Centered Life

Jesus exposed a spiritual value in His Sermon On The Mount, Matthew 5 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
In this life, we are not meant to escape the reality of loss, but to process our losses with God’s Grace. We live in a broken world with bodies that are “appointed once to die” and, therefore, endure losses every day. We are not to “waste” the experiences of life but grow by them. This process of mourning is a carving out of our souls. The deepening of our souls that results from the sorrow and pain will result in a “vessel for His honor” to be filled with His Spirit and poured out for many.
A life without true spiritual experience and spiritual truth results in a Christian faith that will collapse under the sheer weight of the spiritual mediocrity it is compelled to carry.
We must escape the shallow life of hedonism, the cheap pleasure seeking existence that is self-absorbed and empty. The theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoffer, called this “cheap grace”.
Cheap Grace is defined as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church, discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
The author Dallas Willard calls this a “Consumer Christianity.” He defines this as “One who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his life and innermost thoughts, feelings and intentions over to the Kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.”
Jesus said in John 16:33 “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

A fresh start! What a great thought. The longer we live, the more we value this blessing.
At the start of a New Year we have the sense of beginning again. We want to do it right, or at least – better! But, our experience is usually not so. We continue in the same way, doing the same things expecting a different result. This is a form of insanity, a misconception of reality. If you could change yourself, you would have done so already!
The prophet Isaiah reveals a foundational and humble reality;
“But now, O LORD, You are our Father, We are the clay, and You our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand.”
Only a life yielded to the hand of the potter, to His mind and mold, will be truly changed, really improved. A prayer is noted in the classic devotional, “A Cloud of Unknowing,” that powerfully states our need.
“God, unto Whom all hearts be open . . . and unto Whom no secret thing is hid, I beseech Thee so for to cleanse the intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of Thy grace, that I may perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee. Amen.”
This is the heart attitude that will allow change to be made in our lives. The Psalmist (139th) also wrote this powerful prayer of yielding,
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way.”
Now here is the fresh start that is needed!

Another year races to a close.
The days and weeks peel away as the pages of a Sunday paper in the strong winds of life. Their passing awakens our hearts to the reality of the fleeting grasp we have on our time and our future.
The prayer of Moses, the ancient lawgiver of Israel, brings clarity in our brief accumulation of days. Though he lived an exceedingly long life of 120 years, his days so quickly came and went that he was prompted to cry out to the source of life Himself for assistance in his preparation. He observed the reality that;
“The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years” Psalm 90:10

Many people live their lives in a growing despair of hopelessness, forced into this reality by the difficulties of time and life. But, there are some, those with hope in God and His Word, that look at the future with a smile. Rather than a hopeless end, they live with an endless hope! Moses was such a man and wrote this prayer in verse 12 of the same Psalm;
“So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.”

Let us finish the year in the great hope that our days originate in God and are lived for Him. Let us endeavor to stay alert, aware of the passing days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom, so that we may honor God with our lives. This is indeed going to be a Happy New Year!

We live in a time when the voices of this world are using derision and ridicule to discount the voice of faith. They intend to deride those of us that do not agree with them, particularly in the area of biblically moral truth and the creator God. They hypocritically deny any thought that does not line up with theirs or there pseudo-science. The Apostle Paul wrote in II Corinthians 10:3-5 NLT
“We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.”
So, we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, armed with the ammunition of His redeeming love, we follow Him and believe His Word. We do not reject true science nor do we exclude any truth. Reality is truth, or truth is reality from God’s perspective, not mans. True science is defined as knowledge; a systematic gathering and building of testable and reproducible data. Science is the systematic attempt to discover and expose nature’s patterns. As believers, we acknowledge our foundation of faith in that which cannot be proven and build on the discovered truths of science and history, but we are not to be ridiculed into silence.
jc

The 2nd Coming & Earthquakes!

On Wednesday evening I introduced the series of events listed in the Revelation, Chapters 6-16. This is the global scale of the consummation of the ages. That is, global, major earthquakes.

All three series of events in these chapters of the unfolding cataclysms, the 7 seals, the 7 trumpets, and the 7 bowls of wrath conclude in a global crescendo with a major earthquake. Earthquakes occur everyday and their seismic results are monitored and can be seen on the IRIS site www.iris.edu/seismon.

When the earthquake of global proportion occurs, you will not need to go to this site to see if it has occurred!

