November 25, 2014
Alternative
Since my childhood there have
been changes to Halloween and some alternatives offered are church parties
where kids dress up as Bible characters, or Fall Festival activities. I
appreciate choices for parents, but I have fond memories of Trick or Treating
and if I were raising kids today I’d probably still take them around the
neighborhood. A recent television news segment interviewed a man who wanted
people to consider having an “Alternative Christmas.” Basically he wanted
people to donate their traditional Christmas to his suggested benevolent cause.
I’m no more impressed with his suggestion than if an environmentalist ask me to
give up my Birthday or Anniversary for global warming. Paul warns us about
people who delight in false humility, “Therefore do not let anyone judge you by
what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon
celebration or a Sabbath day” (Col 2:16 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I have always been fascinated by man’s penchant to see other people participate in his own ideas. The gentleman you mentioned is a perfect example. It wasn’t enough for him to donate his Christmas, but he needed others doing the same. The fact that he wanted them to donate to his benevolent cause just piles the attitude higher and deeper. It’s like ideas aren’t real unless everyone thinks them, so the truth can’t exist without popularity.
-----Akin to the issue are those who try to sell ideas on the basis of consensus. Global warming is brazenly boasted as having the consensus of the scientists. Worse yet is the foolishness of evolutionists. This monkey progeny arrogantly accuses anybody believing in God’s creative work to be mindless robots. Those of us who know the truth chalk it up to Satan gathering fire fodder.
-----In the end, that is all that it is. But in the meantime, it is more than just that simple. God did make us reflective like mirrors so that realities would reflect amongst us with all the praise and glory they lavish upon the Lord. With the praise and glory removed, though, realities start becoming too much about the reality beholder and not enough about the Lord. And the less we praise the Lord, the more it seems we need to see our own ideas reflecting back out of other people’s heads.
-----I thank God that He did not make truth a thing of consensus. He made it simply what it is: the reflection of what is. It doesn’t need any human minds reflecting it to exist. It exists in the Lord foremost, and in His immense host next. Truth isn’t each of all these creatures reflecting the ideas of all the rest about what is, it is each one reflecting what is.
-----The truth is available to any who loves it. It is hard to lay aside the expectation of finding truth in what most people believe. But the more truth someone begins to uncover, the more obvious it becomes how popularity slings perception beyond the boundaries of reality. I think of that song from a few decades back, “…everybody needs somebody…” And everybody does. But we do the dangerous thing of accepting and reflecting ideas to have somebodies. And over time,. groups of somebodies become embodied first by unspoken rules about what to believe, how to act, what to do. Those rules eventually become codified with punishments to exact. Even the Lord’s beloved body of believers stuck a foot in this bucket of attitude. Therefore, everywhere you turn in the Christian world you see denominations, sects, and even cults built around mutual reflections of legislated thought.
-----But Christ did not intend His body to turn into a bunch of slurpy minds with soda straws sucking Kool-Aid from each other‘s heads. He, the Creator of the human mind, made us to think analytically as well as emotionally, critically as well as receptively; if He gave us any folks to just reflect (which I don‘t believe He did,) then it would probably have been the Bereans. We were made to reflect the glory of the Lord and His truth, not the glory of one another and their ideas. I don’t think Romans 14:5b can be overly quoted, “Let every one be fully convinced in his own mind.” “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (I Cor 3:18) Those who deny Him are being changed into mankind’s likeness, from one degree of depravity to another; that comes from the anti-Christ, who is the demon.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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