http://bible.us/59/RUT1.16.ESV But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”
Bible.com/app
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Always make it a practice to stir your own mind thoroughly to think through what you have easily believed. Your position is not really yours until you make it yours through suffering and study. The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly.
[This is an old post but a good one. Worth bringing attention to every now and then.]
I know that I have this quote on another page, but I had to bring it forward, make it easier to access, because the truth of what Oswald Chambers expresses here is much of what drives me on not just with this site but with my approach to God, his truth, his words and life in general.
He is right, you know!
Honest struggle with life and truth “will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else.” That is the reason that I (dave) feel that I have anything to say because I know I have struggled honestly before God. Generally speaking, as a society, and as the professing Church, because we have absorbed the same values as our culture, we have tremendously underestimated the value of our failures and have equally overestimated the value of our successes.
Read the pages of Scripture, and re-read, and listen, and read and listen. . .
(“Okay, dave, I get the point.”) The great people of the faith? Their failures are not only not omitted, but they are sometimes magnified. So why do we edit Scripture to make it more user-friendly? Why do we second-guess God? There is so much more than the Sunday School stories, more than moral teaching, more than systemized theology. I recently began reading in Genesis because my last go-round of reading the Bible through in a year took me a year and seven months, so I am just now starting again.
The story of Abraham (or should I say Abram?) is amazing. Now as we read this account we have to do at least three things to gain the most from it:
1) Remember what God said about Abraham.
2) Pay close attention to what is really going on in the story.
3) Let God show us where we are in the picture.
And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” And he was called the friend of God. (James 2:23 NKJV)
Abraham had this standing with God because of his faith, not because of his credentials, not because of his great success.
Review point 1) Remember what God says about Abraham: “And he was called the friend of God.” Hold on to that truth all the way through the story.
Review point 2) Pay close attention to the story. Before Abraham ever left home he was worried about Sarai’s beauty getting him killed. Before he ever left home he came up with the half-truth excuse that Sarai was his sister.
This fear caused Sarai to end up in Pharaoh’s harem and in the harem of Abimelech. [You don’t have to take my word for it. If you don’t agree, go back and read the stories. I made it easy and quick for you; all you have to do is click on the hyperlinks.] Now we know that Sarai didn’t sleep with Abimelech; we don’t know this from the first episode with Pharaoh. Another interesting point is that much of Abraham’s wealth came from these two men as a result of his sin.
Before you get too upset with me let me encourage you to be patient. This great failure on Abraham’s part really is a result of his faith. We must remember the end result — “And he was called the friend of God.”
Abraham was a great man, a great man of faith, and a man who even though he failed greatly continued on in God. Hmm … Do we have a hint unfolding before our very eyes as to what the true life of faith is?
The God-breathed words of Scripture tell us about his life of faith, his journey into the unknown with only the promise of God as his light. He could have stayed home and none of this would have happened. He faced his fear and left his home not knowing where he was going. Following God was more important than protecting his image and staying safe. The potential for success (pleasing and glorifying God) weighed greater to Abraham than his fear of failure.
Much, much more in this story. You must read it.
But it is time to review point 3) Let God show us where we are in the picture.
Have you ever seen someone take a photograph and point someone out? Maybe you have done this? “See! There you are!”
That’s what we have to let God do. Show us where we are in this story. Show us where we are in our story. Let God point it out, let God speak to us — “See! There you are.” There you are stepping out in faith, there you are following up on your pastor’s exhortation to greater service, there you are trying to love and give as God would call us to, there you are trying to overcome your fears, there you are trying to defeat a chronic habit. . .
There you are trying to follow God in faith; leaving comfort for the unknown.
And like Abraham, there you are falling flat on your face.
Abraham blew it big time, but he had faith. Abraham was blessed by God like no one else, but even that did not keep him from failing miserably.
The question is not “Have I failed?” The question is “Will I go on in faith?”
If you are willing to go on in faith, and if you are willing to express your honest struggle with life and truth, “then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else.”
And I would like to give you the opportunity to share that wine on this site. Join with me in providing refreshing strength and courage to each other.
Others need your “wine of strengthening,” your honest expression of life as lived by a person of faith. If you are this type of person, you have something to say that can benefit another thirsty traveler.
Would you give them a drink?
Exciting …
I begin today with my final revision for the print edition of Beyond Pretend. Finally settled in enough to pursue some things that have been on the back burner.
The revision really involves reformatting for PDF and paperback. I completed my best revision as far as written expression for the Kindle and ePub editions. Also I am changing the layout from landscape to portrait.
VERY EXCITING FOR ME!!!
I have asked the new president of Judson University – Dr. Gene C. Crume, Jr. – to write the foreword in this soon-to-be “hot off the presses” release. And he has happily accepted. Dr. Crume – Gene to most of you – has provided very positive feedback to me concerning the book. And, yes, he actually read it.
EXCERPT from Beyond Pretend: A Sheep’s Guide to the Universe!
Sentimentality doesn’t save …
Rhetoric is fooling others. Sentimentality is fooling yourself (William Butler Yeats).
Sentimentality may cause us to reflect, possibly even cause us to brilliantly and powerfully express our feelings, but only Jesus saves. It’s the “math of the path” – only one, only one name, only one truth, only one way. God isn’t swayed by our poetic gestures no matter how compelling because he has already demonstrated to us the full measure of his love in sending Jesus his Son.
When I began this book about two years ago, I came across the lyrics to “Time Never Ends” which was written by Hart, Weir and Haynes. The following lyrics are from the revised version played by The Grateful Dead in 2004.
