Spiritual Ponderings

I am trying to grasp a deep truth that has evaded me all my life. Something in today's devotional from Chambers helped me catch a fleeting glimpse of it, but I want to understand it much better. It has to do with the offensiveness of sin to God and the truth about His forgiveness. Unfortunately the legal model so often infused with false beliefs about God's wrath and punishment clouded the picture for me so that the pieces never would fit together properly. Some of the pieces may have been valid but in the wrong context with other beliefs that were skewed against God so that I have never been able to see how it all makes sense. But I want to make sense out of it all and I now have a much clearer view of the puzzle than I have had in the past. I need to somehow be empowered to see this whole sin problem from heaven's perspective and get at least a little sense of God's feelings about all of this that aligns squarely with the truths about His character that I have bee...

The greatest lie ever foisted on the universe was not the lie that death is not the result of sin or that sinners won't really die, as big as that lie was. No, the earlier lie was something far more subtle than that and actually is at the very base of every other deception that has followed in its wake. This is a lie that has even become embedded right into our culture as an assumption that is relied upon to prevent people from getting hurt or taken advantage of. It is so common that most people would seldom even consider it a lie at all but weave their lives around it as if it were as reliable as the Law of God spoken from Mount Sinai. And what is this diabolical thought that is so tenacious and difficult to expose? It is the idea, the belief, the deeply held suspicion that if something sounds too good to be true, then very likely it is not. Can you see the lie in there yet? And even more, can you see the implications that permeate our subconsciousness and infect the very way...

After reading the blog post by Sparx last night about her husband, the Frog, being able to fix nearly anything, and then the Spud fixing something his father could not figure out, this morning I began to reflect on what was really going on behind that story. What induced the sudden flush of emotions and why do these experiences induce such good feelings in us and all who experience them? What is involved at its roots is a sense of honor. And honor is inextricably tied in with value. It also provides a level of relief from the ever-present sense of shame or devalue in our hearts. But what was described in this story is the normally accepted way by which we generally expect to feel honor and value – through the achievement of 'value-adding' activities; we feel it is something we have to earn. People in the Bible sometimes asked a question that reflects this deep desire in all of our hearts by expressing it this way: “What must I do to be saved?” It would not be inaccurate to...