A Word Among Friends

Success-full Love

2009-06-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

For the Christian, hard work, excellence, and uncompromising levels of success are merely the expression of total love towards God. We pour out every thing we are into acts of love for God. We know that whatsoever we do is to the glory of God, because we can only do what God created us to do, and God created us to love. So the more of ourselves we pour into our actions, the more excellent the results are, and the more love is released to God. It is not the objective perfection of the product that results from such an outpouring, but the outpouring itself which matters to God. Therefore, we must focus on putting everything we are into our works, rather than focusing on the results. God is looking for the process of loving Him, rather than the results alone. In the results, however, we create things, just like our Creator, so that every act of creative love for God provides an object we can enjoy together with God. God loves the object-maker, and therefore loves the object. We love the object-recipient and therefore love the object. On a secondary level, we share a love of the object as a creative work, a new expression of our mutual bond, and a point of shared interest in creativity.

EGW quote

2009-06-06T04:57:00.000-07:00

Jesus loves you, and has given me a message for you. His great heart of infinite tenderness yearns over you. He sends you the message that you may recover your self-respect. You may stand where you regard yourself, not as a failure, but as a conqueror, in and through the uplifting influence of the Spirit of God. Take hold of the hand of Christ and do not let go

Commentary on Ephesians 3:14-19

2009-06-05T04:05:00.001-07:00

Goal: to be filled with the fullness of God.

To be filled with the fullness of God, we must first know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. Certainly we can know part of God’s love in the traditional since, but we’ll miss out on the transformative enormity of His love unless we see and experience the part which “passeth knowledge”.

We must do more than see and experience this super dimension of God’s love. We must so fully comprehend it that we can root and ground ourselves within it. When a tree has good roots, you can’t pull it out, even with a massive backhoe. We will be the same with God’s love in our hearts if we can send deep roots into the super dimension. God’s love will be in our hearts for every situation, good and bad. We won’t have to be constantly relearning and reapplying our comprehension, but instead growing and strengthening it.

We can’t get to this state of rooted, lasting comprehension without supernatural aid. We must have Christ dwell in our hearts by faith. In other words, we must just believe that Christ living in our hearts will be the one comprehending the love for us into our weak little human brains.

But how, how in my life, with my desensitized conscience, my world of pain and confusion, can I ever truly have this faith in Christ which brings Him into my heart, giving me the comprehension of God’s super dimensional love, allowing me to fill up on the fullness of God?

Prayer, that’s how. We pray, our family and friends, perhaps even strangers pray, and Christ himself prays. Pray for what? Pray that our wimpy little inner man or woman will be given the spiritual gumption to take the rich and glorious gift of faith from Christ, instead of spitting on it, mocking it, and crucifying it, as we always do under normal circumstances.

So in summary
Pray for gumption to receive faith. Exercise faith to comprehend (through Christ) the transformative enormity of God’s love. Send roots into God’s enormous love, so that you won’t always be forgetting, rejecting, etc. Enjoy! Enjoy getting filled with the fullness of God, which is the whole point of this process.

Salvation and Paradox

2008-07-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

In commenting on a post from the illustrious blog of Joel Kurtz, I've taken a deeper than usual tour into the philsophical depths of paradox. In my tour, I encounter all sorts of fairly mundane observations about salvation, but always from the unique perspective of paradox resolution (at least the attempt at resolution).

I found the tour to be exhilerating, perplexing, and satisfying--also a bit rediculous and extremely long.

Here tis

Joel Said (excerpt from blog post)

I'm not feeling alive in Christ. Somehow during the day, between my attempts to instill good behavior in my campers, the few witnessing moments I catch, and fights I stop, the relentless striving to be a competent staff member, the advice I give, I'm losing the little bit of the Lifewater I managed to scoop up in the morning. Dr. Clouzet shared a thought from an article by John Ortberg that I just recently recalled. It goes something like this, "One of the best things you can do to improve your spiritual life is to ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life."

I said

Good post. Ruthless is the right word, but you can't grit your teeth either, and that's a classic paradox. We can't find God by searching, yet we must seek first the kingdom of God. Obviously, transcending the paradox is the key, provided we don't see transcendence as a third option in itself--like Buddhism. Paradox in general all goes back to the central paradox: the mystery of iniquity. It's sure nice to have arguments for why God allowed evil, but its existence in the first place remains the ultimate, paradoxical sore point.Luckily, this great paradox can be resolved on a personal level, because in a relationship with the Infinite Being, there cannot be an option between good and evil, or even the meaningless third option of transcendence. There can only be God. He's the only option, the only focus. Seeing things this way is equivalent to denying the realities from which the paradox arose. It would be just a senseless mental exercise except there's a Creator who's interested in the exercise. So much so, in fact, that He creates the reality concomitant with the exercise. Paul was probably getting at this idea when he talked about the law of freedom taking on the law of sin and death in Romans 8. Clearly, redemption is much more than meets the eye. How else could it solve the most vexing practical and philosophical question we face?

