Food For the Soul.1 -

"It is written:

'Man shall not live by bread alone,

but by every word that proceeds

out from the mouth of God.'"

-Jesus

We recently started to eat differently. Instead of getting our energy source from sugars (carbohydrates) we now get energy from fat. I've lost twenty five pounds...a more

natural weight for my frame. But weight wasn't the reason we switched to the "Keto" diet plan. We had heard that the body is able to process food in different ways with different effects. It seems that sugar is a major contributor to a variety of ailments humans, especially Americans, experience. What sugars the body is not able to process is turned into body fat. And, frankly, there are a lot of fat Americans...

When we Americans do decide to do something about our physical condition we have a nearly overwhelming number of "diet" options to choose as well as a constant barrage of advertisements for drugs promising to cure whatever ails us. For we believe that if we can somehow manage the physical, emotional or mental pain of life we may actually like ourselves better!

So we spend and ingest and wait hoping for the desired change to our bodies.

While we're waiting do we ever contemplate what we should take to make us more patient or less anxious? Or kinder, gentler, peaceful, loving, joyful, self-controlled?

In our contemplating do we consider how much our bodies demand our attention and consume our resources?

What if we only live on bread alone? A life focused solely on the physical is soon corrupted by the "lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life," with diminishing awareness that we can never satisfy those demands!

Ultimate Selfless Love clashed with Ultimate Self Loathing in the wilderness of temptation.

When the Devil dangled the idea of self preservation to satisfy the wild ravishings of the flesh, Jesus turned to an age-old truth: Real Life springs out of faith and obedience to God's Revealed Word. Seeking first the highest Good, the Perfect Will of God, is the First Priority of Life. There is not a thing in this world that is not in some way better understood, "ingested", and transforming in its effect on every human being than the Perfect Will.

Do we not select a diet plan based on the outcome we're trying to achieve?

Ultimately we want the outcome to be a more attractive me.

What better way to achieve the best outcome of this life than give ourselves to the Creator who knows Supremely what it will take to complete us and make us Supremely Lovely!

Following the Resurrection.6

"In a little while, the world will see Me no more; 

but my presence will remain with you;

and because I live, you will live also." 

-Jesus

In a Little While.

Consider that Jesus, through Whom all things were created, who spent eons of time making sure that each layer of natural order met His "just right" conditions for the eventual introduction of humanity --His crowning achievement-- would ponder the effect of a "little while" on the world.

How things can change in a little while. 

Consider America as representing a world that can no longer see Jesus. Founded on a firm desire to appropriate universal, timeless, revealed truth into a governing structure providing maximum opportunity, liberty and individual growth as well as a serving as a beacon of hope to a world with centuries long history of tyranny and oppression. In a little while, this country became the most prosperous, creative and generous nation in human history.

How things changed in America when this country stopped seeing Jesus...in just a little while! 

Consider this post from social media, a place that offers some sense of what the "world" sees, hears and does:

"I don't recognize the America that I served as an officer and fighter pilot anymore. I swore to defend our constitution and country but now find what we fought against we are now becoming- a socialist country with no borders that kills cops and ICE agents, a country that self destructs from within by allowing our enemies in who seek our demise- radical Islamists, a country that allows kids to determine what sex they are in direct opposition to what they really are, a country that allows politicians to swear into office using the Koran that doesn't recognize our constitution, a country that teaches homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle to our kids, a country that elects politicians who are ruthless and speak lies to destroy their opponents character, a country that has killed 60 million babies for convenience, a country where confused movie stars are regarded as experts in all matters when all they do is act like someone they are not, a country that takes excessive amounts of your wages to pay people who won't work, a country that thinks more highly about illegals and their kids than our own legal citizens and kids, a country that harbors all manner of criminals in sanctuary cities, a country that seems to think students can run this country instead of adults, a country that has thrown God out of the public square. 

No country can do all these things and expect to survive."

The writer goes on to point out that the fault lies with "the silent majority" of people who may be vexed by the decline of morals and character but have done little to stop the decay.

Consider how you and I might behave differently in the presence of Jesus.  

• How would we spend our money? 
• What movies would we watch? 
• What music would we listen to? 
• What books would we read? 
• What games would we play? 
• What cultural influences would we allow in our homes?
• How would our work improve?
• What would our conversation sound like?
• How would our attitudes improve?
• What would our priorities be?
• What character would we strive for?
• What values would we live by and hold others to?

 Whether we admit it or not, the "world" has a powerful effect on us. The question for Followers of Jesus, now more than ever: 

Is the Presence of Jesus 

alive in us? 

And is His Presence evident enough to overcome the world's blindness?

Following The Resurrection.5

"Why are you troubled, allowing doubt to fill your minds?

Be in peace.

