Lost & Found

I'm fully aware that my previous few blogs have been - shall we say - conflicting? That would be because I've been somewhat conflicted on the subject of Christmas. BUT there are things about which I have absolutely NO inner conflict ...the PRIMARY one being the concept of mankind's lost condition. 


When we humans became separated from God, several thousand years [and more generations than I can imagine ago], looking at it from GOD'S PERSPECTIVE, we became lost to Him. ... you don't 'FEEL' lost??  You think you know where you are and where you are going...   so what?  TO GOD, you are LOST. 


Oh, you need a better picture...


 ... hmm... 


Okay, try this. Have you ever had a pet that left home only to finally return after days, weeks or months had passed? To YOU the pet was lost, even though it thought it knew where it was all the time.  Bingo! ...lost and found.


Humanity left God way back when... Until we return we are 'lost'.... When individual humans return to God... they're 'found' (that wasn't hard to understand at all, was it?!) 


The God's Word, the Bible, uses "saved"... wonder why that is... what does a lost person have to be saved from? ever wonder about that? Now there's something to ponder! No, it's not saved from lions, and tigers and bears! oh, my! 


Let's return to the lost pet...YOU DON'T KNOW what happens to it if it never comes home!!!! It may have lived out its life with another family; it may have passed into eternity in an unknown place, with no one to love or bury it. 


But, there's a serious difference between the human and the pet. The pet is a soul that never had the Spirit given to it.... the human, on the other hand, when they went 'lost' HAD THE SPIRIT OF GOD REMOVED FROM THEM because God could not live in the same body with rebellion. So, what happens to a human if he or she never comes 'home' to God? They may live separated from Him, but when they enter eternity, they REMAIN separated from Him. We need to be saved from that separation! and from the rebellion that is not only built into each of us as a result of that separation, but was the CAUSE of it, as well. 


Don't any of you go thinkin' that it doesn't matter where you spend eternity... the description of the end of those who refuse to return to God ... taking the only way He made available... is NOT a pretty picture. The pain felt living here won't even come close! 


Don't take the chance.... God sent His only Son... to reconcile humanity to Himself... one heart at a time .... each of us has to accept the sacrifice of the Son of Man on his/her behalf, to avoid the only alternative. Come home! I beg you. 


Come home! 




Tags: salvation, reconciliation 


Tuesday 25 December 2007 - 07:50PM (EST)  | 2 Comments 

12 down & 12 to go...but who's counting?

I think you have to feel a little sorry for people for whom this upcoming event is merely another day to have a family get together... to do the 'traditional' things, but without any reason or meaning to it to make it special. All it is, is a specific traditional day to do certain things... Visit family, exchange gifts, hang out and talk, tell stories, watch the traditional movies, and have a fantastic dinner. They'll do all the pretty stuff, the colored lights, the tree, trimmings and all, but there's no Christ Child's birth... No angels visiting shepherds in the fields.... No travelers from afar bearing gifts. 


But it's Christmas! Those things that are WHY it was given the name Christmas in the first place (Christ Mass), even if the timing IS a bit off. We Believers are recognizing the FACT that He CAME -- what is the rest of the world 'celebrating' anyway?


Wednesday 12 December 2007 - 11:01PM (EST) 

Truth or Tradition?

I know ... most of you think I'm making a big deal out of nothing when I even remotely reference the fact of the matter regarding December 25th. But, somewhere along the line in my life, I was taught that truth was important. ...that lying is deception. ...that honesty was not just the best policy, but it was EXPECTED of me.  To be honest meant knowing what the truth was; which brings me to the need to know the truth about this date on our calendars that we celebrate as the birth of our Savior.


As Providence would have it, back in the early '80s I heard a radio teaching (which I recorded as much of as I could) by a Messianic Jewish woman who told us about things they (Messianic Jews) had brought down in their historical telling and re-telling of the birth of Christ, and all that surrounded it.  With that in mind, I went to the Scriptures to see if I could find the TIME of Jesus' birth.


My jumping off place was Luke’s 1st chapter, where Luke tells of Mary's cousin, Elisabeth, and her husband, Zechariah, both descendants of Aaron. Zechariah, we are told, was 'a priest of the course of Abijah,' and it says in verse 8, that Zechariah was on duty when the angel Gabriel appeared and spoke to him, so we need to know when that would fall during the year.  That’s where the trail takes us temporarily back to 1 Chronicles 24:4-19, where the courses (by lot) are identified, and their times explained, with Abijah being assigned the 8th course, in verse 10.


