Spiritual Ponderings

Another one of the confusing religious words was brought to my attention recently and was unpacked much more clearly for me. This is the word repentance . As usual, the first ideas that come to mind whenever most of us hear religious terms is almost always based on the false assumptions and traditions built up over centuries of religion, not on true Biblical perspective. Yes, they are often defended and taught using Biblical verses to prop up their traditional use at times, but that does not mean that the Bible supports the way that we perceive them. I have been learning that more and more over the past few years as I have explored one thing after another and found that nearly every word and concept and teaching has been distorted to some degree or another. Even the translators of every version of the Bible introduced a great deal of their own bias and opinions into the text that has seriously obscured the intensity and clarity of the original languages. The normal idea that man...

I was recently listening to a quotation that alerted me to a hidden danger that I had never thought about before. But this is a danger that I now realize has become a cause for much of the arguing and bigotry on the part of many religious people all over the world. It is the idea that the Word of God somehow is to be given greater priority than God Himself. Now I am also aware of the counterpart danger that has led to the reinforcement of this philosophy and teaching. That is, the danger of depending on emotional whims, feelings or excitement to have more importance in one's spiritual journey without accountability to the Word of God. As I think of it now, this seeming tension between which one should be given precedence is not unlike the struggle that goes on over which side of the brain should be respected or trained the most, the left, logical side or the right more emotional side. As I have been learning over recent years, the right side of the brain is actually the cont...

Usually the thoughts that impress me profoundly often come just as I am waking up. However, last night they came in extended form while I was sound asleep interspersed with other dreams. After waking up to continue thinking about them I realized that the ideas themselves were not really new to me but the connections between them were making far more sense at the heart level inside of me. That for me is very encouraging. I feel like my heart is so slow to understand the wonderful things my head has been learning about God and about reality. For it is not until my heart really grasps and believes these truths that they are going to begin to really make a difference in both my relationships with others, with God and also how I react under surprise pressure. That is one part of my life that I am keenly aware needs to be healed and that still lurks deep inside of me, pockets of vulnerability threatening to discredit everything I have been saying and teaching for years. What is emergi...

Grace. Graceful . Graciously . Graciousness . There is something interesting that goes on inside of me whenever I think about these various words. The strange thing is that all of the words after the first one seem to have very little to do with grace. Now I realize that this idea seems absurd when exposed out in the open like this, but that is just the point. Why is it that inside of me, in the feeling, intuitive, experience-based part of my being, that these last three words would seem to have so little connection with the word grace when they are so obviously based on that word? It doesn't take much brilliance to realize that much of the problem lies in the fact that the word grace has been hijacked and distorted by religion in my experience whereas the other words have not had so much confusion associated with them. Now, if someone reading this has not experienced the level of confusion from religion like I have they may be puzzling over everything that I have said s...

I have wondered all of my life what might have happened if Adam had chosen to not accept the temptation to sin when Eve offered him the fruit. It was possible after all, and it even can be instructive for situations today when we are tempted in certain ways. It was not inevitable that Adam had to sin; he did have a choice after all. He didn't have to distrust God just because Eve had been deceived and was offering him a temptation to join her in disobedience. What usually turns up in most discussions on this topic is the assumption that most likely Eve would have had to die if Adam had chosen not to join her in sin. Based on this assumption, which I am rather certain was what Adam was also thinking, the argument usually takes on the nature of Adam's wrestling with the fear that the love of his life would be lost to him forever and that such a choice was simply to overwhelming for him to seriously consider. His attraction to Eve and her overwhelming beauty simply became more...

I have become aware over the past few years that I have a major deficit in my heart due to a lack of proper nurturing and training when I was young. I know that it comes from that time in my life because infancy is the maturing time when this vital component of life is supposed to be integrated into the fabric of each person's thinking and relating. But what I am now faced with is how to expose, address and repair this problem. The deficit is my tendency or lack of willing ability to receive before attempting to disperse. I have learned in the past few years that when a person is forced to give unselfishly before learning first of all to receive with joy, then the character is marred and that person becomes stunted and somewhat warped in this part of their experience. The person may or may not become a giver and sharer of what they have with others, but their ability to do so with joy and spontaneously with a spirit of cheerfulness is seriously lacking. It is like damaging an o...

A thought seemed to appear in my mind while I was sleeping this morning that persisted in keeping my attention until my conscious mind began to ponder it as I slowly began to wake up. Then I began to fear that I might lose it before capturing it here, so I couldn't go back to sleep completely. Since it is a thought that is rather new to me and also because I don't recall even thinking about this subject recently, I suspect that it wasn't an idea that originated with me. There is a teaching in my church about the time prophesied in Daniel that we are now living in. The period of time we find ourselves in today is called the time of the Investigative Judgment. There has been a great deal of debate about this concept or event, both its very existence and also the nature of what it really involves. Unfortunately this teaching has been abused by good-intentioned people far too often to promote a religion based on fear. They have done this because their perceptions of God wer...