Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

When you think of heaven, what is the picture that comes to mind?  Do you see a medieval painting with rotund Cherubim lounging on clouds, far from the reach of man?  Is it more down to earth than that?  Where is God?  What does he look like? Is Jesus there? In ancient Jewish cosmology, specifically in first-century Jewish culture, heaven was not a place that was distant.  It was all around them. It was in the atmosphere that surrounded them.  It was in the air that touched their skin and as close as their next breath. Somehow over the next 2000 years, popular culture (though it is not popular anymore to consider these things) succumbed to an uninformed and two dimensional rendering of heaven.  It is a heaven that is far away - somewhere where we go after we die. Somewhere that has no impact on our thinking in the here-and-now grinding monotony of the every-day, in the secular life. It is safe to say that this is not the view Jesus h...

God is not the person you might think he is.  Many people read the Old Testament and see a picture of an angry and vengeful destroyer.  This is the God experience without the personal experience of God.  It is one thing to seek God intellectually, but God likes to come to us though personal experience, and so you have a grounding from which you can seek him with your intellect.  God came to me, gently and slowly.  First he sought me out, making circumstances in my life work out for the better, redeeming my suffering (I have a condition that cost me the first half of my 20's), and bringing beauty into my life.  He came to me bearing gifts of happenstance and serendipity that were too numerous and too life changing to be mere chance.  From chance meetings with people who changed my way of thinking, to circumstances in my life coming together to provide a much better path than I could have orchestrated on my own. At the same time, prompted by these unus...

I was writing a blog post tonight, heatedly pouring out my thoughts on paper.  I had just read a chapter in “The Good and Beautiful God” by James Bryan Smith and was inspired to write.  Without much thought, I attacked the problem of modern Christians believing that suffering was the result of sin.  A large percentage of Christians, according to the book, saw a judgmental, vindictive God who repaid sin with suffering. And I had good evidence to support the pervasiveness of this view.  From people offering pat answers for horrific suffering, to televangelists proclaiming to the nation that 911 was the result of sins committed by our nation or New York or even better:  the gay lifestyle. I wanted to change people’s views and convict them of their error and prove to them that God is gracious and just and doesn't want or need suffering. But this was not what God wanted me to do.  While I was writing, I heard a still small voic...

What is the hope of the Christian message?  Is it like Plato’s followers and the Gnostics believed, that an elect are spiritual beings living in an irrelevant and corrupt world, just waiting to break these earthly bounds and obtain a purely enlightened spiritual existence?  Or conversely, is it that we are like rats trapped on a sinking ship, and there is nothing we can do save delude ourselves with a spiritual pie-in-the-sky way of thinking?  No, far from it.  Jewish thought believed that there was a day coming, when the heavenly kingdom would come down and the saved would be welcomed in, on a restored Earth, in a return to the Garden of Eden. And the early Christians found that they no longer needed to wait until the end of time and the final resurrection of all souls to see the beginnings of this. They were surprised and their world view shifted with the early resurrection of Jesus Christ: in history rather than at the end of it. And so he adopted us as sons and ...

"It is that “oh yeah” feeling when you see something like you are seeing it for the first time." 50 days after Jesus ascended to heaven, he appeared to a group of his disciples in the upper room and poured out the Holy Spirit on them.  It was like a mighty rushing of wind that settled on each person with tongues of fire. They went out and spoke to the crowds from all nations gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost, and everyone heard them in their own language. 3000 people converted to Christianity that day.  What was this thing that could settle on people with such power? In the trinity, we speak of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit.  I have heard the Holy Spirit is that thing that causes sight: that thing that causes the Son and the Father to lock eyes, and understand each other. So too, it causes people see with new eyes, the truth in the Gospel, God in a sunset, and all of creation. The Holy Spirit is that personality that brings clarity.  It brin...

It is an ironic twist built into reality that sooner or later, you will come to believe in Jesus Christ.  It is just a matter of if you do it now, on this side of death, or later, when you meet him at the door. To do it now, means to gain a way of thinking and living that is purposeful, comforting, and exciting.  To do it later may provide you intolerable eternal accommodations.

In 1993, after graduation from High School, I went underground.  It was not my choice. It was not fair. It was because of an illness that onset in my first semester of college.  When I came out of it, it was almost two years later.  I started a part time job.  Then someone told me about the internet.  I was shocked to find that the dial-up system which I used to spend hours on text-based MUDs (roll-playing adventures) in high school had become an international commerce phenomenon.   I was asleep when the world changed. In Luke 9, Jesus takes his closest disciples up to the mountain to pray.  The account appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  But in Luke, it offers the detail: They were sleeping while he prayed. While they were snoozing, his countenance was changed to bright white like lightening and he was conversing with Moses and Elijah who talked with him about his future death in Jerusalem. (Luke 9:29-36) 1 His sleepy disciples awoke t...