In Response: “did God stop writing books and letters?”

This was the question as posed in a discussion recently:

“did God stop writing books and letters?”

the books and letters that make up The Holy Bible were written by men and women who were (allegedly) divinely inspired. in Sunday School i was taught God basically wrote those books and letters using the men and women as vessels.

if that’s true, have there been any others written since then? if so, why hasn’t the Holy Bible been updated to include the newer books and letters?

if there haven’t been any newer books and letters, why not? why did God stop communicating w/humans via the written word?

In Response:

No, God didn’t stop

As you alluded, we stopped uniting behind them.

The personalising of faith, the appeal that these books had towards allowing people to search for their own relationship with God, or without as is sometimes the result, rather than needing a group medium or a holy middleman, allowed for a plurality of faith to emerge. You could pray to the same God as another person but see God’s role in this world and your life as totally different to them. The principles of tolerance set out in some holy books have allowed for this to emerge.

As such, if you believe in God, there is room to believe that God’s imprint lives in parents who pray for inspiration when teaching their children about life and living with and loving those around them. God’s words can flow from the lips of a woman trying desperately to bring her brother back from a life of crime.

These aren’t the words that move us as a globe, but they do move the worlds for those people who are touched by them. Whether it is a physical manifestation of divine energy or just a mix of chemical reactions predicated by our current place in the evolutionary process, people are out there now authoring parables and principles that live in the hearts of those they touch long after the person who physically expressed them is gone. That’s the true beauty of a humble love in my opinion. It doesn’t blow it’s own horn, and lets the effect unite rather than set itself on a hill to divide.

Your inch of mortar between the bricks of the kingdom

There’s push in some Christian circles, and you can see it on TV sometimes, to do what’s called ushering in the kingdom. This can be expressed in various ways. Sometimes it is termed as taking dominion or some variation on Christian establishing governance of some sort.

Such a mindset can be tempting from a desire to see peace in the world, but unfortunately the usual outcome is an over-pouring of ego. Rather than being content to humbly do a small, unsung  part in building the kingdom of God, people end up wanting a position of glory and accolades during their life time. They want to be there when every knee bows and every tongue confesses, not realising the enormity of such a task and how small any contribution they can make is in the scheme of things. The irony is rich if these people are the same who decry the state of the world as it is right now.

Every Christian that has toiled in lifetimes past without ego regarding the kingdom has added their small inch of the mortar. As the structure has grown the ability to differentiate one person’s efforts from another has grown ever more difficult. There’s no staking territory with a flag, there’s no plaque on any bricks for anyone to lay a claim to. We have come this far, and there is still far to go. Many are those who cry for aid but shy away from the kingdom because we have not yet built the kind of trust that gives people the faith and freedom to ask.

Rather than looking to rush the matter on our timetable so we can enjoy the moment as we wish, perhaps we should just redouble our efforts, even in relative anonymity, knowing that in the fullness of time God brings such things to fruition in conjunction with our humble, faithful service according to God’s will. As small as our inch of mortar may be, that inch has still taken a lifetime, so while being humble and anonymous it is still no small thing.

Rather than being concerned with the spoils of governance or dominion, perhaps we should shy away from such desires in favour of focusing on the real needs that people in our communities have now. There is still so much undone that needs attending with a focus on love rather than a focus on what we get out of it, which we shouldn’t desire beyond improving ourselves to improve the lives of others anyway.

We are building towards a greater goal, but lets not over-blow our place in history and look to force the issue now. If the time has come, let it be evidenced through God’s action, rather than forced through human manufacture, which is futile for such a task anyway.

Love is the best sin weed eater

Sin is a stubborn weed that plants roots in our heart that we never quite get rid of. Rebuke is the weed eater that skims along the surface, and where successful lops the top off the weed and keeps the ground looking tidy for appearances sake. However, it leaves the root intact, and the ground above still spare with plenty of reserves below and fertile room above to grow back.

Love is the seed that God and others plant in our hearts, and we in others. Love takes over the ground that sin would claim and makes it its own. It is a slow and steady lifelong bloom, but if tended to correctly (this seed is so amazing it feeds off itself to beget more of itself) pushes sin from the ground it claims as a matter of course. As we grow in the attending of our own hearts, with a mind to how that helps us attend others, the beauty of this bloom, the diversity of form, colour, and nourishment it brings to the soil, gives us a focus for what the rest of the garden should look like.

Those who are parents or work life long spans with people at various levels of dependency know that sometimes, for the sake of order, and to clear the ground to plant love, rebuke is needed. This is the purview for people who tend the hearts of others long enough to know the cycles of seasons and the best time to plant seeds through a journey of empathy and fellowship and/or parenthood.

