When my sister passed away I inherited
her jewelry and one of the pieces is an ostentatious gold ring. I felt self-conscious
wearing the ring even on special occasions, so I decided to get comfortable with
the flamboyance by wearing it all the time. Consequently it now no longer
bothers me that the ring may sometimes look out of place even when I’m dressed in
casual attire. I think something similar happens to people when they first
accept Christ. We tend to wear Christianity to church and on special occasions,
but feel self-conscious about being a new creation out into the world. Paul
said, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has
gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor 5:17 NIV).
1 comment:
Gail;
-----It doesn’t help that the push from the left has been towards banning anything Christian from public view. Many scriptures are very significant to these times. But the one becoming more relevant by the moment is Romans 3:4 “Let God be true though every man be false.” After one hundred-sixty-five years of Darwinian obfuscation, the most basic foundation upon which reality is framed in the social mind has been turned on its head. Before Darwin, it was the norm to understand God’s part in human affairs. Although theism was less a deviancy, atheism was more. That God created heaven and earth and placed His Word into man’s hand by divine revelation was the expected mindset.
-----People don’t realize the magnitude of what happened in those one-hundred-sixty-five years. Social norms are perpetuated by larger numbers of individual minds participating in similar thought by far more than not. People do not like to be perceived as being different than “everyone else”. So, as a trend in thinking gains acceptance it reaches a point of popularity that becomes an actual pressure for individuals to switch from any former trend to it. This is all over-simplified by the necessity of brevity, but generation after generation after generation is remolded further and further from the norm of the former belief into the that of the emerging one. Although the ideas of the former belief remain written in books and portrayed in films, all of the deeper emotional ties between their constituent ideas and the actual beliefs begin loosing and retying first to apprehension about the former ideas, then to doubts, then to ideas of rejection, then to simple vacancy. At that point, any contact the former beliefs might have with a “reformed” individual is met by skepticism or scoffing. All of the subtleties of social belief residing in the emotional side of life which can only pass from one person to another by social contact die out like a fire out of fuel leaving only the charcoal and ash of a few books scattered around various library shelves. Soon the subtle fit informational details need to form mental bridges between one concept and the next to articulate the “bones” of the old belief into a well organized skeletal structure is lost to society. Few individual minds now contain enough completeness of the structure to pass it along to other minds, if those other minds accepting of it can be found amongst the masses of minds now rejecting it. Eventually the old norm bellies up dead as Dagan and becomes publicly perceived to be twice as rotten.
-----It is interesting that both evolution and scriptural authority require intricately articulated ideas and emotions to stand as a public belief. It is also interesting that when a person has reached a point of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each, the conflict between the two teeters visualization quite like peering at the “beautiful lady/old hag” picture. But the more society as a whole looses the ideas and emotions which articulate the “beautiful lady” in the picture, the more society becomes convinced life is the old hag. As attitudes propagate faster than either people or bunnies, the world lumbers on towards a time when there will be little faith for the Lord to find upon His return.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment