October 01, 2015
Blots and Blemishes
For over a year I’ve written
for the Montrose Mirror, a free
online newspaper. I find it curious that I get more feedback for interviews and
articles on community activities than I do on articles about my church visits.
I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that the church articles
reveal a few blots and blemishes on the Bride of Christ — and most believers
want to see only the perfect bride. Most of us aren’t comfortable with examining
ourselves, much less with examining the church, and yet God sees it all. “For a
man’s ways are in full view of the LORD, and he examines all his paths” (Proverbs
5:21 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----”Most of us aren’t comfortable with examining ourselves, much less with examining the church, and yet God sees it all.” This is a gigantic concept. It puts the situation of our perpetual error into a nutshell. What a person does not know is often more formative to that person’s concepts than what he does know. For we constantly must proceed with thinking, feeling, conversation, and actions in the due course of their time whether we have gained all of the knowledge to do so, or not. That’s where guessing and imagination enter the equations filling our minds with who we are. The more determined we are to accomplish our intentions, whether they be towards acquiring knowledge and understanding or gold and leisure, the more the unknown affects the known. Impatience will drag us through our knowledge banks’ empty spaces making up bits and pieces of stories about ourselves, others, things, and ideas as it presses us towards achieving any overly desired goal.
-----So, there becomes two distinctly different realities. I don’t mean existences. I mean realizations of existence. God has one, and you have one. Which do you think more closely matches what really is? He sees all at all times. We can only see through our five senses. That’s a giant bottleneck in the flow of information. First, we can only observe what is in our proximity. You might say, “Well, Steve, we can observe Pluto, and it is some hundreds of millions of miles displaced from our proximity.” But the telescope through which we observe it must still be in our proximity, or sorry, nothing seen. We must be there to see there, to hear there, smell, taste, or touch there. And have you ever noticed how darned tiny “there” is, though it looks gigantic? And worse than tiny in this immense world, “there” is only a split instant within thousands of years of time. Dog gone, that can make anyone claustrophobic! Reality leaves far, far more blanks in our personal observations than it gives data.
-----So, to fill in the blank, we go to school and read books and watch documentaries and do almost everything like that except listen to politicians (at least the wise among us don‘t.) We oddly go to such sources without considering that they were all produced by people of minuscule “theres” too. They’ve had to gather other people’s imperfect perceptions, who’ve had to gather other people’s, etc., etc., etc. Yet we treat these sources as “authorities”, when they really are mostly nothing more than a patchworks only somewhat less misconstrued, and often more. The foolishness of folks who are unwilling to examine self or circles of perceptions gleams brightly in the facts that they too are aware of these different circles of “knowledge”, and yet they take great pains to screen out all other perceptions except those coming from their own analytically unexamined circle which they highly defend.
-----Blanks in our data must be filled with something able to get us from now to then against the backdrop of a functional picture. Mankind has brewed up as many “Alice in Wonderlands” for functional pictures as there are places for people to group off into ingrown thought patterns. We would be hopelessly lost in a sea of inbred guessing without the Word of God, the independent thinkers through whom He inspired it, the self-examiners who follow it, and the Christ to Whom it leads. Lost in the head is a sorry place to be. With His Word in mind, His Spirit in heart, and self examination in practice, finding one’s self within the Lord’s picture of truth becomes the greatest adventure of life. And the stuff that’s findable…WOW!
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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