But for we who pass each other on the corridors of life, who connect only briefly and often superficially over the Internet or other mediums, surely love is always the seed we plant if we care about sin. If we focus on sin through rebuke we give power to it, and do so without knowing the root of the weed in the other person’s heart. It provides nothing to tear the top off of sin if the person walks away the next moment. 

Love is the seed that plants itself in ignorance of the sin. Its purity ensures its supremacy, the beauty being that what seeds we may sow in another may not bloom until many years later, but still starve the weed of life as love  hungers for righteousness. Love is the seed you can cast another person’s way, and even if they depart from you, they carry it with them.

So which would you choose, the machine that hungers for weeds? Or the seed that hungers for righteousness? Which do you think produces better results in the long run?

Jesus said blessed are the meek

Matthew 5

3Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

There is much made in some Christian circles about people being strong in faith. A premium is placed on metaphors that convey power, even an endorsement of a sort of masculine potency that springs from the idea that we were made in His image. Such people are valued and held up as examples to be exalted and followed as believers who stand apart from others.

This flies in the face of these words from Jesus, and if anything tempts pride. It is all to easy to forget in the comfort of our faith the fortune we have in our lives.

Consider Christians who do feel secure in their faith and live lives apparently blessed by an abundance of support and financial security. Missed sometimes is the reality that none of these people is an island. For every person who appears righteous and a (wo)man apart in the Lord, is a multitude of people and the Lord who have built into that success. These people stand on a selection or all of a supportive congregation, family life, fortuitous upbringing, other favourable circumstances, and most of all God’s grace. Small success it is then that these people have such a leg up to the heights of forgiveness. Easy for their successes to be broadcast from such a height, at an advantage of position.

All the while there are the meek; poor in spirit and mourning. These people strain for grace through the tribulations of their lives without the same measure of support. They might be the people at the back of the church or at the backs of our lives who toil in humility. Their successes are not trumpeted at all because they do not acknowledge them or their sense of humility tells them they are not worthy. Even if they are noticed perhaps from their position they are lost in the noise of those trumpeting their success closer to or on the pulpit. They are sometimes even looked down upon by those who have something to stand on when these people have nothing but their faith, which may even seem poor in comparison.

I say, as one who stands on much provided by others to support his faith, that these silent others, reaching for forgiveness without that same support, are taller in stature because of it. Jesus’ words affirm that sentiment. These are the ‘last’ who shall be first, and I acknowledge I am lucky to be in line at all.

We do well to remember that when someone appears weak to us. We do not know how Jesus values their faith for the trials they work through that we do not understand.

We Christians are all Prodigal until we die

See: Luke 15:11-32, Romans 3:23.

We’re all on a journey. When it comes to the refinement of our spirit and understanding of love, we start a journey from birth that never completes during our living years. Our ability to express love through the mediums of compassion, empathy, honesty, humility and forgiveness never reaches an acceptable standard and in some cases has deteriorated from the highs it once enjoyed when we reach the end of our lives.

Love is what brings us home through the medium of forgiveness. It is only in accepting how we fall short and asking for mercy that the gate opens for us to be taken into a welcome home embrace. We do well to remember this fact with humility when peering into the lives of others. Considering they share our journey home, what right do we have to rebuke their mode of transport when our vessel for doing so is also in dire need of repair? Especially when you consider we walk as Christians, our imperfection arguably places us further from our destination because we already know that love yet still fail to make the necessary changes.

Rebuke and condemnation also fail to take a valuable lesson that Jesus taught through his actions in the bible. Healing and love always came first. Jesus went hard against the religious establishment, but understood how the average person didn’t know him, and that the best way to introduce himself was through love. He broke bread with them, healed them, and saved them from the condemnation that came through punishments like stoning. He didn’t seek to rebuke and condemn, certainly not as a way of winning hearts. If hearts is what Jesus wants to win, surely the way to the heart is love.

We who seek to be guides on this path, or who just want to be good examples of the love we receive, are probably best served to follow Jesus’ example. We should be providers of healing and compassion to warm other travellers on the colder stretches of road. If we cannot provide a welcoming atmosphere for people to break bread in, how can we expect people to stop for nourishment?

We never know how tough the road is home for other people. They walk different paths with different dangers with different personal weaknesses. Jesus explicitly said it is not for us to judge the distance a person is away from home, lest we lose sight of how far we have to go. It behooves us in our cries for mercy to remember this in the context of all the sin we never account for ourselves.