Thoughts From Spending a Night on the Trampoline

What if God doesn't care about YOU? *gasp* What if He loves the world but He only loves you to the degree that you incorporate yourself into His plan for the universe at large? A scary notion it is true but one I think you would be hard put to prove wrong. I've been thinking alot about God recently, making my way along that endless ray of beauty, attempting to insure that the God I place my trust in is actually the God which exists and is not a god I created for myself to suit my fancy and my worldview. It is this journey which makes me ask questions like I posed at the beginning.

So during my meditations of God I've realized something. This something is simply phrased not so simply applied. It is this:

That forgiveness of God is not so hard to get but unless you have Godliness being forgiven isn’t worth much. We often talk about the gospel and about God's grace but only in respect to their forgiving power; never in respect to their ability to change the very nature of who we are and how we act. I have never heard a preacher say, "accept the gospel so that you can stop hating your parents and stop being peer pressured and stop displeasing the God who creates Hurricanes." What we here is "accept the gospel so that you can be forgiven for hating your parents, for being peer pressured and for displeasing God."

The problem is not in one statement being false is that in separating them and only talking about one side of the gospel we remove the supports and our theology begins to crumble when applied to real life. If the only purpose for the Jesus coming to earth is to forgive us of our sins then I have no need to do anything else but sit passively and be forgiven. When the "impregnable" forces of selfish desire, passion and pride assail my soul why should I not let them carry me along in a rush of good feeling? I have no reason to resist and even if I wanted to resist I couldn't because all I've ever been taught is that the blood of Christ forgives me of sins. Herein lies the problem and herein is a primary reason for our weakness as churches, families and individuals. We don’t understand that godliness which is the being the character of God is so very essential. For some silly reason we think the only think important in life is to be happy. For secular people we see this in all the selfish means people use to acquire self worth and happiness. Christians, are also focused on being happy so they talk about being forgiven. They say, “we have to suffer through this life, obeying all sorts of rules but it will be ok because when we die we are going to heaven” Christians wonder why people call them hypocrites.

Well I was telling God all this yesterday. Basically God said, "yeah you can do that if you want, I will forgive you when you come back to me BUT if you continue to live in sin I will not help you as you walk through life. If you(Caleb) believe that you can do your life better on your own, then you run it as you like and the blood of my son will wash away your sins on judgment day." The point is that we have a backwards view of life in general. If we can step back for a moment and step out of a worldview which tells us, “the purpose of your existence is your own happiness” and see that what our purpose ought to be is, “to see the kingdom of God fulfilled” then we will be able to make sense out of Jesus’ which before made no sense.

I look at history, watch the news, observe the modern theories of worldly philosophers and feel like I’m eating raw tofu wrapped in slugs. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to here a well respected, doctors and professors proclaiming evolution which at its core means, that one drop of my own fat must be dearer to me then the accumulated lives of tens of thousands of my fellow primates.

Life without God is just not worth living. If you don't live for God you have to ignore things to be happy or be depressed because their is absolutely nothing you can do about the child who dies every two minutes because of starvation or about the millions of people around the world who live their lives in slums, garbage dumps and communes without any hope of being freed from their unofficial slavery. So maybe it is easy to be forgiven of our sins. Perhaps its true that we can get away with an awful lot without anyone ever finding out but doesn’t it all seem like such a waste when you compare the greatest life ever lived by any non Christian, compare that life to the idea of spending a life in service to a God who can point his finger and send constellations into the sky. Would we rather serve ourselves assuming everything we did went right or would it be better for us to sacrifice our lives and serve a God of power and might, who makes the earth shake and the mountains tremble, waters the earth and grants the stars their light.

Mumblings

Humans seem to have this tendency to blame things on others. Please correct me, if this is an illegitimate statement but I don’t find many people who are willing to admit that they are faulty I hardly know if I could myself. Indeed if pressed myself I would know I’m faulty, who wouldn’t? But I would never be able to honestly admit the depths of my pride without a self righteous contempt of all “those others” who won’t admit to being as bad as me. It’s really a pitiful state to be in, knowing you’re awful but being unable to admit the thing because admitting it would only bring you lower. Oh dear, I’ll return to my mumblings…*thinks*.... Now many people are very willing to admit that they fail and they are willing to admit their faults but they aren’t willing to talk about how they themselves are to blame. Examples that prove this are numerous. A child steals a cookie gets caught and will admit that he took the cookie but offers the excuse that he was hungry or that his mom “said” he could have one. A teen murders his peer and admits to doing it but blames his anger or even his peer’s actions. An adult cheats on his taxes and may admit he cheated but blames the government and says the taxes are too high.

Encase you didn't guess this already the pictures have nothing whatsoever to do with what I write.

