Spiritual Ponderings

I caught a glimpse this morning of the truth about what we often think are blessings. Comforts and pleasures that we enjoy can often be the greatest hindrances in our lives to seeking intimacy with God. Pleasures and comforts many times fill in the emptiness that is supposed to be filled with God thereby preventing our hunger for God from motivating us to seek Him with an intensity enough to find Him. Lack of spiritual hunger and low levels of desire for God leave us satisfied with such tiny encounters with His glory that we never realize how dangerous our condition is until it may be too late. Our very gratitude for what we consider to be blessings that are in fact the very things that are keeping us from seeking God seriously, may be a mistake. It may be discovered that we are praising God for curses in our lives rather than things that are truly beneficial to us. The early Christians experienced such a deep level of intense fellowship with God under persecution that it was little...

If I attract someone's affections to myself but fail to at the right time seek to use that bond to introduce them and encourage them to attach their affections on Jesus, then I am betraying them and cheating them of knowing the only source that can provide them with the very essence of what they need and crave deep in their heart. If they enjoy what they are receiving from me, it is only honest that I need to relay to them at an opportune time the truth about how I am able to share that love with them at all. I cannot produce unconditional love in my own heart; I can only reflect it as I receive it and appreciate it coming from God. Yet unconditional love is the fuel which all of our hearts were designed to rely on for us to function properly. Anything else, any other kind of love or affection or pleasure or feeling is a substitute at best and does not contain the essential ingredients for life. Other feelings and fuels may keep me going for a time, may make me feel good and even ...