Moving from the seen into the unseen....

Who can keep up with God?

 I do not know all the questions I'll encounter in what time I have left coming up, let alone fathom any answers. Therefore, I am going to ease up, as best I can on my logic jazz, and leave the rest of the questions to be answered to God. With His record He can deal with them.

Having made all the logical conclusions to satisfy myself, I am going to turn to singularly to increasing my faith. How I am going to do this I cannot rightly predict beyond the lone fundamental way suggested in the Bible. That is, reading and meditating on the Word that I sense will carry me from beyond myself in this world, into the spirit.

It may be that all these calculations I've been making are more of a distraction than I realize. It may be that anything I believe is more important to the truth of anything I've yet considered.

I've always felt previous to this that there was a certain limit to any goal or any satisfaction in my mind. I long felt that the mind is supposed to direct the body and the spirit the soul. When I use the word soul, I suddenly realize I've not yet well enough settled the definition of soul in a logical manner. It may not be so easy moving on.

Churches often test one's faith

I Guard my faith in church

In case I lose it there

 So, as I suggested earlier, there is no telling what one could encounter in the Protestant lineup. Now the Catholic experience is the complete opposite. Anytime someone comes on the scene with a different emphasis, there was no allowance to go off and start a new church. They simply tell offshoots to stick around, and they will give them their own "order."

Therefore, today it is not uncommon for there to be in a single community, one very large Catholic church and a good dozen or more smaller Protestant churches. When a Protestant church accumulates 500 or more members, they will very often just as likely spin off another totally independent church.

Not to say there aren't any, but I have never myself found a terribly harmonious Protestant church. It is certainly not easy. There is a lot of rule or ruin thinking under the surface in my experience, if anyone wants to admit it. This is where I think many of the 'hypocritical' complaints come, from many of the disaffected. 

Hopalong Dare Along

A true agnostic will usually always slide slowly into the atheist column in my view. The reason they often give me is that people who say they do, don't. I made the same mistake as a child and carried it into my college years where I discovered I did. My class in logic finally sank into marblehead. 

So, then I ask how they defined God. Late at night after the goings on of various seminars I've known of several discussions which ironed that nicety out. But I only heard of one minster who did mention, on television yet, that "we" should preach on this.

But never I heard of anyone who did. I love the one about the supreme being, and another about "love." Many give me the "goalong" definition, that is go along with yours truly. That is when I spring my trap, all for the sheer delight of it, I confess. The I ask who does God say He is, that is, specifically? To which they respond again to their first, "according to me, their "all along go along."

One minister, a very interesting guy I discovered, who from pulpit said he did not "believe" in Jesus. It sounded to me like he was saying, like you, perhaps my imagination. So afterward at coffee, I asked him what he did believe. He gave many long and repetitive answers of what he did not believe.

One wonders what he was preaching from the pulpit at all. I finally concluded from his comments that it was because his wife died. I was tempted to tell him, that was a selfish thing she did to him. Likely never gave him a thought, just off and died on him. BTW he gets a salary for this so maybe it was not so bad as imagined. Nothing like a little lucre to clean things up a bit.

Greatest single sermon....

All About Jesus

And God's Existence

I remember a pastor, now deceased, who preached the same sermon every week, albeit in a different setting. Always it was about Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and how he believed in Jesus. He talked continually about the one major theme of Jesus' ministry which was being born again. He wanted more and more about celebrating Jesus. 

How flowers are designed.

The law came by Moses, but grace and being born again came through Jesus. History may be wonderful about the prophets, and other wonderful Bible stories. Stories such as Joseph in Egypt are popular favorites. But one cannot touch any subject more important than Jesus and His ministry, 

Knowing Jesus' commandments and building my faith is my only desire, I think there can be nothing to compete with meditating on the existence of God. That He exists and gave that gift to us, no matter how variably apportioned, is the reason one loves and are grateful worshipping and celebrating the existence of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, all in One. And together one with all believers.  

Today's magic is tomorrow's science....

The unbelievable today

Is the routine of tomorrow

There are things coming, not far into the future, which are totally unbelievable today. Things thought to be merely fairytale myths will be understood eventually and accepted when larger knowledge is gained. Jesus had no printing press, no recording equipment, wrote nothing down, was never filmed, yet He is more well-known than many doing those veery things today.

All things seen came from the unseen....

Proving God Physically

Does away with Faith Spiritually 

If someone cannot believe the Jonah story, then how do they believe the resurrection story? If they only believe something easy to believe, or explained by history, or even logic; how do they believe at all? Of course, an unfriendly and incorrect view of the Jonah story includes cartoons of Jonah playing poker over the long weekend with an octopus. 

Jonah was suffocated and digested. He died, just like Jesus died on the Cross. So, the story requires a greater belief than that, since Jonah died in the whale and came alive on the beach. Jesus even mentions Jonah, as a precursor to Himself in the New Testament. Another test is whether one believes in mountain moving faith faithfully or figuratively. 

Playing Church

Testing My Faith

From the time I was deciding whether Santa Claus existed or not, the adults in church made me wonder the same about Jesus Christ. I eventually learned everything from the adults, who I concluded, were in with God. The verdict was the adults were pretending for the benefit of the children. 

