Seeing the Lord in Everything in Life - Good and Bad

Nina Dewees gave a really great talk last Sunday at the kick-off event for the Sunday Night Thing's series, “How the Lord Speaks With Us.”

One of the things she talked about was hearing the Lord speaking to her in all different aspects of life. She pointed out that at the beginning of Genesis the Lord breathed into man the breath of life and at the end of Revelation the Spirit and the Bride invite “him who thirsts” to take of the water of life” (Genesis 2:7; Revelation 22:17).

The thing she said that I find myself still thinking about a week later, is that the Lord speaks to us and is with us in the good and the hard things in life. He doesn't cause the hard things but He certainly uses them to make our lives better and happier in the end. I'm finding it really powerful to try to see the hard things in my life that way. Nina said that one of the places where she hears the Lord teaching this idea is in Psalm 139, particularly this part.

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,” Even the night shall be light about me; Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, But the night shines as the day; The darkness and the light are both alike to You. (7-12)

Are the Writings the Word? Check out this Passage

In college I had many long conversations about whether the Writings are the Word or not and spent many hours reading different passages and arguments about it. After all that I ended up being happy with calling the Writings the Word (with a few qualifications) but not thinking that it was directly taught anywhere.

But when we were discussing this question in a theological school class yesterday, Rev. Grant Odhner showed us a passage (that a lay person showed him) that gets pretty darn close to saying that the Writings are the Word directly. And it's not buried somewhere in the depths of Apocalypse Explained, it's right at the beginning of True Christian Religion:

... From these words it is clear that without the Lord's coming into the world no one could have been saved. It is the same today; and therefore without the Lord's coming again into the world in Divine truth, which is the Word, no one can be saved. (True Christian Religion 3)

Does it do it for you or is a leap still required?

Simple Lessons About Marriage from CaringForMarriage.org

The latest video made by the Caring For Marriage folks (caringformarriage.org) is up on YouTube. Like the 3 other Caring For Marriage videos (this one, this one, and this one) it has a simple metaphor and a simple message about marriage. If you don't get distracted by the low quality video and the other flaws you could find, there's a good point in each of them. I think it's useful to have these sorts of easily understandable metaphors for explaining simple truths about marriage.

Incidentally, on the Caring For Marriage web site you can find information about and register for the Caring For Marriage conference coming up on February 14th and 15th.

UPDATE: I've now embedded the videos in this post so you can watch them right here.

What do Christians Today Believe?

When reading statements in the Heavenly Doctrines about what people in the Christian Church believe, I often wonder whether things have changed at all. With that question in mind it's interesting to read “An Evangelical Manifesto” (www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com). Here's what it is:

An Evangelical Manifesto is an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for. It has been drafted and published by a representative group of Evangelical leaders who do not claim to speak for all Evangelicals, but who invite all other Evangelicals to stand with them and help clarify what Evangelical means in light of “confusions within and the consternation without” the movement.

On the site there are PDFs of an executive summary of the manifesto (6 pages) and the manifesto itself (20 pages). The executive summary lists these as the beliefs that they place their emphasis on:

1. Jesus, fully divine and fully human, as the only full and complete revelation of God and therefore the only Savior.
2. The death of Jesus on the cross, in which he took the penalty for our sins and reconciled us to God.
3. Salvation as God’s gift grasped through faith. We contribute nothing to our salvation.
4. New life in the Holy Spirit, who brings us spiritual rebirth and power to live as Jesus did, reaching out to the poor, sick, and oppressed.
5. The Bible as God’s Word written, fully trustworthy as our final guide to faith and practice.
6. The future personal return of Jesus to establish the reign of God.
7. The importance of sharing these beliefs so that others may experience God’s salvation and may walk in Jesus’ way.

What do you think—have things changed or are they about the same as always?

A Good Point

In class today, Rev. Stephen Cole showed us a small excerpt from a 1951 paper by Rev. Hugo Lj. Odhner, “The Lord's Human Essence.” In the paper Odhner is discussing the difficulty of understanding some of the finer points of the Lord's glorification and says,

Many questions may here properly arise. How could the material substance of the organic body become no longer material, no longer finite, but Divine substantial or infinite? no longer a vessel of life, but life itself? The truth does not depend on whether we understand such a process or not. We understand so little, even of natural forces like light or electricity, or gravitation, but we accept their effects which we can repeatedly observe and check.

It's a simple but good point.

Along these lines you might be interested to read two previous posts, "How Much Do We Need to Understand to Believe?" and "What We Need to Know About the Lord's Coming."