April 15, 2011
Trigger Happy
Recently my husband joined the DAV Honor Guard and now participates in performing the 21 Gun Salute at funerals of deceased Veterans. There are seven members on the team and in unison each member is to fire his rifle on command three times. Although they practice before each funeral, you can’t expect this group of retired volunteer Vets to be totally professional. At the most recent funeral service one of the guys joked as they got in formation, “Put me at the end so I can fire the last shot.” With his own faux pas, Bill came home shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders because his second round blatantly outpaced of the other six shots. This so reminds me of believers. We may be loaded and ready to go, but sometimes our delivery of the Gospel is just not quite synchronized.
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2 comments:
Sometimes I envy those people who are so in love with Jesus that they don't wait for the "right" time.
Grace and Peace
Gail;
-----The NRB channel (DirectTV 378) airs a program called “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.” The host, Frank Turek, has been presenting the honest and simple reasoning that ultimately concludes God’s definite existence, just like Romans 1:19-20 says it does. I have never had trouble accepting the reality of God’s existence or the Divine inspiration of the Bible; I thank my Mom and Dad for that. But I have always had trouble both envisioning the possibility of my convincing anyone else of the same and with finding the Bible’s natural, untwisted, and untrimmed fit into the rest of what man has certainly discovered about the universe. Now, as I watch and ponder Frank Turek’s stuff, I feel badly unsynchronized - shamefully tardy - in acquiring the ability to give account for the faith I have.
-----But in his last presentation, he gave me some emotional relief. I have always understood that people believe what they want to believe, at least for the most part. What folks accept as knowledge is often more shaped by the way they perceive reality than by the way reality actually is. The differences between the two are in part due to a person’s great lack of information and use of intuitive logic rather than genuine logic on the one hand, and to his natural inclination for protecting the only mental link he has with reality - his own perceptions of it - on the other hand. Barring any errors rising from the former, this desire to shelter his own perceptions is a person’s complete culpability for the errors rising from the latter. And those errors tend to be the more basic assumptions from which the most of his other perceptions are reasoned. If we want to bring someone into the lifeboat of salvation, the first matter for address is less the logistics about existence, and more those about why he should want to believe. I now feel less tardy in being able to reason God’s reality and more tardy in simply presenting to others the many reasons for their desiring to believe.
-----Obviously, avoiding hell is a valid reason to desire belief in Christ. Although that may tend once again to invoke a debate about existence and reality, the public perception of hell being here on earth is useful even though inaccurate. Unfortunately, the behavior of the church in the last several centuries has bolstered many conditions supporting that perception. But so also the public inaccurately, but usefully, perceives heaven to be here on earth, and throughout the centuries the church has bolstered many more conditions supporting that perception. Those good works God prepared beforehand in which we should walk are the first line of reasoning for convincing a soul to desire the heaven of things instead of the hell. Of course, they are not the complete reasoning needed to convince a soul to call upon Jesus Christ, but each one you do to another person is a reason synchronized into the whole line of logic beckoning him towards that saving resignation.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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