Today's Thoughts

My life journey thus far has brought me to a place where I realize that we need to focus more on “loving God and each other” than anything else.  This is easy to say but rarely is it lived out.  Simply because, I believe, we have been caged by our desires for other things.  And these cages, in this day and age, are so diabolical.  I believe we are living the words our Savior cried on the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”.

I believe Jesus meant this not only as it applied to His crucifixion then, but as well as, to people today.  We have been deceived by Satan and that deception has grown and been compounded over the centuries to produce a state of mind that is clearly ignorant of what God our Father lovingly desires for us and how we are to live in response to that love.

Today we have fallen very far from the path our Savior directed us to follow.  But we don’t realize it and therefore can’t appreciate our error.  We don’t and can’t understand what is fundamentally wrong with our world, society, and our own personal lives.  Let me try to illustrate the problem.  Man has been given the gift of intelligence and he has used it to discover, invent, build, and create.  However, and is often the case, this ability to use our intelligence to make this world a better place to live, becomes misguided or misused.  That is because I believe that man’s gift of intelligence, first and foremost, should be used in conjunction/communion with his love for God and his fellow man, if not, if we use our gift not in communion with God, then sad to say even our best intentions become polluted.

 Unfortunately, our physical world is not currently under the dominion of God.  Yes…the kingdom of God is at hand and within us but the physical kingdom of Satan surrounds us in all of its evil manifestations.  And thus, we can be misled, by Satan, to use our God given abilities to support his cause, just like in the Garden of Eden.  However, our pride often keeps us from acknowledging this.  Instead we fight and argue about how our actions are good and noble, all the while; we are further turning our hearts and minds away from our Creator and turning instead into the darkness and loving it.

What are we to do?  How do we divorce ourselves from Satan’s world?   Do we quit our jobs and give away all our wealth and live in poverty?   Or do we deny ourselves any pleasures and wait in eager anticipation of death?  How do we keep our focus on Our Lord while living in a cesspool of evil?

First off, I believe that man has been hard-coded with the same makeup as Our Creator.  Yes…we are created in His image.  And therefore, we don’t simply die and shrivel up when things are bad.  We have a strong desire to love.  Again, this is hard coded into our makeup.  This cannot be denied.  We also desire to be joyful and at peace, another hard-coded bit of our makeup.  This all comes into direct conflict with Satan’s plan of our destruction and since he cannot change our makeup he needs to substitute these thing like love, joy and peace with his own diabolical substitutes.   Let me illustrate:

   God’s Gift            |              Satan’s Substitute

                                Love                                    Sex, Hedonism
                                Joy                                       Financial Riches
                                Peace                                 Alcohol, Drugs, and the things listed above.

Unfortunately for Satan his substitutes do not provide the same results as God gifts.  Instead, anger, frustration, envy, pride, suicide, alcohol/drug addiction, divorce, rape, murder are just a few of Satan’s side effects.  In Satan’s world we are ruled by fear and desire.  What if I lose my job?  What do I need to do to make the most money I can?  Why can’t I do what feels good, I’m not hurting anybody?

However, in God’s kingdom we are ruled by love with a spirit of service and sacrifice.  What can I do to help others?  How can I be more Christ-like?  How do I pick up and carry my cross every day?

Two completely opposite paths, one that seems to be logical and sensible and the other that seems to be stupid and foolish.

Read - 1 Corinthians - and listen to what Paul wrote about the subject.