This lesson of pretense was drummed into me, in the church I was born into, to the Christian high school I graduated from, to the religious college I attended where I finally decided I was an avowed atheist. After seven years I became tired of that crowd. The extent of their awareness seemed to be all rejoicing when a church burned down. 

Playing Church

From the church I was born into, to the church I was married in, to the church where they normally put on a celebration when one dies, religion was either for the "benefit of the children" or for "clicks". 

Pretending Church

It was well known, since I heard it often enough from the adults, about pulpit talk. It was just for the children, the adults put no stock in it. All this even as far as my 12th grade in high school where I was told, literally now, it was all for the benefit of the children. 

Easter in
Stained Glass

Jesus said, if you love me, you will obey my commandments. In my experience, few in church prominence even know or give any recognition of what the commandments are. Many in churches I attended, the lay people preached or taught from books they read. They never said what they themselves believed or mentioned how they came to believe in Jesus. 

If the great doubter cannot shake anyone from their belief in Jesus, he will settle for shaking their belief in the power of Jesus. 

One can only imagine how many fourteen old boys graduate from the coloring books of church and enter college. There they are told, by professors in college, and they agree with what they are told, if you are educated you do not believe in God.

Does God allow sin?

Some Cannot Distinguish the Spirit 

I eventually focused into my mind the only desirable state is to be one with Jesus and the spirit as He has revealed, the Holy Spirit, all one with God the Father. 

Another time, when I was more or less watching my life go by like a movie, at a favorable moment for it, someone came to the door asking if he could explain to me about the Trinity. My curiosity about a subject I never gave much thought to allowed him in. When he finished, I thanked him for his presentation and said I'd never before thought the Trinity as so important and interesting. He, surprised, had argued the opposite, emphasizing that the word Trinity was not even in the entire Bible.

In that view is the admission he had no idea of the spirit at all, only of the flesh. Later I found John 17 revealed the Trinity in the spirit where we are all one with Jesus. The spirit is not bound by words which are merely signals better suited for the ideas of the flesh rather than the spirit. 

Eventually my belief grew around Jesus who is my first touchstone, the cornerstone so to speak, if that is correct for me to say. He became my Paraclete before God, verifying my accepting my sins, that I believed, were forgiven by Him on the Cross, as God had instructed. All this is required because God will not allow any sin whatever to be permitted in His presence. Sin enters by the freewill of anyone who decides to favor sin. God has nothing to do with it.

Our flesh cannot help us.. . .

Holding to the Spirit 

More Tightly than the Flesh? 

Our flesh sees flesh, now briefly, and our spirit sees spirit forever in due time. Our flesh will be strong, perhaps, if our spirit is strong. But, according to Jesus, the flesh cannot help us. 

First the flesh is born, then the spirit is born. The act of being "born" is "again" not the flesh or the spirit. The implication is the flesh changes and in change, dies when its' function is no longer active. We will be faced forever with our spirit eternally. 

Does holding onto the flesh weaken the spirit?

Eventually one could more greatly love the flesh or totally love the spirit. This is the big contention struggling for a decision within. Seems like I should be more willing to lose my flesh, in order to gain my spirit. This, of course, has been pointed out before. But sometimes I think one can slip over it.  

Definitions defined

Money is stored labor and words are stored ideas. Money is like art. Art is a verb, not a subject. Like the Benny Goodman song says in the title, It, is not "what" you do, it, is the "way" that you do it. Finally, politics is gossip. Gossip is merely hearsay to everyone who did not hear it originally. Called rumor in the market, 70% of rumor, it has been said, often turns out to be true. Rumor, like gossip, is people said. People said reflects people spirit. This blog talks to issues spirit, not to people said. This is only what I say. Everyone else believes what they say. Everyone is on their own nickel.                                                                  From the BigCyranose.

Issues that set the stage

 Growth is the only evidence of life.

John Henry Newman

What the "ring true" of this quote means to me: Change is continuing. Everything in this life has a course that will be concluded. Once completed we will go on to another completion. Whether we will grow, when we are a born again as a spirit, is not clear at this stage, at least to me. Right now we are changing, in appearance, in everything. Ahead may well be the same, or not. But we just cannot die and everything stop, I was going to say, dead. I suspect we will experience what we believed. We will be our own judges in a sense. We can only hope the Paraclete will be our judge. I am groping in the dark, but we should see it clearer in the spirit, according to the Saints.

Here is a neat trick if I ever saw one

The forever loop

When the opportunity for knowledge presented itself to the human race, guess what? Knowledge included knowledge of ignorance. Ignorance of what? Knowledge of questions to be answered. 

So what? The answers to questions of knowledge contained more questions. Watch out! Change is in the wind. In the dynamics of the conundrum we learn answers revealing more questions. So the bald state of things now is that we learn we are in a loop. We are enlarging our knowledge that we are aware of our ignorance.

And we will never get out of the loop? No? So if not, how will we ever be able to answer the question of whether there is a God, or not? So now we are looking for a different answer to a different question.