Witness my hands and my feet.

Touch me, and verify my resurrected body; for a ghost does not appear having flesh and bones.

Because you have seen me, you believe.

More blessed are those who come after you, who having not seen me, believe."

--Jesus

Learning To Believe.

You may not have noticed, but Humans are a strange lot! With every reason to believe in a loving, beneficent Creator who only has our best interests at heart, we act like inconsolable victims at the mercy of Capricious Forces bent on our suffering! Sadly, because of our unbelief, we become the Capricious Forces bent on ensuring that other Humans suffer!

Believing in the Resurrection To Life is critical to understanding the work of Jesus on this planet, that is, to teach us to behave as if we believe in the Love and Power of God!

Three times the New Testament writers retold accounts where Jesus revealed God's power in bringing back human beings from death:

• A young man who's funeral procession happened to cross paths with Jesus on his Teaching Truth Tour; 
• wading through scoffers and skeptics at Temple official Jairus' house in order to call back his daughter to the wonder and delight of her parents; 
• and calling to his personal friend, Lazarus, to leave the splendor of heaven to come console (and convince) his sisters of the Truth of what they thought they believed.

The last incident was particularly vexing to the Lord when he was met by the sisters, Martha and Mary, who were perfectly knowledgeable about Jesus' demonstrations of power over death, yet chided Him for not preventing their brother's early departure from this planet. They "wept as those who believe in Death not in Life" in the very presence of Life!

The fact that Humans have the ability to make the heart of the Lord sad with hopeless tears should give us pause and hope that the death of unbelief is His great delight!

So let us, as friends and family pass on from this life, be grateful we don't have to call them back from the splendor and ecstasy of reunion with those who love them as much (or more) than we do, just to convince our faith! For if we are convinced that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life it is the naughtiest of childish faithlessness to lament, moan and refuse comfort for those who, to be sure, are extraordinarily thankful to be where they are!

It would be a shame, at this point, to let doubt fill our minds and not the joy of belief He gives to all who put their trust in Him!

So let us live without fear! Let us live with confidence that those we love are alive to Him, the Good Shepherd, feeding His flock in a different pasture! Lost, momentarily to us, but not to Him who is preparing our place, departure time and grand reunion!

Now that is a faith worth dying for!

Following The Resurrection.4

"No one has ascended up to heaven, except he that has come down from heaven, the Son of God who is in heaven.

Go, tell my brothers that I will ascend to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God."

--Jesus

I opened a box of old photos we'd dug out of my deceased mother's storage unit. The box (and her earthly belongings) had been sitting in storage for several years before we finally took the time to retrieve them. The box is really the only keepsake that stayed with me after recently purchasing a new home near where I grew up and cleaning out years of accumulated stuff.

Needless to say, I hadn't seen many of the items in the box

for years. I discovered photos of my father I didn't know existed -- for he died at an early age, I was only seven. I have very few recollections of him. The photos revealed qualities and questions I'd never pondered. Along with photos of his mother and brothers, I realize I know very little about their stories: the influences, values and experiences that shaped the things they hoped for, the conversations they had, the values they lived by, the quality of love they shared, the legacy they hoped to leave.

In a previous blog I shared a quote from Hugh Ross on the difficulty of a visitation from another solar system specifically in keeping generations of whatever lifeforms on board a spaceship focused on a mission. I realized I barely knew my own father, never met his father (who also died at a young age), and couldn't tell you the name of my great grandfather! So whatever "mission" they felt they were called to got swallowed up by the reality of death prohibiting them from passing much of what really matters on to their posterity.

So what really matters? What are the things that are worth passing on to our posterity? Three things stand out from these words of Jesus:

Ascension.

Every human being is called to higher things. MacDonald observes: "There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection." The apostle Paul refers to the "hope of the resurrection" not meaning simply life after death but the call to an ascending life whereby we live with an awareness that we are constantly undergoing newness of life (even when we don't feel it so).  The seeming chaos and brokenness of this life is being led to the higher, deeper, greater by our Big Brother, Jesus.

Brotherhood.

"Shall a man love his neighbor as himself and must he be content not to know him in heaven? Better be
content to lose our consciousness and know

ourselves no longer. Shall God be the God of the families of the earth, and shall the love that he has thus created towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child go moaning and longing to all eternity? What will resurrection or life be to me, how shall I continue to love God as I have learned to love him through you, if I find He cares so little for this human heart of mine, as to take from
me the gracious visitings of your faces and forms?
And in the changes which, thank God, must take
place when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves; that the more the idea of each is carried out in the perfection of beauty, the more like they are to what we thought them in our most exalted moods, to that which we saw in them

in the rarest moments of profoundest communion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all their imperfections when we loved them the truest?"

