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.

Peace

When I was only a young boy in a Catholic grade school in Philadelphia, possibly in sixth, seventh or eighth grade, our teacher, a nun, played for us a newsreel on an old reel to reel projector.  The newsreel was a documentary on the liberation, by American soldiers, of a nazi concentration camp.  It’s was either in the late 60’s or earlier 70’s when I was between the ages of 11-14 years old.

As a child, in those days, I had watched plenty of scary movies with Hollywood monsters like; Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula, and even though they scared me a little I knew they were only make believe.  However, what I saw from that projector that day, horrified me beyond anything I had ever seen before; emaciated bodies, expressionless faces, of men, women, and children who were apparently treated worse than animals.  These were the lucky ones; they had escaped certain execution from the gas chambers, firing squad or whatever other method of execution the nazi’s had cooked up.  Then the image, that is forever burnt into my conscience, of a bulldozer pushing a pile of dead, emaciated bodies into a big hole in the ground.   A feeling of horror came first, and then a sickening feeling began to grow in the pit of my stomach, and finally this evil malaise extended throughout my body.  It was then, that I felt as if my life, was a nightmare, that I was just awoken into.  The Hollywood monsters were nothing compared to these real life monsters that perpetrated this evil.

Nothing in my life seemed the same to me after that.  I now realized that I lived in a world where everyday people could do this to other people – to me and my family.  I did not wish to live here anymore.  I wanted our family to get away, as fast as possible from this house of horrors.  What a childish thought.  The petty issues, rivalries, competitions, strivings, pride, egotisms, bullying, vanities, and every other type of BS that goes with this modern lifestyle just seemed to exacerbate my desire to simply disappear from this cruel world.  I didn't want to play the game anymore.

It was then I realized too, there was no escape, this was the reality of my life, of everybodys life, and I simply had to push forward and live my life, just like everybody else, in the manner my experiences taught me to - SURVIVE.   I did not despair I learned to ignore.  Over time though, you can only ignore for so long.  At some point you will come face-to-face with the bad elements in this life.  What then was the answer to facing the bad element?

War.  That word has haunted me ever since.  War.  The final solution when all other solutions fail.  War.  That, which kills, wounds, cripples millions of people in order that others may live – so they may have children – in order that they may kill or be killed, someday, so that others may live – so forth and so on.  War.  War.  War.  It was simply an integral and natural part of life like having children, going to school, or having a job.   War.  It is what we as humans have been perfecting for thousands of years.  It is not to be questioned or feared…it is our fate…kill or be killed…that is the hand we have been dealt.

On the other hand, acts of kindness, lending a hand, sacrificing and serving others, giving your time, talent and treasures to build the city of God, this is what Jesus taught us to do – to follow.  This is how we find peace – in a world filled with war.  Not through strength of arms but through the strength of our faith.  True peace comes from God.  This present world is not to be feared.  Instead our focus is on love – our love of God, our families, friends and those who have been misled by this broken world.   His peace will come to you, if you repent of your sins, love and follow Him.

May His peace be with you!

Humility

Being humble, does that sound appealing to you?  What does it mean to you?  Is humility an attitude of weakness or strength?  Do you humble yourself or do you lead with pride?  Humility sounds like a nice idea but at the end of the day do you trust in being heard, loud, boastful, and confident in your own abilities?  Are you making your place/mark in the world?  Do you value your humility or the humility of your children? 

If you can understand that everything we have (that’s everything…think about it) is God given, then humility is simply a natural response to that belief.  However, real humility is not something found in those who believe/trust in themselves or their own abilities.  If I truly believe that I am the center of my universe, that my life, my body is simply the evolution of happenstance, then I should boast in what I do.  For it was I, in every sense, that made things happen - maybe I’d give a few kudos to my forefathers for good gene’s or a nice inheritance.

But, if you do believe in God then you know, He instructs/commands/teaches us to be humble.  For God has said, He will exalt the humble and will humble the exalted.  So maybe it’s time we took out our Bibles and did a little research on the subject of being humble.  You’ll thank God you did! 

Taking on the Giants of the 21st Century

For all of us today and as well as for those generations past, there have always been ”so-called” giants living in our lives.  I’m not talking about the ” fe-fi-fo-fum” kind but more like the Goliath variety – living, real, and apparently invincible obstacles that can often intimidate us into inaction or even get us  running in the completely opposite direction to escape certain doom.   Unlike David, from the Old Testament, who faced a very large and powerful man, by the name of Goliath, in a fight to the death, our giants today are often less physically intimidating but very much similar in their dimensions of being seemingly unbeatable.

However, let me talk a little bit about David’s situation before I get into this any further.   I think there are many important "life lessons"we can learn from this story.  Without turning this into a sermon, since it has been told so well, by so many spiritual people, so many times already, let me try instead to pick out some of the basic lessons we, of any religious belief can learn from this, I believe, very real story.