———
Stepping through the midnight sun, To a life that never ends,
Snowflakes fall, winter comes, Time to make amends,
God of wind, God of time, I give my heart to thee,
Take me to a better place, Let my soul fly free, Let my soul fly free
Beyond the moon, beyond the stars, A wizard guiding me,
Beyond the moon, beyond the stars, Beyond the galaxy,
A secret place, a gentle space, A land beyond pretend
…
God of dreams, of life supreme, Come to me tonight,
Guide me to a better place, Beyond this starry night,
Take me to a better place, On golden spirit wings
…
Where gods and angels sing, Where gods and angels sing.
———
How beautiful, how sad and how tragic as we offer words of reconciliation but still refuse God’s offer of life through Jesus Christ.
One day you will die and find yourself on the threshold of eternity. You will step through “the midnight sun,” but there will be no time then to make amends, no sentimentality to sway the vote. If only you had preferred God’s song of salvation over the poetic illusion of another lost soul.
“And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil. It was when the now fallen angels began to look upon themselves with self-complacency that they were led to disobedience, and were cast down from the light of heaven into outer darkness. Even so it was, when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.
Hence it follows that nothing can be our redemption, but the restoration of the ‘lost humility, the original and only true relation of the creature to its God. And so Jesus came to bring humility back to earth, to make us partakers of it, and by it to save us.”
Excerpt From: Murray, Andrew. “Humility.” iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Check out this book on the iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/humility/id505163185?mt=11
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“The life God bestows is imparted not once for all, but each moment continuously, by the unceasing operation of His mighty power. Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue.”
Excerpt From: Murray, Andrew. “Humility.” iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Check out this book on the iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/humility/id505163185?mt=11
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“And the Christian life has suffered loss, where believers have not been distinctly guided to see that, even in our relation as creatures, nothing is more natural and beautiful and blessed than to be nothing, that God may be all; or where it has not been made clear that it is not sin that humbles most, but grace, and that it is the soul, led through its sinfulness to be occupied with God in His wonderful glory as God, as Creator and Redeemer, that will truly take the lowest place before Him.”
Excerpt From: Murray, Andrew. “Humility.” iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Check out this book on the iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/humility/id505163185?mt=11
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1.subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one’s discretion: an arbitrary decision.
2.decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute.
3.having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government.
4.capricious; unreasonable; unsupported:
And how arbitrary God sometimes appears even to the believer.
But to the person who doesn’t trust, God does appear unreasonable.
Numbers 9:21-23 LEB
“When the cloud remained from evening until morning, and the cloud lifted up in the morning, they would set out, or if it remained in the daytime and at night, when the cloud lifted up they set out. When it was two days, a month, or a year that the cloud prolonged to dwell on the tabernacle, the Israelites encamped, and they did not set out; when it lifted up they set out. On the command of Yahweh they encamped, and on the command of Yahweh they set out. They kept the requirement of Yahweh, on the command of Yahweh in the hand of Moses.”
See it at YouVersion.com:
http://bible.us/90/num.9.21.leb
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Romans 2:1 LEB
“Therefore you are without excuse, O man, every one of you who passes judgment. For in that which you pass judgment on someone else, you condemn yourself, for you who are passing judgment are doing the same things.”
See it at YouVersion.com:
http://bible.us/90/rom.2.1.leb
Dave Scott
Bottle Rocket Theology …
The simple art of following Jesus Son of God
http://bottlerockettheology.com
I have been listening off and on to Dick Estell (The Radio Reader) on 95.1 FM for a few weeks now as he has been reading Roger Ebert’s “Life Itself: A Memoir.” I have included an extended excerpt below from the chapter – “I do not fear death.”
I had just listened to this chapter, and then on my lunch break I read the following in Psalm 49:13.
I am not trying to be mean or judgmental. I appreciate the very candid nature of Ebert and the transparency he displays in the book. The reason I am writing is that when a notable person expresses himself or herself so eloquently, a warning may sometimes be necessary as our imagined thoughts or those of someone else have almost become truth to us.
But only truth is truth. We can play with truth, and eloquently and powerfully express our own thoughts as truth, and we may even convince others of our truth, but only what is true is true.
And do we really want to trust ourselves, what we find when we look within, with life and death?
We can have our thoughts on death, life and everything else, but there is one reality and that reality is expressed to us very clearly in the Bible. Poetic and philosophical expressions aside, death comes to all and death is not an end but a beginning. Each person begins this next step in the presence of God either for judgment or salvation.
One who believes in Jesus Christ as clearly stated in Scripture is welcomed into God’s kingdom. The other who preferred his own thoughts and imaginations of life and death begins a journey of everlasting torment.
Don’t allow your confidence in your plan for life after death deceive you. If your plan does not include Jesus Christ, and your belief in him for forgiveness of sins and the gift of eternal life, then your plan will bring the tragedy of hell and no one to help.
———————– Following is the extended excerpt —————–
I will pass away sooner than most people who read this, but that doesn’t shake my sense of wonder and joy.
I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”
Me too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”
Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”
What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.
O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
That does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.
Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally — not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.
Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:
That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/
————————————————-
Apart from Christ … no traveling to stars, no dying quietly and blending with the dirt and the grass …
Revelation 20:11–15 (ESV)
11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. 13 And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. 14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. 15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
Don’t respect people, don’t revere God …
Leviticus 25:17 LEB
“And you must not oppress one another, but you shall revere your God, because I am Yahweh, your God.”
See it at YouVersion.com:
http://bible.us/90/lev.25.17.leb
Dave Scott
Bottle Rocket Theology …
The simple art of following Jesus Son of God
http://bottlerockettheology.com
