Spiritual Ponderings

This is a followup email I sent after the last one about Sowing and Reaping to a good friend. Friend , as I have listened to God speaking to my own issues today, I am encouraged to pass along some things I am reminded of that may give you help as well. Galatians 3:6 says that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness. What was it that Abraham believed? He believed that God could do what He said He could do. If necessary God could raise Isaac from the dead to make him Abraham's heir after being sacrificed at God's command. No matter how impossible circumstances appeared, God would have no problem fulfilling His promises. That is the kind of faith/belief that was honored by receiving a reputation of righteousness. It is exactly the same with us. In fact the Bible repeatedly talks about Abraham as the father of all those who believe and are Israelites in reality. Faith at its very core is a choice to believe that God can do the impossible in ...

This is a slightly revised letter I wrote to a friend and decided that others might benefit from it as well. Dear friend, a few thoughts have come to me that maybe God can use to encourage you. Remember the seminar called Love and Respect that we began to watch? Remember the crazy cycle? That is the trap you find yourself in right now and seem to not be able to escape. But while you are desperate for you wife to show you some respect which you rightly need and crave, at the very same time you are standing on your wife's air hose supplying her innate need for love. Without love she tends to act disrespectfully; without respect you tend to act unlovingly. And the cycle keeps spinning out of control. Remember that? But it will never work to wait and expect her to make the first move to reverse that spinning wheel. As much as you long for it to happen that way, God cannot violate the natural laws that He has designed for creation to function. Realize that God is sharing ...

I am finally sensing that maybe I am beginning to catch glimpses of the real meaning of the cross of Christ for the first time in my life. I hesitate to say this sensing that the enormity of its true implications are still so far beyond my ability to even imagine that it might be arrogant to claim such a thing. But at the same time, what I am now learning is not only perfectly fitting together with all the fundamental facts and insights that God has been showing me from His Word for decades now, but more importantly my heart, the true object of interest by the One who hung on that cross, is finally beginning to respond positively to the latest explanations of how the cross should be interpreted. I just read a few minutes ago another vital truth about the role of God at the cross in relation to those who put His Son to death. “Our real problem is not the lack of depth in our thinking, but the lack of depth in our character. ...We fail to comprehend such sacrificial love becaus...

You might be surprised to hear that I have a Christian watch. But its true – I just realized it this morning. How can a watch be Christian you might ask? Good question. I love good questions. Let me try to explain. My watch relies completely on the sun for all of its power, a resource outside of itself. And although it does have some kind of battery inside I suppose, it is not the kind that you must change when it runs out of energy. It uses some sort of solar collection system to re-energize its storage unit so that in fact for a number of years now the measurement indicator on the face telling me how much internal energy it has stored up is almost always maxed out. Even after many long dark days of winter it tells me that it has plenty of energy to keep going faithfully, serving me almost 24/7 to reliably tell me what time it is. Why almost ? More on that later. It is versatile. My watch is one of those fancy digital, new-fangled contraptions that not only tells me what ...

I sometimes hear people talk about their intention to stand up for God, to be jealous for His reputation. But then I begin to wonder sometimes if they are actually jealous for God or jealous about their own version of God. I think this partly depends on our definition of jealousy and very much on how we perceive God. I have wondered at times how much I am supposed to come to the defense of God's reputation. Or maybe the question should be more along the lines of, in what way do I seek to defend God's reputation. Of course involved in that would be which reputation I might have in mind to defend, for most versions of God I have heard about I would have no interest in defending. I recently read a short piece about God's jealousy and how it is different than what we typically think of when we use that word. Our jealousy is very often selfish in nature. We become jealous of what someone else has or receives what we want for ourselves. Often in acting out our jealo...

I submit to Your authority over every part of my life. Your authority tells me to rejoice in trials and to trust in You, to rest in the truth that You are working everything together for my good, even though it may be difficult to see how that can be at the present. Your authority tells me to not worry about anything but in everything to give thanks. Thank-you! Claiming that You are my Lord means that I live by what You say, not by my own authority or the authority of religion claiming to speak in Your place. While I am not to resist Your appointed authorities here on earth or to resist an evil person, at the same time I am not to reflect their evil spirit or become contaminated by it in my own spirit. Rather I am to pass along all mistreatment, shame and evil along to You, my Savior who has earned the right on the cross to absorb all of the shame, the humiliation, the pain that any mistreatment may produce. Because I am 'in Christ' I must remember to not try to sh...