the Way, the Truth, and the Life

How do you respect someone who is not you? O.K., how about someone who is not in your family? What about a step further, someone not in your 'group?' How about even to stretch it as far as your enemy? How do you respect them? This word is so big, respect, because it can truly effect a persons ability to function in life. If one is not receiving enough of it than they begin to question things. They begin to think, "is God the only one who respects me?" This is a rant and rage more than a blog. This is emotion. I simply can not accept that cliques form within the church . I'm not saying just little groups of friends. I mean high school childish cliques. This is something that has to stop. Please stop it. Unite. Don't start singling out people because they are not like you; they don't vote your party, they, oh my goodness, had a divorce! Please stop this. Jesus is all about uniting followers, not casting stones at each other, even if some mess up more than ot...

It is quite amazing that I would be able to come full circle in understanding God. See, I walked with faith when I was young growing up in church (hmm, that must be what Jesus meant in Mark 10:15 "I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it") . Then I got it destroyed by a couple of internet sites about people who take God's word to the extreme, coming to different conclusions after long drawn out studies of what it takes to believe and just exactly who the wolves in sheeps clothing are that are leading the masses to death. But now I come back to realize two key elements that have been revealed to me after coming across these sites; one being that God should not be taken lightly, he just cant be used as a trump card whenever we need to use Him (i.e. death, Sunday morning, political arguments, etc.), that instead we need to keep changing into becoming better than what we think we are (pride), and the second b...

I wonder how narrow the gate to heaven really is? I do believe that a lot of people over the years have wondered this as well, coming to long drawn out conclusions that lead them into cults and psychotherapy. It has been a close call for me a couple times, but I am able to rest assured of a couple facts. First, Jesus is the savior of the world and that belief of what His death meant and that He did in fact rise from the dead is how we are saved by God's grace. So the next obvious thing that must be done once someone comes to this understanding is that they must obey His commands if they truly love Him. This is the tough part, because we will never be able to fully carry this out with our sinful nature that is our flesh. Don Miller gets it so right that the Christian experience is a journey and not a check list, because if it were then there would be no reason to keep it up. You would get your sharpie, make a nice looking check mark on you 3' x 5' card and enter heaven when ...

has someone taken your faith, it's real, the pain you feel, you trust, you must confess, Is Someone Getting the Best, the Best, the Best, the Best of You? Now, I probably will not quote the Foo Fighters all that often (or ever), but I must. Lyrics are everything about a song, but the music can enhance the emotion like it does in this Foo Fighter song. But the fact that lyrics can go by without even comprehending what they are saying happens too often. I tend not to fully grasp the lyrical content of a song right away, perhaps because I am much more a music guy and judge a song by the music purely. Here though are lyrics by Dave Grohl that one cant escape the meaning, the meaning is quite clear and he emphasizes the meaning by repetition, to get it ingrained into one's head. Well, it got into mine! The difference though between it just getting in my head and actually having meaning has come in part due to my current state of spirituality. See, God has been re...

The fact that I have been tuning myself in to God's radio station for the past 2 or more years now has enabled me to finally get the right frequency. I'd love to challenge all the psychologists out there that say that hearing God is essentially based upon one's own preferences, and that their blinders have them honing in on anything that they would feel as being related to God. The example they would give would be like a Christian saying that a brownie taught them a lesson the other day about God, that he 'spoke' to them through the medium of a brownie. That sounds freakin crazy. But is it crazy? The main point of Romans 1:18-32 is to fire up the Romans into understanding that God's presence has always been around, but instead of seeing that we have seen the tree of knowledge; we have chosen to see the devil. Since the Fall of mankind, there has been this distortion between what we commonly accept and what is. God IS; and the devil is the distortion. What we com...

Just as I was about to go out for a bike ride out to the local park, to go and read and catch some evening sun, in through the door comes some of my family. I've had a lot of ideas through my head lately, big ideas, theological religious emerging evangelical type of thoughts. But instead, as life does, it goes the route that we don't expect. That really is the way God works. Paul was just an unsuspecting ruthless tax collector, minding his own dirty business, when God blinds him with a big beam of light, during the day, down a road which he is traveling with friends. Paul's life was forever changed, because God wanted Paul to do His dirty work, the most difficult job ever in the history of the world: start the Christian following. Jesus knew what he had to do, carry the burdens of the worlds sin's as the ultimate sacrifice, He knew that ahead of time. That job though was the toughest. Paul's was lucrative. So taking me out of step are my father, his brother and sist...

...That's what spews from my friends mouths. I have always known, as Paul goes into great detail in Romans 7, how the law declares what is good, and what isn't. Thusly the law makes things that are evil plainly evil, and noticeable. I have always been raised in the church, so I have had an understanding of black and white, right and wrong. So it has never been a shock to me that what I here coming from other's mouths can be down right brutal. I mean, all those four letter words come out as if they were throw up from a dog. But wait, there's more! More what you ask? Well, I have an interesting take on four letter words. They are completely relative. If I tell you that you are awesome, then you would appreciate that. But say I told you that you were f-ing awesome, than that means you're that more awesome! Of course, there is a wrong usage of the word, which is used in context of anger and its actual definition (although I don't see why a married couple, Christia...