with his own insecurity and the deceit of Laban…
On this day 12 years ago our son Joshua went to heaven. Now, what do we want? To see him again soon. You lit up our lives for a short 25 years and we miss you today, Josh, and the wait seems long; but eternity is longer. Can’t wait! St. Augustine says: He that loveth little, prayeth little; he that loveth much, prayeth much. What do you want? Surprisingly we rarely visit this thought. What do I need, what can I eat, what do I need to do and what does God want, are statements more common. Christians say, “I lost my vision when things didn’t work out and now I am just meandering.” “What do you want?” When I dutifully focus on my Savior. He says “what do you want?” Some folks in the Bible got healed because when Jesus asked them “what do you want?” —they had an…
“…and that they were afraid was the essential consequence of the fact that they retrograded from Gods love and had therefore incurred Gods wrath.” Franz Delitzsch Conscience “a knowing together with God” awakens the terriblest. Every gritty body nerve, and every psychic sinew, in denial, dreads the dawning of conscience. It arrives as a wake up call on the level of a freight-train. It whisks us away into a clawing-out mode of life. Flat-out life-loathing attends it. We’re hijacked into bustle’s whims, all of which we vowed, would get consideration when hell freezes over. But no; we’re head-over-heels right now, hot-footed feet blazing. “My life slipped way out of sync, my true-blue supporters turned out miserable liars.” “Woe is me, I am undone, a man of unclean lips.” “Thou Art the Man.” cried Nathan” Conscience: confronts the willful infant coddle and screams “get the ‘h’ off your…