In this setting, (understand we're talking about the priesthood), so the calendar being used [there are two] would likely be the sacred calendar, not the civil one. With that in mind, note that each 'course' is 2 weeks in length, beginning in Nisan, which corresponds to March-April, and that Abijah is the 8th course. So all we need do is to count through the months, 2 weeks at a time, to get an idea of when it was he was in the temple. (calendars make this much easier, but)... counting... 
last 2 weeks of March, 
1st 2 weeks of April, 
last 2 weeks of Apr, 
1st 2 weeks of May (that's 4 courses)... 
last 2 weeks of May, 
1st 2 weeks of Jun, 
last 2 weeks of Jun, 
1st 2 weeks of Jul... 
so we get it that Zechariah's on duty in the temple during the 1st half of July... OK? You still with me?  We know the narrative here... Gabriel tells Zechariah that he and Elisabeth are going to have a son, what to name him ... Zechariah responds in unbelief, is rendered speechless, etc, and in verse 23, "...as soon as the days of his ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house." (KJV)


Verse 24 "And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived, and hid herself 5 months..." Zechariah would have gone home in mid July, Elisabeth conceived (from the way it reads, almost immediately!!!) so counting... mid Jul-Aug=1 month, mid Aug-Sept=2, mid Sept-Oct=3, mid Oct-Nov=4, mid Nov-mid Dec=5.


Now the telling turns to Mary verse 26. "And in the 6th month [after that], the angel Gabriel was sent..." So sometime during Elisabeth's 6th month (mid Dec to mid Jan) we have Gabriel's visit to Mary, at which time she's told she'll conceive by the Holy Spirit.  So it's entirely possible that this visit took place sometime during last two weeks of December. (I like to think so, anyway! ...why hold off till late in the month???)


As soon as the Angel Gabriel leaves Mary, it says she arose and went (in haste!) to see Elisabeth (who, upon hearing her greeting, referenced the 'fruit of her womb' in blessing her, indicating to me that her pregnancy was already in progress).  So Mary's baby would be born like about ... late September. But I jumped ahead of the chronology there... sorry... 


Mary stayed with her cousin Elisabeth 3 months (verse 56) till like mid February and returned home.  You know, I always found it interesting that she left just before the birth of John... amazing.  Anyway, Joseph sees her back home and notes the obvious 3 month 'baby bump', and plans to ditch the girl, till he's told not to, in a dream (for that you have to go to Matthew 1:18-25).


Oh, there was one other thing the Messianic woman added during the teaching: the Shepherds out by Bethlehem... those sheep they were watching over were raised for supplying a Passover sacrifice for out of town visitors who didn't have one, and they would NOT have been out in the field by night during the rainy season ... December!  She said the latest they'd have stayed out there with the sheep was late October.


Here we have the whole storyline is laid out clear as day, so what's with December 25th? ...just tradition... thanks to a whole host of folks down through the ages.


Does that explain it clearly enough? So... what are we celebrating? 
THAT HE CAME!


Tags: truth, tradition, Christmas 


Thursday 6 December 2007 - 04:49PM (EST) 

Contrasts

A broken and contrite heart is one thing... 


this leads us to apologize when we do the wrong thing, when we hurt someone, when we are all full of ourselves and finally realize that we're being self-centered and acknowledged that this has to change before things will get better. This, the Lord will honor. 


a broken spirit another entirely different thing... 


when all seems hopeless, without a solution in sight or even on the horizon - that we recognize, a depression that centers on one's own life and all the faultiness that comes with living on this planet, in a condition perhaps not even recognized as fallen-ness, or away from God, or simply out of place, the condition translated 'lost' in KJV. 


what then is the remedy? 


in my life, it has always been to move back to the first position... that of a recognition that I am not the center of even my own universe. that position belongs to the One who crafted the whole thing; spoke it into existence. at which point, it becomes clear, i've been being my own deity ... perhaps again. 
Lord, God, forgive me. 
Thursday 13 September 2007 - 08:55PM (EDT) 





The Art of Giving 
by Kent Nerburn.... Letters to My Son ...from a Celestial Seasonings Tea box
"Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how it is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace."
Sunday 11 November 2007 - 10:23PM (EST) 

To Your Health

For me, it started coming to my attention when I turned 35 that I simply had let life slide on by and that being conscientious about taking care of daily things might make a HUGE difference.


