THE LIVING WORD.2

"These words that I speak are not my own, but come from the Father who has sent me.

They that hear the words that I speak, and believe in him who has sent me, will have everlasting life.

They will not be condemned but will pass from death to life."

--Jesus

God the Father has always desired and worked to explain how He would have us think of Him. From the moment we enter this world His revelation in nature begins its

work of helping us connect with our Creator. The unchangeable-ness of His nature, for example, can be understood in pondering the "solidity" of rock.

The artistry in a flower tells us something about His beauty. The vitality of water helps us taste a little of what the

"inventor and mediator of thirst and water" intends for our thirsty souls to find in Him.

Words mean things. That seems simple enough to understand, as concepts go. But for some reason, in today's turbulent political/social scene, people seem to be having a hard time understanding the meaning of words. More precisely, in a world rapidly resembling Orwell's 1984, words are being assigned new meanings while ignoring, vilifying, and repudiating their natural, historical and common meaning.

Have we lost the capacity to understand the meaning of things? Or the will? Or, could it be, there is no longer the kind of faith Jesus came to advance to be found on the earth?

Written oracles claimed by human beings to be the "Words of God," test our capacity, will, and faith to measure what they say, what we think they mean, and how accurately they depict our recognition of what we know to be like God. To embrace in our imagination the power to see the truth of a thing and to reject what we know to be false, is the development of faith.



Jesus, the perfect revelation of God, was sent that the Name of Truth could connect with man. The Son of Man leads each person to a higher plane: the moment when Truth goes beyond intellect, comes in contact with the will, and forces a choice to be True or False concerning the Life He reveals.

Putting into practice Jesus' words, given by God, reveals in each individual a perception of Truth (itself a gift from God) that acted upon transforms a man to a right relation to the Creator and the created. This is the perfecting of Life everlasting in the man!

"Man is man only in the doing of the truth, perfect man only in the doing of the highest truth:fulfilling his relations to the purpose for which God created him.
He has relations with his fellow man, closer infinitely than with any of the "things" around him, and to many a man far plainer than his relations with God. Now the nearer is plainer that he may step on it, and rise to the higher (but till then the less plain.)
These relations make a large part of his being, are essential to his very existence, and spring from the very facts of the origination of his being.
They are the relation of thought to thought, of being to being, of duty to duty. The very nature of a man depends upon, or is one with, these relations. They are truths, and the man is a true man as he fulfills them.
Fulfilling them perfectly, he is himself a truth, a living truth.
As regarded merely by the intellect, these relations are facts of man's nature; but that they are of man's nature makes them truths, and the fulfilments of them are duties.
He is so constituted as to understand them at first more than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true; so doing he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing, which alone can truly reveal them to him, and make the loving of them possible.
Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties, and appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights.
The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty...who forgets the name of it."

A young man I work with has fathered two children with a woman he did not marry and now no longer lives with. In fact, his relationship with his kid's mom is rather antagonistic. Each day presents more challenges testing his will and capacity to care for his children. His son, in particular, has some lifelong health issues he'll have to deal with for years to come.

I admire this man's devotion to his children, though as a "Christian" kind of frown on how he got himself in this predicament and wouldn't have prescribed it as a way to begin a life of fulfilling parenting.

I'm sure if he had to do it over he would have found a better way. But that is hardly the issue. The difficulties he faces, whether self-inflicted or not, and the way he is accepting his fatherly duties is helping to shape both his own character and the character of his posterity!

Those difficulties, in fact, make him more humble and receptive to a word of Truth from time to time. And open to the possibility that God is looking out for him and pleased that He is displaying true Fatherhood by fulfilling his duty to care for and protect his kids.

 For the rest of us...
Do we not take joy in the midst of severe crisis such as the recent hurricanes, wildfires and earthquakes in various places at the accounts of people fulfilling their duty to help and care for one another? Whatever problem we have with the political philosophies guiding modern journalism, we smile that they can't help themselves but to report the wonderful capacity of people to respond with earnest and tender help when duty calls!

Whatever the "professionals" may attribute that response to, we can with confident faith know that it is the God of Life who is continually working to shape mankind in His image!

His Words, His meaning, His Life!

adapted from George MacDonald's, Justice, Unspoken Sermons III

AN INVITATION TO LIFE.1

"Everyone who believes in the Son will have life everlasting."
--Jesus

When I began dating my wife years ago, I learned about her mother's secret stash of sacred family videos.  Only the inner circle could even suggest they existed!  After mother's passing, the secret stash was finally revealed and I discovered something significant about the sacredness of family.  When I saw my wife as a little girl I was strangely squeamish, like I didn't belong there.  I couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't watch them...

When I watch our own family videos a somewhat similar feeling comes over me, not that I don't belong there, I did, after all, help create this family and provide many of the experiences that have helped shape them, but a feeling of the paradox of time.  It mocks that those precious moments were so fleeting; that I didn't appreciate or savor them more. But it befriends in filtering the negative influences of impatience, impertinence and immaturity in those moments.

Time as taskmaster will soon be tamed.

I once had an experience in a college class that put time in eternal perspective.  The professor asked us to write down memories, both good and bad on 3x5 cards.  He explained that the reason we don't "forgive and forget" is because of the emotions attached to painful memories and that the healing of traumatic incidents just takes time.  He asked us to take out of our stack of bad memories a particularly difficult moment and sit quietly  before the Lord to let Him speak to us about it. The memory I selected occurred at around the age of ten. While playing a creepy game of some sort in an old house at twilight, an uncle jumped on top of me pinning me to the ground with a rubber hose squeezing my neck.  I was pretty sure I was going to die in that moment.  While recalling that memory I noted I had no real emotion attached to it.  (The professor later explained that the brain insulates itself from particularly traumatic memories.) 

As part of this exercise we were to take a favorite image of Jesus and focus on it while recalling the memory.  The image I used was the last scene in the "Matthew" video series where the actor playing Jesus turns, smiles and motions to follow him.  It is such a compelling vision of a joy-filled Savior.  However, while merging these two memories in my mind, the face of Jesus turned from confident caring to cruel mockery. It took my breath away and I wanted to stop.  But I let the

image from christianitymalasia.com

scene play out and soon discovered that the look on his face was the agony He experienced on the cross.  I realized that He was there in that moment; saw the evil I endured and let me know it was for that He died to redeem us.

It was life changing.

I believe the "judgment seat of Christ" will be a place of wonderful healing and reconciliation. Time, as servant of Death, will be swallowed up in LIFE!