MacDonald, God of the Living, Unspoken Sermons II

I uncovered another old photo album out of the box. An

album I'd put together while working at a summer camp during my high school years. The pictures tearfully reminded me of the sweet and "profoundest communion" with dear friends. I was reminded of how I've tried, throughout my life, to recapture the depth of fellowship and friendship and purpose I felt during those wonder-filled seasons . I've come close at times and wandered into dry desert places at others. What a powerful promise: to be in a place where that kind of fellowship is the rule and not the exception!


Father and Godhood.

"The very Godhead lies in the giving of life. Therefore [those who've gone on before us] must be alive. If he speaks of them, remembers his own loving thoughts of them, would he not have kept them alive if he could; and if he could not, how could he create them? Can it be an easier thing to call into life than to keep alive?

What is the use of this body of ours? It is the means of Revelation to us, the camera in which God's eternal shows are set forth. It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellow-men, with all their revelations of God to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outwards from ourselves, and driven inwards into our deepest selves to find God. We cannot yet have learned all that we are meant to learn through the body. Is all that we have learned to be lost? Who that has loved this earth can but believe that the spiritual body of which St. Paul speaks will be a yet higher channel of such revelation? 

Our God is an unveiling, a revealing God. He will raise you from the dead, that I may behold you; that that which vanished from the earth may again stand forth, looking out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same mighty hand of brotherhood, the same delicate and gentle, yet strong hand of sisterhood, to me, this me that knew you and loved you in the days gone by. I shall not care [what form you may take] so long as it is yourselves that are before me, beloved, sons and daughters of the Divine!" MacDonald, ibid.

Whatever I did not know about my earthly ancestors and their hopes, disappointments, character and faith, this I do know: I have a Father who is unchanging and incorruptible in his plans and purposes for every human being!

Thank you Jesus for your willingness to do His Perfect Will demonstrating His Perfect Love for me, my family and friends and all the family of those who know and love you!

Following The Resurrection.3

"I know from where I have come, and where I will go. You cannot tell from where I have come, or where I am going.

You are from the earth.

I am from above.

You are of this world.

I am not of this world."

--Jesus

The Ultimate Extraterrestrial

Long before mankind would spend hundreds of billions of dollars investigating and speculating on whether there is life in outer space, a carpenter turned itinerant preacher in a remote country of the Roman Empire made an extraordinary claim to an extraterrestrial life!

Suppose this very Man-God had delayed His visit to this uniquely designed life-sustaining planet (supposing, of course, that His actual timing had nothing to do with the advancement of civilization). With today's 24/7 news cycle, can you imagine the debates that would erupt about the legitimacy of His message? What governmental agencies would NOT be employed to investigate His outrageous claims? What scientific bodies would not covet the chance to research His miraculous command of natural phenomena?

Hugh Ross, anthropologist/astrophysicist, makes a startling observation:

"Given the limitations imposed by the laws of physics and the conditions of interstellar space within the Milky Way Galaxy, a trip by physical intelligent aliens from another planetary system to Earth would take at least 25,000 years... That length of time implies multiple generations. As challenging as it might be to keep one generation focused on a single mission for their entire lives, the possibility of maintaining that focus throughout hundreds of generations seems hard to imagine. A more fundamental problem for interstellar space travelers, however, is that a trip of more than 25,000 years exceeds any reasonable extinction time for the onboard inhabitants. It’s one thing to keep a high-tech, intelligent species alive on a good-sized, resource-rich planet for that long (although even that possibility seems doubtful); it’s quite another to keep such a species alive, healthy, and goal-oriented for thousands of years within the confines of a spaceship."

Ross, Hugh. Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (pp. 60-61). Baker Publishing Group. (Emphasis added)

That certainly puts perspective on the words of Jesus and lifts the accounts of angelic visitations to a whole new level of wonder. Given what we know about the ubiquitous laws that exist throughout the billions of galaxies in this universe, Jesus' claim to come from outside this world confronts humanity with this choice: was He a lunatic or the Lord Creator God?! 

Think about what we could do with the billions of dollars we could save not listening to the stars but rather broadcasting Jesus' message to this world!

"For God so loved the world,

that he gave his only Son,

that whoever believes in him

should not perish

but have eternal life."

-John 3:16

FOLLOWING THE RESURRECTION.2

"This is what I have told you from the beginning, that all things must be fulfilled which is written in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and by the Psalm-writers, concerning me!

Christ must suffer, and then rise from the dead on the third day; that repentance and forgiveness of sins might be preached in his name among all nations, beginning in Jerusalem."

