Spiritual Ponderings

I have been listening for the past few days to a series on the book of 1 John by a powerful minister recorded on MP3, Alistair Begg. He is one who takes great pains to explore the Word in detail very much like the inductive study methods that I learned years ago and that I use on a daily basis. As I have listened to him unpack what he has found in the Word and think about it myself as I am working through the day I am finding my own heart tuning in more to the mind of God. Sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information that my mind has to process at times. But I suppose that should be no surprise since I have been listening to around 8-10 sermons a day. Quite a number of insights have come to my attention during this time of intense instruction, but one thing rather jumped out at me. It is also related to a clarifying of my own understanding of salvation and my own relationship to God that has been confusing in some respects nearly all of my life. In fact,

A thought keeps coming back to me at times that I have not explored very much. It is the idea that maybe the judgment turns on where our love is focused. In fact, the judgment may in large part be simply an exposure of what it really is that we have decided to love in the long run much more than a rehearsal of things that we have done wrong or done right. But figuring out what and where our love is can be a very slippery undertaking. There are so many things inside of us that can evade detection, so many ways in which we deceive both ourselves and most everyone around us that it can at times seem almost impossible to discern where our affections really lie. And not the least of these is the inherent hypocrisy that accompanies our attempts to satisfy the expectations of those who are important to us or the demands of religion as it is often taught to us. When a person is raised to view themselves and their personal worth or value based on their performance or their ability to mak