December 01, 2014
Kind and Gentle
For many years I’ve watched
Betty wring her hands and try to interject Jesus into the life of an unsaved
friend. Her friend is new age and has no interest in religious innuendo,
devotionals or spiritually slanted greeting cards. Usually our prayer for the
unsaved is for someone to come into their lives and help bring them to the
Lord. I think it’s interesting that we pray for people to intervene, rather
than praying for God directed circumstance. It is a frightening to think of
asking God to bring about circumstances that will bring the unsaved to the Lord
— that could be so harsh. We would rather people be saved through the kinder
and more gentle means of testimony, witnessing and invitation.
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Gail;
-----Maybe the greatest reason I hold so tightly to the Lord is because He makes sense. In all ways He makes sense. And everything I continue learning from His Bible makes sense. And my heart fills up with praise, because sense only comes from what is real.
-----I’m not sure why I spend so much mental energy trying to understand psychology of the individual, social psychology, and their interrelationships. But the more I learn about them, the more the Bible makes sense. One rabbit I chased down a long trail into the very back of his hole the author of “Philosophy For Idiots“ called “belief conservation”. And the Bible is interlaced with this concept.
-----We would all go loony if it were not for belief conservation. And like all processes of psychology, its products are often good, while other of its products are often bad. It either directs the continual development of thoughts and feelings and attitudes into some correlation with what’s already believed, or it perfunctorily discards what clashes with them at first impression. It’s the process involved in the faith we keep, as well as that of the biases and prejudices by which we abuse. The ideologies and attitudes forming an individual’s core beliefs fall into a great multitude of categories, but the reasons they’ve attained their methods of conservation sort into far fewer. Fear is maybe the greatest and subtlest (fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.) Pride is maybe next. List the various human emotions and you will have inventoried the various reasons for holding to beliefs with white knuckles. This makes Biblical sense: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.” (Rom 6:12) “So shun youthful passions and aim at righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call upon the Lord from a pure heart.” (II Tim 2:22)
-----Now, righteousness is an interesting concept. I never liked to think of it as praying and tithing and going to church and such. To me, that was kind of like thinking of a tree as twigs and branches and limbs. They are its parts. But a more overall concept of a tree is photosynthesis and capillarity and such, since the tree is produced by these forces combining nutrients according to DNA patterns supplied by its seed. Righteousness is simply doing right according to God’s definition of right. It is as much a thing of the moment as it is the product of your life, e.g. being a prayerful, generous member of the Lord’s body. So, as the processes of capillarity and photosynthesis builds the tree of water and nutrients, the processes of sensible reasoning upon the spiritual nutrients God richly supplies in His Word builds righteousness into our minds choosing right moment by moment.
-----Belief conservation is a case hardened protection of whatever tree the DNA of its seed provides. I am infinitely thankful that the Lord Our God chose to birth me into a Christian family of a Christian community, seeded of the right “DNA“. I am also infinitely thankful for the various slams against the hard Rock God directed for my life, several times cracking my hard conservation of improperly formed beliefs. Such impacts against the Rock are necessary. Fortunately, He impacts those He loves and has called, even before they know they’ve been called. I think it an honor to pray for these hard knocks. That may sound cruel, but it doesn’t compare to the cruelty of its alternative.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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