--Jesus

"To see a Truth, to know what it is, to understand it, and to love it, are all one....To see one divine fact is to stand face to face with essential eternal life." --George MacDonald

Eternal Goodness Itself Suffers in the Fire of God's Redemptive Plan

The Consuming Fire is God working through the ages in His science, history and poetry to impart His vision of the Truth of essential life, that is eternal life, to every human soul whose eyes have not been opened, whose child-heart has not yet been born in him.

• A burning bush transforms an eighty year old man from lawless fugitive to premiere lawgiver 
• A smoking mountain makes a slave-bound people fit for
  
  nationhood
• Fiery visions warning of impending judgments turn hearts from sin
• A hellish, blood stained cross purifies a ragtag group of men who turn the world upside down 

For our Creator regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, towards that image after which he made them that they might grow to it.

Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress.

Growth toward the divine nature is accomplished through the divine process: repentance (agreeing with the Creator's indisputable right and necessary duty to judge how our actions measure up to that image) and forgiveness (accepting the bonding of our hearts with His by releasing our revealed inner corruption into the Fire of His Perfecting Love).

This, follower of Jesus, IS Good News worthy of our efforts to proclaim to everyone: that the Living Savior is at work with His father, tirelessly transforming every individual into His Goodness!

(adapted from The Consuming Fire, Unspoken Sermons I, George MacDonald.)

FOLLOWING THE RESURRECTION.1

"Oh fools, and slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Should not Christ have suffered all of these things and then enter into his glory! Be faithless no longer, but believe."

- Jesus

Slow belief or Suspended disbelief?

In order to get the fullest experience from a work of fiction, whether on screen or in a book, we are often

required to suspend disbelief. We know people can't really fly around on broomsticks, or spaceships travel at warp speed to distant galaxies, or caped wonders bend bars of steel. We also know reasonably mentally healthy people can distinguish between fantasy and reality.

And we know people don't come back from the dead. Especially those who die in an exceptionally brutal manner!

To shake them (and us) out of the fog of disbelief, Jesus directs our thoughts to this powerful truth: the Savior fit to save all mankind must suffer the worst of mankind's warped world.

He created a world worth redeeming.

He came from heaven to rescue that world from natural and man-made induced suffering.

He gave himself to show what it is that makes a god worthy of universal devotion, honor, sacrifice and worship.

He lived Perfect Obedience to the Perfect Will to develop Perfect Love in all the created order.

God plunged himself into the most significant and toxic of human experiences: the suffering man brought upon himself when he realized not only his own vulnerability and the fear of exposure when his disobedience cast him out into a hostile environment, but that he could, with forethought and malice, inflict hurt on other naked/vulnerable members of the species.

As Dr. Jordan Peterson* observes,

"...the rise of self-consciousness and its attendant realization of mortality and knowledge of Good and Evil is presented in the early chapters of Genesis (and in the vast tradition that surrounds them) as a cataclysm of cosmic magnitude...
Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer--we're tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world. Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy [can] not shake.
...the central problem of life—the dealing with its brute facts—is not merely what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering, but what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering and evil—the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering."

Sacrifice and Suffering

The idea of sacrifice as a means of holding suffering in "abeyance" and ensuring a more beneficial future is an idea as old as mankind itself. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the benefit.

My wife recently took a tumble with her horse resulting in a severely broken ankle. She was in another state hundreds of miles from our home on a trip she'd planned with several of her horse riding friends. Those friends demonstrated extraordinary sacrifice in ensuring the best possible future for my wife's foot. First, they immediately cut short that day's ride. Then they transported her to the nearest emergency room...an hour away. Then they rearranged their schedules to accommodate the follow up visits with the surgeon who needed to repair the ankle. And they took her place for cooking and clean up duties so that she could rest! The benefits of their sacrifice included minimizing the suffering my wife had to endure and a deepening of the bonds of friendship.

Why must the Savior suffer?

The greatest benefit for all of mankind is to be made right, eternally given to the highest good possible: Oneness with God. The disciples would have some sense of this idea as sons of Israel whose history was replete with illustrations about the purpose and effectiveness of God-ordained sacrifice.

What they certainly did not grasp is how God himself would offer himself as the Ultimate Sacrifice to achieve the Ultimate Benefit for mankind. Nor that his resurrection put the stamp of finality that this sacrifice was eternal!

image by 2013 Anatoly Shumkin

"...the Son of God, who, instead of accepting the sacrifice of one of his creatures to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly unto them, and therein to the Father by doing his lovely will; who suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his, and lead them up to his perfection" -George MacDonald

Just as suffering shapes the person (our response can leave us stronger, more patient, humbler, with deeper understanding of God's care and will, -or- it can leave us bitter, vengeful, angry, wounded) sacrifice shapes the suffering in giving it meaning and purpose in helping us reach our potential to love...like Jesus.

"Greater love has no one than this that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Now you know.


*Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules For Life, chapter 7