Important Things

"In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding. The really important things are the things about which men must fight."

J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism, 1923)
 

Blogging the Institutes #1

/begin_rambling

I have been wanting to blog more often. I find writing to be beneficial. It forces me to think, I mean, really think. Normally, thinking can seem fairly simple, but to think in such a way that would be able to convey the same thought, with all of it's nuances and fluctuations of feeling, to someone else, can be quite challenging.

Words must be picked accurately and meticulously in order to capture that firing of neurons in my brain. To then translate that sequence of fired brain cells into words that are then sent as impulses down my arms to my fingers to formulate those same words onto a computer screen on Blogger.com. And then to have this done in such a way that when all of the little 0's and 1's of the binary computer language are re-translated back into words that will show up on another's computer screen, after having traveled through the waves of the internet, as the light waves from those reconstructed letters, enter the eyes, the shapes that they create will make sense to this completely separate brain in such a way that the identical thought in the first brain will now be a new collection of fired neurons in the second brain. This is a marvelous thing.

But it has left me struggling with the blogging topics. For such a long time I simply blogged book reviews, but this blog originally had actual thoughts that I would attempt to convey through the blogging medium, though I did it quite poorly at times, that was my original intent. So... I am back at it, but needing to give myself some better direction.

I have been trying to simply blog what comes to my mind each day, when I have a chance, but have found that I have trouble picking which thought to run with. It isn't a shortage of thoughts, it is an overabundance of thoughts, but most of them are undeveloped thoughts. They simply are not specific enough to narrow it down to one blog post, and when I try to, they tend to become too burdensome to try to actually type out in a meaningful way. This post is because I am going to try something a bit different. I am going to blog through a big book... The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. And... this is supposed to be the first post from the book, and I have already gone overboard on non-book-related conversation. Time to move on.

Since there are only two of you remaining that are continuing to read, instead of risking your loss, I will simply share a quote from the book and allow you to consider it for yourself:

Such is pure and genuine religion, namely, confidence in God coupled with serious fear - fear, which both includes in it willing reverence, and brings along with it such legitimate worship as is prescribed by the law. And it ought to be more carefully considered that all men promiscuously do homage to God, but very few truly reverence him. On all hands, there is abundance of ostentatious ceremonies, but sincerity of heart is rare. 

When you understand the nature of worship, and then couple that with the fact that it is commanded, we suddenly become acutely aware of our own need for genuine heart-change.

I promise that the next "Blogging the Institutes" posts will be more about the Institutes and less about why I am blogging about them.

/end_rambling

Moral Determination = FAIL

I am preparing for our Wednesday night Bible Study. We are currently ready for chapter 3 in the book, Love Into Light by Peter Hubbard. As I am reading through this chapter on "Change" I am once again finding so many connections between the topic of the book and our everyday Christian Struggles. More specifically the unbiblical/wrong methods of change are so familiar to me as the typical way that many in the church have attempted and hoped for change. The one I am noticing now is "Moral Determination." Read this quote and tell me if it rings true to Scripture:

Determination alone cannot lead us to God -- only to gods, individually constructed deities that are manageable and obtainable. If in myself I am determined that I will be able to please God, I am confessing worship to a false god -- either I am turning my aspirations themselves into gods, or I am creating a false version of the true God, a god whom I think will be pleased by my resolutions and performance. The God of the Bible is far different from these false gods: He is higher and holier than all my resolve could possibly obtain. ‘For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.’ The determined have their own plan. God dwells with the broken and humble, the powerless and planless.

Oh, how often I have attempted to change based on my own moral determination to do so. And oh how often it has failed.