“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.” – Pearl S. Buck
This is very true about my relationships with other humans, and exceedingly true about the Great Relationship with our Father! Thanks to my ol’ roomie Grant for posting this originally.
Here is a good take on how God, who abhorred child sacrifices, could demand a child sacrifice of Abraham, excerpted from Timothy Keller’s Counterfeit Gods:
We can only understand God’s command to Abraham against the cultural background of ancient times. The Bible repeatedly states that, because of the Israelites’ sinfulness, the lives of their firstborn are automatically forfeit, though they might be redeemed through regular sacrifice, or through service at the tabernacle among the Levites or through a ransom payment to the tabernacle and priests. When God brought judgment on Egypt for enslaving the Israelites, his ultimate punishment was taking the lives of their firstborn. Their firstborns’ lives were forfeit, because of the sins of the families and the nation. Why? The firstborn son was the family. So when God told the Israelites that the firstborn’s life belonged to him unless ransomed, he was saying in the most vivid way possible in those cultures that every family on earth owed a debt to eternal justice–the debt of sin.
All this is crucial for interpreting God’s directive to Abraham. If Abraham had heard a voice sounding like God’s saying, “Get up and kill Sarah,” Abraham would probably never have done it. He would have rightly assumed that he was hallucinating, for God would not ask him to do something that clearly contradicted everything he had ever said about justice and righteousness. But when God stated that his only son’s life was forfeit, that was not an irrational, contradictory statement to him. Notice, God was not asking him to walk over into Isaac’s tent and just murder him. He asked him to make a burnt offering. He was calling in Abraham’s debt. His son was going to die for the sins of the family.
We look for God to manifest Himself to His children: God only manifests himself in His children. Other people see the manifestation, the child of God does not. We want to be conscious of God; we cannot be conscious of our consciousness and remain sane.
– Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest
“The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality – it is holiness. Wholeness.”
“Straight people go to hell too.”
“It’s not whether you are gay or straight; it’s whether you’ve given your heart and mind to Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus loves gays just as much as he would if they weren’t gay.”
“If God doesn’t love gays, he doesn’t love any of us.”
“When you look at what’s missing in the body of Christ, often times, it’s a mirror image of what’s found in the homosexual community.”
“Do you realize that God is in love with the homosexual?…He loves us too much to leave us the way we are.”
“I will never go back. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to.”
Notes from a sermon by Mike Sharrett of Redeemer Presbyterian Church
Why does Jesus use the thirst analogy?
“No one in the presence of God thirsts. Why? Because there is nothing more to be desired. You lack nothing. Every aspect of human enjoyment is fulfilled.”
“It is our nature to grab something…something…to satisfy us.”
“Material things, good of themselves, have a way of satisfying us so we stop hungering for God.”
Can I say “God is my exceeding joy”?
Who can hear the message?
Why wouldn’t people respond?
“I Presuppose that God is at work in everyone’s life to some level.”
They are in denial about their thirst because they are:
“I am not as bad as Hitler, and God must grade on a curve.”
“I can come out smelling like a rose comparing myself to Saddam Hussein…but not if I compare myself to God.”
“There may be a standard in this world higher than the one you hold yourself to. Just look at what ticks you off in other people.”
“I am my own person.”
“Not only are you forgiven in the gospel, you get a new heart.”
How do you drink?
From Jesus flow the rivers of living water.
“Drinking is believing.”
How do you know you’re satisfied? Your desires begin to change. You will become more thirsty.
I present for your thoughtful consideration my favorite excerpts from Lewis’ insight on God’s predestination, justice and love- relevant to the timeless tension of the Problem of Evil. These are hand-typed, so I must really agree with them!
Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible’ universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only ‘worlds that God could have made, but didn’t’. The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic [man-shaped] conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.…
No answer [has been] attempted to the objection that if the universe must, from the outset, admit the possibility of suffering, then absolute goodness would have left the universe uncreated. And I must warn the reader that I shall not attempt to prove that to create was better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere words. “It would be better for me not to exist” – in what sense “for me”? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing?
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 2, “Divine Omnipotence”
If God’s moral judgment differs from our so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good”, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say “God is we know not what.” And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If he is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. …The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning….
We call human love selfish when it satisfies its own needs at the expense of the object’s needs—as when a father keeps at home, because he cannot bear to relinquish their society, children who ought, in their own interests, to be put out into the world. The situation implies a need or passion on the part of the lover, an incompatible need on the part of the beloved, and the lover’s disregard or culpable ignorance of the beloved’s need. None of these conditions is present in the relation of God to man. God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty—of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all his love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive.
—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 3, “Divine Goodness”
Step past your wounds and help others. Then you will look back and find your wounds have disappeared by the resurrection power. (A watched pot never boils because if you are watching your pot, you aren’t showing any faith.)
We work with God like a child trying to learn to write. His father’s hand surrounds his hand, guides it. His father’s hand is the one responsible for forming the letters. Yet if the child chooses to make his hand go limp, then it will not work well. The child’s part is to keep his hand stiff and his eyes attentive. Then the letters will form.
You can’t lose your salvation, because you can’t break a relationship–but you can break fellowship. Your dad will never cease to be your dad, but you can become estranged to him. [hmm…in cases of utter disownment…?]
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“It is hard for me to be clever and make Jesus beautiful at the same time.” – Jim Cymbala
“Grace and self-sufficiency are like oil and water.” – Daniel Henderson
Discontent is a good place to be because it can be the mother of change (if and only if you choose to). – Tim Clinton
TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
– Tim Clinton
Ben Taylor 