   

First off David was a young man – so maybe he wasn’t the strongest he would ever be.  However, he was a good shepherd, who loved his sheep, and had fought off many dangerous predators from his flock.  So, he had been physical and tangled with some potentially deadly combatants.   On the other hand, Goliath was literally a giant, and not just a giant but an experienced warrior as well.  Add to that a very belligerent and disrespectful attitude.  Not a pleasant combination anyone on David’s side of the battle wanted anything to deal with.  In fact, many of them cowered at the sound of his vile and booming voice.  But David, nevertheless, didn’t seem to bother with the odds based on the pure appearances of the match up – which were heavily in Goliath’s favor.  Think about it, how could this young man, who was inexperienced in fighting seasoned warriors, ever stand a chance of defeating a giant who was very experienced in killing men of much greater stature and experience.  He had to simply be crazy and out of his mind. 

But that wasn’t the case, in fact, David believed in something more than mere appearances, he felt something deep inside himself, he looked beyond his senses, he believed with all his heart that this giant was his personal call to action.  He could never have satisfactorily explained this feeling to anyone around him at the time – since they were too busy shivering in their boots.  No this evil foe was challenging him, personally, to stand up for what he believed – what he stood for (his love and reverence for God).  Interestingly, without any hesitation David boldly accepted this apparent suicidal challenge.

On that glorious day, many many years ago, what actually tipped the scale in David’s favor, I believe, was his God giving ability to think – and think he did.  He outsmarted his bigger and brawnier opponent with a clever and ingenious idea of the human imagination (thank you God) – a slingshot.  This simple, childlike device in the hand of an experienced user made him more than a match for Goliath.  At a safe distance from Goliath, David trusted in what God had given him the ability to master, this weapon of human ingenuity.  He placed all of his trust in his God given ability to physically project a rock precisely and firmly in the forehead of his unprepared nemesis, bringing him to the ground swiftly in one deliberate and heartfelt shot.   And he did just that, because he knew, in his heart, that if he didn’t face this giant now, he could never expect to be a man that stood for what he believed in, since he was fully capable, with slingshot in hand, of standing up to this situation.  Though he had never before defeated a giant with his weapon, he just had to be fearless and trust, in what his heart told him he was capable of doing.

 

Is this any different in how we can defeat the giants we face today, to be fearless and trust in a solution, a way, that we are fully aware of, that will equip us to overcome and defeat the challenges of this secular society?  No, it is exactly the same.  So what is your solution, game plan, to overcoming the giants in your life?  Do you face them or do you simple run away?  Maybe you just stand there shivering in your boots, waiting for somebody else to defeat your giant.

Don't fear.  God has given you the answer.  Pick up your rock, Jesus, and He will bring you to victory, everytime!

 

Honor God

In 1 Corinthians 10:31 we read, “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.”

So why should I honor (respect, exalt, etc.) God?  It’s not a question you need to struggle with, either you do or don’t. So, make your decision…don’t “sit on the fence”…because the Lord says:

Revelation 3:15-19 “I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything, and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white garments to put on so that your shameful nakedness may not be exposed, and buy ointment to smear on your eyes so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and chastise. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.” 

How do I honor God?

There are a few old adages I love, “actions speak louder than words” and “walking the talk.” These two sayings basically answer that question. Just do it. Honoring God begins with trusting God (see my previous post). If God asks you to do…you do. If He asks you to stop…you stop. 

Are you listening?

Are you wasting your time with God...you should be!

It's About Time

John 13 34:35 “I give you a new commandment:  love one another.   As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.  This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

In preparation of His departure Jesus the Son of God gave his disciples a new commandment to love one another as He has loved them.  Further He tells them that this will be the visible sign or way to identify those who are His true disciples.  On the surface and at that moment when Jesus is telling His disciples this new commandment, it must have sounded just like a nice sentimental thought before saying goodbye.  In fact, the scriptures document the disciples’ failure to realize or even ponder its profound meaning.  Instead Peter is simply concerned with His departure by asking, “Master, where are you going?”  Not even stopping to ask for further guidance on this new commandment - a commandment…not a recommendation or suggestion but a full fledged commandment.   All Peter can think about is His leaving and selfishly wanting to know where He is going and “why can’t I follow you now?”  - not asking “why can’t WE follow you” but selfishly asking “why can’t I follow you”.

Today as Peter did then, are we overlooking this new commandment too and distracted by our daily worries/fears instead of taking to heart the importance of what Jesus is commanding  us to do here?  Are we thinking/praying about what it truly means to love one another as He loved us?  Is it about time we open our ears, hearts and minds to follow Jesus’ new commandment?

Remember…if you want to find followers of Jesus look no further than those who are truly loving one another.  Then you will be in good company!