In each circumstance the person at fault admitted their fault but never admitted that they were to blame, they never admitted a fault with them just something wrong which they did. For most people a cheating parent is not a cheat himself he is just a parent who cheats. A child who steals is not a thief only a stealing child and a murdering teen is not a murderer simply a victim of his emotions and upbringing. That is really it…we like to be victims and it has become totally engrained into our nature. Not engrained rather it has been born into us. Can you imagine a kid upon being reprimanded for stealing a cookie saying, “yes I am a thief, I’m sorry for being a thief” No! that would sounds crazy to our ears, what we hear is, “I’m sorry I took the cookie” or, “I’m sorry you caught me, I won’t let it happen again” We have become accustomed to making excuses and pointing blame at everyone except for ourselves. This tendency of course goes back to our sin nature, to the Fall and it remains the norm today because of humanities unwillingness to control this great cosmos, so the rule of it has fallen to more base creatures, the devil and his minions.


Here now is another problem, not only do we humans want to be victims but to stay victims and have that victimized feeling of self pity which we all know and love we must relinquish our lordship over this world which God granted to humanity and pass it over to The Prince of This World, who waits eagerly to accept it. This sacrificing of our freedom is the price we all pay, when we don’t take responsibility for our actions, when we blame what we do, feel, think and say on anything other then our own self; we give up control of ourselves to whatever it is we are blaming. The teen who blames anger for his actions is actually admitting to being under the dominion of anger. Whenever we allow ourselves to act outside the bounds of God’s will we have submitted to what is unchristian and admitted for all to see that we care more for that thing then we do for God. Isn’t that terrible? Every time I allow myself to fall into laziness I am admitting that I care more for my comfort then God. Will comfort last? Will the results of idle past time and vain hobbies last one minute under the fires of God’s judgment? I hardly know where I am heading with this post; it is indeed mumblings which I hope some reader wiser then I can glean some moral or lesson from and be kind enough to post it in a comment. Best of luck to you wiser person wherever you may be. As for the rest of us lets not be victims, rather lets take up with courage and confidence whatever position of command God has given us. May we govern and govern well that sphere of this world which God created “very good” and which man has allowed to slip into the chaos which we see it dominated by today.

Simplicity

I am a staunch supporter of the idea that life is simpler then we make it out to be. I believe that if common sense were a bit more common we'd have a far superior race of people today. There is this tendency for humanity to take the easiest road to get places. Now sometimes this is good because it has made people invent many useful and convenient tools to satisfy their innate laziness. However its negative side is far more harmful. Our desire to do things the easy way, keeps us from doing the right thing because the right thing is often harder. Leonard Ravenhill rightly says, "you don't have to do anything to displease God, there is only one way to heaven there are a million ways to Hell" If we just continue living our lives, coasting along then we'll never come to a proper relationship with God. We are unwilling to do the simple thing because it seems harder and we make things much more complicated then they have to be in order to justify not acting properly.



Lets take the example of Jesus. He never wrote a book and he had no higher education but at the age of twelve he was debating with the most intellectual men of his day. I do not believe that Jesus had any sort of supernatural wisdom booster pack we humans do not also have access to. That means that whatever Jesus was at twelve we also could and probably should be. We must ask then, how did this boy of twelve with minimal education become so intelligent? The answer, is...simple ;). The important things in life are generally the simplest. It is our pride, our arrogance and all the other garbage that we pick up as we grow up which makes discoursing about the serious things of life so difficult and so complicated. Throughout history it was rarely a problem for people to believe that god created the world. The simplest explanation to something existing is that something created it but in today schools we are willing to except unnecessarily complicated formulas that make no sense. Why? because to acknowledge the sensible, simple, explanation for the universe existing would mean that we are created beings, responsible to a higher power. This is something which no freedom loving individual will admit.

This question of creation is the crux of one's worldview and from it springs the answers to all other questions. For someone who is unwilling to accept the idea that we are indeed created their worldview only gets increasingly complex as they try to explain away good and evil, the problem of destiny, people's guilt, the deterioration of the earth and of course spiritual phenomenons or miracles. Exactly the opposite for someone who submits to the simple explanation that fits into reality. Answer to all those problems rather then becoming increasingly complex become simpler and the answers fit neatly into a well ordered worldview.



So Jesus was able to talk and discuss eloquently about the intellectual topics of his day, not because he had some divinely enhanced mind and not because he had studied for years in the best schools of his era rather he had spent his life in love to those around him. In observing the world and inviting God to interact in everything He did. Because He was willing to accept the simplest solutions that did not contradict reality. This to ought to be our goal, not that we should dispense with all formal education but we must not allow ourselves to think that our most important learning takes place in the classroom. Learning about the nature of God, the nature of ourselves, the nature of people, the nature of the universe and all other important questions will rarely be answered in a lecture hall but the answers come from humble observation of God, people, ourselves and the universe in which we live.