Any man, redeemed or other, can recognize the following possibilities: Knowing that I am different — I can isolate myself from others. Recognizing that others are different — I am suspicious of others, I can deceive others. I can meet my own needs, Free will — I can resist the devil, but, I can resist God. I can choose what will influence me — spirit or sense. Oswald Chambers expounds in his book, “Biblical Psychology,” these soul powers. Expansion, contraction, and rotation are three. From these headings we have seven subtitles, “self-comprehending, (discerning where I leave off and the other person begins). stretching beyond self, (imagination). self-living (will),” spirit penetrated, (a soul has this capability). stirred sensually (soulishly) or spiritually, speaking spirit thoughts, sum total of unity.” Fundamental abilities, these, of course, require further explanation; they function one way in the unredeemed person, as above describes, but differently in the redeemed.…
Tag: <span>hypocrisy</span>
Abraham muffed the next one, big time —fooling around with Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar. He belittles God’s promise and miscalculates God’s ability to accomplish His promise with the true son, Isaac. One explanation would be; the works of God still seem vague to Abe, and not always so easy for him to discern. Not to defend Abe, but maybe when Sarah made the suggestion to reproduce a child with her handmaid, Abram could have thought, “God must work this way in a practical-sense.” Lets be real, Abraham was being schooled in an intricate-walk-with-God “faith” classroom. To state the obvious, God shows Himself not to the human eye. Abraham, not quite getting it yet, opens the story’s other side to view. I will concede, however, Abe’s sexual-manhood most likely encouraged the compromising. His motives were wrong. Because this was sin, God’s forgiveness remains the only remedy. So, for us a problem also…
Dedicated runner (me) in Belle Vernon cemetery, late 70’s We practiced examining our conscience before going to confession when fourth and fifth grades came. Basically, assigned a copy of the Ten Commandments, we mulled over them one by one. My hardest of all was: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. I certainly didn’t, but the Catholics listed sub-points under the big point. “Impure thoughts” logically followed as a major sub-heading, and this complicated a lot of things. Outspokenly, a million things could have comprised an “impure thought,” and since self-examination was a subjective exercise, I ended up confessing these 9 or 10 times per, and even more. Somehow, this variety of sin extracted more guilt than other sins. As we moved to 6th and 7th grades, it became impractical to repeatedly confess these kinds of sins; we had reached pure evil now, I guess. Moses delivered, to the children…