Joel said
Barry, I had to read your comment twice before I figured out what you were saying;) But it's true--a complete paradigm shift can resolve the most perplexing paradoxes--provided it's absolute, and that's the clincher. It's not that staying God-focused is effortless--it takes a decided effort of will--it's just that the effort required is so completely different from what we're used to. It's not easy to free fall in boundless love. I want so much to be in control! Anyway, good thought.

I said
Joel, you're quite considerate of my rambling, which more successfully suffocated the central question than resolved it.

The Christian walk seems both easy and hard because of another more fundamental paradox: original sin. There's no way to see around the original sin paradox, but if we deny reality, we can destroy the paradox completely. However, if we really destroy the paradox, we destroy the concepts of paradox-resolution, such as transcendence, "the third option" and even paradigm shift.

Yet how can we express salvation without these concepts? After all, destroying reality unburdens us of both the paradox and our descriptive abilities.

How, indeed. How can we express something totally new in terms of the old?

Perhaps we describe the new in terms of the new, which is circular reasoning, and why creative people are sometimes neither logical nor very coherent.

Try this grammatical nightmare for instance: the new reality is that God is. "is that God is"? God might say "I am that I AM".

But this crazy sentence is precisely where I see a way out of the whole conundrum. We must accept the simple premise that God is, and make it our primary and totally definitive truth. Then, our focus will simply be on God (there's nothing else).

Having accepted this truth, there's no sense in saying our focus shifted away from the paradox of original sin. Nothing has shifted anywhere. When God makes a new man, He does it like usual--ex nihilo. After all, a makeover isn't a true creative act.

In everyday life, however, we're all painfully aware that the Christian walk really is both easy and hard. When we succumb to temptation, reality hits hard.

The key distinction is that our walk with God begins on this earth, where we've been saturated with the reality of sin. The realities of a sinful world make us think our walk with God is both easy and hard. In reality...

Who's reality? Yours or God's?

In God's reality, even the good connotations we have with easy and hard are obsolete. When even a drop of God's reality seeps inside us, there's a paradigm explosion--none of this paradigm shift foolishness.

But now, I've argued myself into a corner, because I'm just a complacent sin man. I want to be new man, and no makeover, paradigm shifted man for me.

Rats in the cellar

2008-02-17T20:46:00.001-08:00

I like a certain analogy of C.S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity, where he talks about who you really are inside. It's been brought home to me again over the past couple weeks that it doesn't matter what veneer you put on for society, even your family. It's how you act when you're off your guard that shows who you really are. And who I really am is not a nice person. So, with apologies to Mr. Lewis, here is one of my favorite passages of his:

"[When we begin to try to be like Christ] We begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness; begin to be alarmed not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth?
If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul. Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious will. I can to some extent control my acts: I have not direct control over my temperament. And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do--if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are--then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about.
And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act?
But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God."

One reason I like C.S. Lewis is that he gets to the heart of things that are difficult to say, and then says them so clearly you wonder why you thought they were difficult. I'm reminded of this quote nearly every day. I am constantly telling my students that they need to control their actions and not just lash out if they are mad. But being in control of your actions is one thing; truly being undisturbed is another. I may take a lot of stressful happenings during the day at school and not react, but then if I go home and blow up over a small thing, like a towel left out or a dish in the sink, then I have not truly changed myself. I've only put a thin veneer over a bubbling volcano. Or, in the words of Lewis, I've only frightened the rats, not killed them. I think to myself at the end of the day how "good" I was. But "good" only goes as far, usually, as I can do what I want at home. When something doesn't go my way, I unleash the dragon that has been muzzled at work, and woe be unto the hapless one who gets in my way! Sometimes it's only a few sharp words or tone, but sometimes it's a full-out firestorm for no reason at all. The more stress I have, the more I need to pray that God will truly change me, not just give me the light to frighten the rats, but storm the cellar and kill the rats.

2007-11-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

Night

Jupiter, Moons and Bees (from NASA)
Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman

The stars, perforating the sky,

The moon, crisply glowing in the dark,

The clouds, floating like foam on the sea,

A symphony of peacefulness.

Then a cold wind

Starts me shivering. DG 1972

Thoughts on anger and letting go

2007-11-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

It doesn't do anything to get mad when people don't do what you want them to, or understand, or change. No one really cares about anyone else more than themselves, so they're unlikely to do or change something that doesn't benefit them, especially if it takes effort. The only person I can really change is myself and that only with God's help.