My daughter’s recent resolution to conquer time on www.maniacalmother.blogspot.com has stirred a challenging thought.

     We should endeavor to conquer time. We exist “in time,” and are creatures “of time.” Since time is relative to our perspective and our perspective is bound by our existence and our existence is reflective of our actions, we can and should control or conquer these actions. Our actions are reflective of our faith, or to say it more pragmatically, “we do what we believe”.

     So, if we choose to act and follow through with selected actions, we have, in a sense, conquered time. It is a good resolution!

jc

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Joseph Company is a gathering of small businessmen and entrepreneurs.

The name is taken from the story of Joseph as told in the Bible, Genesis 37:1 through Genesis 50:26. God used Joseph to save Israel and all of the known world at that time.

This audio message was given to the group that gathered today.

It is hard to watch the daily headlong plunge into the abyss of irresponsibility and self-delusion.

All for a vain hope of circumventing the pain of our choices!

The elites (bureaucrats, edu-crats, and media monopolies) consider themselves creatures of greater enlightenment and higher evolution, above the fray. Their insanity is being swallowed by the mob. Their arrogance is amazingly deceived and deceptive. Their promises are hollow. Their purposes are misdirected. Their understanding is naive and misguided. They ignore the truth in hopes of having their way and escaping the reality of the consequences of deceptive, misdirected, misguided ways.

The ancient writer of the Hebrew Proverbs in chapter 14 verse 12 reminds us that, “There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death.”

jc

Here’s a thought. We need to pursue the idea that we can “peel the onion” of our belief systems to clasify the core.
As a stone in the pond produces a diminishing strength of ripples, so also, our beliefs produce ripples that radiate out from our core of absolutes. We do what we believe! These absolutes extend to our feelings, preferences, changing opinions and even cultural norms.
It is my desire to move more and more toward a Centered Life and therefore seek to establish and increasingly solidify the core. I believe that such a life is an expression of our absolutes and must be stable, unwavering in its foundations, confident in its basic premise of existence and growing in the revelation of purpose and destiny. A Centered Life begins with believing that such a life is possible!
The question, I believe, is this; “What do I hold to?” Am I trying to build on conflicting beliefs? If so, what are they and how can I see them? Can a centered life be based on a weak foundation of truth? How, then, can I make decisions that result in a more centered life? Considering the question, “What kind of person am I?” will assist in beginning to define your base. Are you the kind of person with absolutes derived from the reality that “there is someone out there” or the kind that believes that “you are all alone and everything is an accident?”
The ripples from your core of absolutes will either bring a greater security in life or produce diminishing ripples of confidence.
So I’ll begin with the core, our absolutes. These are the things that I believe which are considered total and unequivocal. Beliefs held with no doubt of misinterpretation. We all have these beliefs, even if we conclude negatively that truth is relative and there are “absolutely no absolutes!” If a belief is held that there is “no one out there,” the result then is a life that cannot be centered due to the resulting instability from the fear that we are all alone and the hollow feeling that nothing really matters.
We need to be aware of the diminishing ripples of certainty, the layers of our beliefs. It is an important awareness because we attempt to reason and make our choices based on the light that we have. These processes define our conclusions and establish our deductions. They are drawn from our narrow windows of truth and life experiences. I love the humility and enlightenment from the quote attributed to Albert Einstein,
“The ever lengthening diameter of my knowledge only reveals the circumference of that which I do not know.”
In other words, we must realize that our deductions are always changing as we grow and learn and experience life. Some have, unfortunately, stopped growing and learning a long time ago. These continue in misdiagnosed conclusions and conflicting beliefs.
The next layer is even more ambiguous, our interpretations. As with the previous layer of our deductions, this layer is determined by the lenses we are currently looking through, our perceptions of life, of truth and reality. If your life is not centered, then I suggest that maybe you need a new prescriptions for your lenses on life.
jc

There seems to be a lot of people setting themselves on “higher moral ground” withouth having to pay the price. Defined by Theodore Dalrymple as “False Apology Syndrome”, many apologize for the failure of others at no cost to themselves. There is a big difference between shame and guilt!

One of the key self-flagellating topics of the church today is apologizing for the countervailing actions of the crusades, history is ignored and only the failure of the Roman church leaders is applied in all cases, very poor view of reality. What do you think?