My first discovery was that the dreaded "acid reflux" (now so-called), could be eased by simply taking a digestive enzyme! It actually got rid of it for me. WOW! That seriously changed my outlook. There WERE things in my life I could control, and not allow them to become so bad I would need a Doctor's attentions. It was revolutionary. From that point, I began looking at other things I might take care of on my own. 


Have you ever wandered the RealAge.com website, and taken their little test(s) to determine your REAL age? It's quite revealing... especially if you answer honestly. That site showed me a number of things I could manage on my own, and others that would be better handled by "the professionals". But to be honest, it seems the more things I handle for myself, the fewer things are left to someone else to be responsible for. 


So my thought tonight is this... any time feeling good is important... wouldn't feeling better be a good thing? I like feeling better than I did when I was younger... this is fun!

Wednesday 21 March 2007 - 02:06PM (EDT)

Just thinking...

Wish I could remember what I heard Tony Evans say in that short (8 minute) sermon segment I heard... something about EMOTIONS HAVE NO INTELLECT; they only do what they are told. 

1. When we speak sorry things, they'll respond accordingly, and be "down". 
2. When we say hopeful things, they respond accordingly and leave us feeling "up". 

That made sense to me, and know it to be (from experience) true.


So why do we generally allow our emotions to “run the show” so to speak? What’s up with that? 
Upon awaking if we’ve had a bad dream, a scary dream, we’re in a bad mood and the bad mood runs (ruins) at least part of the day. Doesn’t that seem wrong to anybody? How about that rush hour traffic, the crazy drivers who cut you off then slow down abruptly… that tick us off, “make us just furious” and we want to run around being mad as if it is right that these outside influences determine how we will behave…. No clue…. Sounds like we don’t want to accept the responsibility for our own actions.


Following that was a Joyce Meyer teaching (which I also missed most of), in which she said that "I want", "I think", "I feel" statements are all soul statements... The will says, "I want", the mind says, "I think" and the emotions say, "I feel" ... each wanting to be heard for themselves (selfish at the core), but none has usually looked to the Spirit, to learn what the mind of Christ would say.  ...to which our spirit will say, "I believe."


Instead, we surround ourselves with sound... the TV, a radio, iPod, MP3, phone, etc. -constant chatter, constant sound.  We inundate our minds with images from TV, movies, internet...  and we think we're doing ourselves a favor.  When what we NEED to do is "to sit in silence with God... without making suggestions, giving directions or making requests." 

We seldom give ourselves the GIFT of time to allow peace to flood our souls... telling the mind, will and emotions to just HUSH!


Saturday 17 March 2007 - 02:43PM (EDT) 

Peace and Quiet

(Thomas Kinkade painting, A Peaceful Retreat)


Ah, this life is so noisy sometimes... and finding some time to get away into some peace and quiet can be so difficult. So where can I go to find it? 


To quote a song, "Wouldn't it be loverly?" ...to be able to trek off to say, a cabin, with a fireplace, by a river... out in the woods some where... just to ... get away from it all? Looking at such a picture offers a bit of the peace I oft times found fishing and camping as a kid, or hiking as a youth, riding my bike through the woods between the base and the town I lived in over in Germany in my 20s... 


Which brings me to a thought the Lord brought to me the other day, when I was somewhat unhappy with the number of different things that scream for my time and attention. How does that verse go? ... something about "he who loses his life for My sake will find it".... I had actually began wondering who I was anymore! So it shouldn't be surprising that I would feel the need to find that solitude place to renew my spirit, and just hang out with God, His Spirit and His Word. 


As it is, most times just being online, without any contact such as inSpeak or PalTalk, when I can sit here in my back room and listen to the fan blow seems to work okay. Other times, the empty sanctuary at church is a good place to find that solitude I seek... a place where God and I can be alone. 


It's just something I need more often than I get it. 

Sunday 11 March 2007 - 08:17PM