That said, I find now (sitting in church when someone affiliated with MCA was there) I still have a lot of anger and resentment toward those who could have done something to help me last year and chose either to do nothing or to actively work against me. I have to admit, the thought of revenge is tempting, but I wouldn't want to do something that would really ruin someone's life (like the First Wives' Club book).

So...what about anger and hatred? I think I do hate some of the people from last year, but not enough to ruin their lives. But Jesus said hating your brother is as good as murdering him. It doesn't seem fair. Their carelessness, neglect, and outright bad actions ruined my life last year and put a blot on my resume. Why can't I just dislike or hate them? I'm not *doing* anything to hurt them, or *not* doing something that would help them -- not like they did to me.

And I know. It doesn't hurt them to hate them, it only hurts me. It keeps me from developing as a person. And I thought I had moved on with this new school, etc. Maybe I haven't yet. I didn't realize how much resentment I still had until I saw this person in church who could have helped me and did nothing; in fact, who basically told me to "suck it up and deal with it". I know all the little textbook answers as to why I should forgive and move on, and I know I haven't been hurt as much as others. It doesn't make a difference to me; that's "head" knowledge, and I'm angry in my "heart". Maybe just venting gets it out.

Good people and Bad things

2007-10-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Half the professors at Yale Divinity School say that the fact that bad things happen to good people proves that God doesn't exist.

Maybe I'm being overly simplistic but...

There are no good people ("all have sinned" "all our righteousness is filthy rags")

We can't tell the difference between good happenings in our lives and bad ones (See Job). We do know that "all things work together for good to those who love God." This doesn't mean that all things are good, but it doesn't mean that they aren't, and doesn't change the fact that we can't prove that anything bad has ever happened to anyone...

very rough...suggestions welcome

2007-10-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

Sparrows

Too many sparrows falling nowadays

Am I a sparrow compared to Iraq?

“He sees the sparrow fall” but what does that mean?

Some database in the sky records yet another fluttering fall?

Spiraling thump

Sprawl

Rumpled, scattered feathers

“6,972 today”…

Am I really falling or do I just think I am?

Does a fallen sparrow ever get up?

What does it take to give a falling sparrow the wings of eagles?

Do sparrows eat mustard seeds?

Do they stay sparrows?

Am I afraid to be a sparrow?

A Marriage Feast

2007-10-05T03:09:00.000-07:00

John 2:4
Jesus saith unto her, "Women, what have I to do with thee? My hour is not yet come".

John 2:6
And there were set six water pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews...

Jesus was preparing his mother for a realization that probably wouldn't dawn until the cross. When Jesus asked Mary "what have I to do with thee?" Mary would instinctively think "you're my son!" But Jesus answered his own question symbolically by turning the water of purification into wine, a symbol of his cleansing blood. Doubtless, this miracle left Mary initially perplexed, but at the cross, Mary would have the greatest possible comfort available to a mother losing the most wonderful son the world has ever seen. Perhaps an inkling of what she was gaining at the loss of her son began to dawn on Mary on that dark day.
At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus gently planted a seed in Mary's mind. Eventually, the seed would grow into Mary's realization that the most important relationship she had with Jesus was not mother to son, but sinner to Savior.
We serve a infinitely tender, loving God, and His relationship with us is far more intimate than any human attachment.
Are you ready for the Marriage Feast?

Ruminations on Romans

2007-08-16T02:58:00.001-07:00

I'm working on the book of Romans for my morning devotions. Look at Paul's definition of the Gospel (Romans 1:16)
"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation"...(italics supplied)
Wait a minute! I always thought "God is love" = gospel.

Suppose you are clinging to a cliff, about to fall off. An experienced rock climber comes running to the foot of the cliff. "Hey! I love you with all my heart" he shouts. He continues to tell you about his undying affection as your grip fades away and you crash to the bottom. At the bottom, you're a bleeding pile of pulp, and the loving rock climber says "it doesn't matter what you've done, I still love you no matter what".
That's not the gospel.
Instead, God scales the cliff, leaping from hold to hold, taking extraordinary risks with each death-defying move. He reaches your side in record time. "I love you with all my heart" he whispers, "will you let me take you down?".

First Words...

2007-08-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

In order to propel the proverbial vulcanized spheroid in a forward motion, I submit this recent effort of mine.

Shore to Shore

A peaceful view of tree and water,

Cheerful words from son and daughter.

A bowl of fruit, a slice of bread,

With mango, pineapple, and raspberries we’ve been fed.

The Word of God bestowed upon youth,

Such comforting promises, with the ring of Truth.

When we as families first began

Our mission together to follow God’s plan,

We could not foresee how we would be

So closely knit—one big family.

One day, on glassy sea, again we’ll meet,

And with joyful cry sit at Jesus’ feet.

Home at last to wander no more,

At home, at one on that peaceful shore