August 11, 2011
Home Run
My grandkids were having a sleepover so I picked up a couple of craft
projects to help keep them entertained. Eight year-old David was beyond
ecstatic with putting together three pre-cut wooden race cars. Following the
instructions he and his granddad glued, sanded, painted and applied stencils. I
knew I’d hit it out of the park with the craft selection when David continued
to be excited and even started imagining himself being skilled enough to now
start building furniture. Jesus said, “If
you…know how to give good gifts to you children, how much more will your Father
in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt 7:11 NIV) I can only
imagine the pleasure God gets watching us get excited over the gifts He gives
us.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----It’s easy to find people who think of a hard-nosed God waiting with a bull whip and club for our slightest slip. Although most folks have intellectually moved beyond such an image, its subtle effect yet sifts through their emotions. People get ideas from reality devoid of their complete sense and context within reality. Their own perspectives of reality then supply the sense from an imagined context. It can be rather far from true. Indeed God has a ferocious wrath held back for a certain time when the kin of deceit will be thrown into some place of absolute isolation vivified by the Word as outer darkness, lake of fire, and a place of gnashing teeth and wailing. But the Word is certain about the bull whip and club being hung on His wall reserved.
-----A preacher once speculated to his Sunday School class that hell was not a place. It was a condition people were thrown into and lived amongst everyone else in heaven. They were unseen in any way and completely not able to be contacted by anybody who had been welcomed into heaven’s righteousness. Their torment and punishment would then be to watch the love and blessedness going on around them without being a part of it. Speculation crosses the line into deceit where particular evidence to its contrary is ignored. These kinds of ideas grow in mental soil disturbed by the struggle to see only giggly God.
-----The Bible presents a fully loving God. But then love is an idea rather lost in the senses and contexts of human perspectives. We certainly know its surface. We learn love with our spouses (still think the plural should be spice), within our families, in our churches, and amongst our friends. And amongst our friends. Uh. Amongst our friends...uh...and neighbors. It’s hard to say much about learning love beyond our friends and neighbors; we don’t seem to do it. We talk about loving strangers and enemies. We even try it a smidgeon. But we don’t actually learn anything from there.
-----God’s place is everywhere and anywhere, and He is in it all over. It is perfect all over. Now, perfection is that kind of thing in which every individual being does what it does completely by its own volition, yet every effect of anything done works to the complete and total satisfaction of whatever or whoever its effect contacts. Talk about smiley! And this whole dynamic of mutually beneficial effects from individually beneficial actions and individually beneficial effects from mutually beneficial actions is simply love. Which God is. So naturally it entirely joys Him to experience His beings in the continuous throws of satisfaction, happiness, and ecstasy. He is in every one of His for that experience.
-----But bullies kick His sand castle to the hurt of his happy beings. He has no problem just annihilating destructiveness, which is any presence whatsoever of imperfection. Heh, heh, that would be us. We are amongst the kicking bullies. But His mercy and grace towards our desire to be perfected out of imperfection is the demonstration of love for enemy. It is the working of true benefit to whoever truly desires it. Then, in our guided course back to perfection, we may get His paddle a bit for benefit, but not His whip and club for destruction. And when the purpose of His forbearance towards the rest of the bullies has been served, His wrath will release that annihilation of destruction to the satisfaction of everything in love with construction.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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