Monday, March 16, 2015

Death...Are We Ready?

The brother in law of coworker past away last Friday. It was totally unexpected. It was thought that he had a heart attack even though he was believed to have been in good health. He was 3 years younger than me. They found him laying on his kitchen floor. I have noticed many people in my age range passing from unforeseen circumstances. I suppose we all must be in that special time of life.

I started watching the obit page back when my Mom died. It is strange how many young people die, but there seems to be an alarming curve upward in the death rate once people start hitting 50.

The average life expectancy in America is sitting at 71 years right now. My Mom hit that one on the nose. I have two grandparents that lived to 89 and 90 years each, one that lived to 83 and another that lived to 59. There just are no guarantees regarding how much time we all have left. We can be recalled at anytime for any reason.

I think about some of the people I knew in high school that have passed that I also considered friends of mine. There is a suicide, an AIDS victim, an alcoholic that passed out and fell down the stairs of his home and a cancer victim. These are just the ones I know about. There are probably others. I find myself wondering if they were prepared to pass into eternity.

Many people think that if they just live right, do good things and avoid violent crimes, etc they will be prepared to meet their maker. Others you must make the most of what you do here because there is nothing else. I wish for them that this was correct, but both my mind and my faith tell me otherwise. The truth is...

It is not so much what you do. It's who you know.

And there are many in this world who know who Jesus is. Many of them believed in Him at one time in their lives, but they walked away from Him for any number of reasons. The big reasons go something like this.

1) They do not like the company that Jesus keeps...meaning Christians of course; The Church. Now I would be the first to admit that we are a weird bunch, but we are really no weirder than you are, at least from our perspective. We are sinners too, but we acknowledge that. We are just saved by God's grace. We do have some standards that we believe come from God that are hard for many to accept and we have trouble consistently maintaining these standards ourselves, but we are trying I think. Some see us as self righteous and uncompassionate because of the way we hold up these standards and I think there is some room for discussion there, but the bottom line is that these standards are God's and not of our own manufacture.

2) There are others that have concluded that if God is the God of the Bible, they want nothing to do with Him. He is a bully. My answer would be that He is not a bully, but even if He were, He is God. Ultimately you will surrender control. There will be no choice. Why not change your mind about this now while there is a choice and avoid condemnation? God is willing if you are.

3) My favorite objection of the newly faithless is anger at God. This one has to be my favorite since I have been there and done that, and got the T-shirt. Anger at God, as I have learned, is a fruitless effort and a waste of energy from my experience. God essentially put me in a corner and told me to think about what I had done. As it turned out, I was not only angry, I was pretty stubborn. Between the ages of 23 and 37 God and I did not speak. The anger actually started at a much earlier age, but I gave up on Him and refused to accept what He was trying to tell me when I was 23. There are just some things one just does not want to deal with. Maybe some day I will talk about the actual issue. That ain't today. Suffice it to say, since that time, I have submitted myself to His will. It has been tough. I am still not perfect. I do not think I will be completely dead to sin until I am dead...which is the subject here. I do know this however. I am going to live forever with Him and that's all that matters to me really.

4) The scariest objectors to God are those that have no faith at all. Atheists are among the most self righteous, proud and arrogant people on earth. They outclass any hypocritical Christian any day of the week because when they say there is no God, they claim to know everything. The only way anyone can know there is no God is if they know everything. It does not get more arrogant than that. In the process, they become their own god and they create their own morality simply because they have no reason not to. After all, they know everything.

5) Another class of faithless people are agnostics. They admit they do not know everything and they are not sure if there is a God, but they are willing to listen. This is usually where it ends. If a proposed "God" is not created in their own image, it will get rejected. Agnostics are more malleable though, less proud and more willing to entertain the idea that one must submit to God to be successful in faith and life.

I could go on, but I won't, except to say this. If you are in one of these five groups, you need to reconsider your position. God is a God of love, grace and compassion, but He is also a God of justice. The time is now for the first three items. Justice will be delivered in the future. Get yourself within His grace now. Tomorrow you could be dead and the only thing that will lie ahead for you is His justice. It will be too late for anything else.

Changing Human Behavior or Changing the Human Heart

I have struggled for years in understanding the nature of regeneration in the conversion process of Christianity. I think maybe I look too much to personal experience and not enough at the facts sometimes, nevertheless, I struggle with understanding. So here is what I have come up with. My thoughts on this issue are evolving, so there will be some tweaking and refining, but this is basically it.

When we become Christians, a sort of mini miracle happens. We are baptized in water and we are raised up as new creations in Christ. But what all happens in that water? Is there some mystical effect from it? Does it wash away sins?

My answer is that it does not. The baptism in water is symbolic of the actual process. All in one moment and as we go down into the water, we receive at the same time the baptism of the Holy Spirit and forgiveness of sin. Holy Spirit releases our spirits and enables us to resist what we could not resist before and in that way, we are changed. A new will power is enabled within us by Holy Spirit and we are enabled to stand. This power increases as we walk with Christ and learn from His word. It requires our cooperation, but it works every time it is tried.

So what exactly is being changed? Is it the desire to sin? Is it just behavior? What is it?

We know from Jesus that the things that make a man unclean do not come from outside the body or the human spirit. The things that make one unclean come from the heart. We also know that even the contemplation of sin....hating your neighbor....lusting after your neighbor and so on can be just as sinful as the actual behaviors of murder and sexual immorality if contemplated for any length of time.

The process, however, has to stop somewhere and so I am thinking that we begin with behavior modification, through use of the will power that is supplied by the Holy Spirit and abstain from the sins we are tempted with. The modification ultimately starves the desire to the point that it dies in the heart and is no longer a issue.

Wonderful theory huh? But does it work in practice? As a somewhat lighthearted example of this, consider the self destructive habit of smoking? Many who finally manage to quit become virulent "anti smoking Zealots". They have been changed, first by the death of the habit and then by the death of the desire. They are free and they want to set others free.

Why can it not work that way with sin? I would suggest that it does. It is a process that takes time and the desire to sin does not always die right away after the cessation of the practice. It continues in the human heart as a longing. There is in some ways a morning process that goes on. The sin is missed like an old friend. It is withdrawal from addiction in the truest sense. Only the stubbornness of our reborn spirits empowered by the Holy Spirit will get us through that and it may take some time. Sorrow for sin and a desire to obey Christ are at the heart of it. If these things are not in place, no change of heart will occur and the desire to sin will torture the Christian. Paul says in II Corinthians 7:10

10 Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death

So here is my advice to you. Pray with God through His Holy Spirit for the will power to change what ever sinful behavior it is that needs to change. Stop the behavior. Starve the unclean desire of the heart and so die to your sins and live for Christ. 

Titus 3:3-7  

 For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs [a]according to the hope of eternal life.

 

Vlad Is Back...Apparently

 Image result for Putin

He may be on a short leash or maybe he was even victorious in whatever struggle he has been involved in, but Putin is back according to Reuters. It may be nothing. Maybe nothing happened. It all just seems to weird that he would be out of the limelight for 10 days. We should continue to watch events there.