Category Archives: Life College

church, Discipleship Series, General Principles

Three Pillars

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Three Pillars Venn Diagram

The above diagram is a way of looking at what happens if an individual or church adopts one or two of the three pillars.  A balanced Christian or church includes all three.

Recently I spent a couple of hours with someone I hadn’t met in years.  As we spoke together it became obvious that he was struggling with his faith.  He is a bright guy and had spent a long time researching the nature of Christ as part of trying to allay his doubts.  He did what many intellectuals do, that is, he put too much emphasis on a logical analysis of the Bible only.

As someone in relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ I know the Holy Spirit uses the 66 books of the Bible to speak the truth to me.  It is part of what Jesus promises the Holy Spirit will do in John 16:13.

But that is the point I made to my friend.  Approaching the Bible without the leading of the Holy Spirit is a waste of time.  We cannot by our intellects alone know or find God.  It is up to Him to reveal Himself to us.

Standing on one foot is hard.  You will eventually fall over if all that is holding you up is one of the three pillars that God has given us.  An objective understanding of Scripture is one of those pillars.  If you know the Bible off by heart and can quote any part of it then you have a strong leg to stand on but that is not enough on its own.  You must be born again and continue in the relationship that God initiates with you spiritually from that time forward.  Intimate, experiential relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit is essential if you are to interpret the Bible correctly and if it is to become a living word not just a deadly letter (2 Cor. 3:6).  This is the second pillar.

The third pillar is the Church.  When we are born again we are part of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12) and it is foolish not to meet together with those who are your brothers and sisters in Christ (Hebrews 10:25).  I believe firmly in the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9) and that no one needs to teach you anything if you are born again (Hebrews 8:11, 1 John 2:20).  However it would be arrogant of anyone to think that they can live in this sin and devil filled world in a way that is pleasing to God without the other members of the body supporting and feeding into them.

So read the Scripture and understand it as well as you can but don’t do that on your own, let the Holy Spirit guide you into all truth and let others who love you in Christ encourage you.  We all need encouragement.  Relationship is at the heart of knowing God.

church, Discipleship Series, General Principles

Fellowship with the Saints

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The words “fellowship” and “saints” are old-fashioned and rarely encountered in modern Evangelical/ Pentecostal circles.

JRR Tolkein’s first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is called “The Fellowship of the Ring”.  Fellowship in that context, and generally, speaks of a group of people united in a common purpose.  The purpose is greater than the individuals and calls for self-sacrifice and submission.

The word “saint” means sanctified one.  In the context of Scripture, Paul writes to the saints at various places as members of the local churches there.  Saints in the biblical context are those who have an ongoing, personal relationship with God in the context of the local church.

Put the two words “Fellowship” and “Saints” together and you have a group of people united in glorifying God through their lives together.

Discipleship Series, General Principles, prayer

Communion with God

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Communion with God is intimacy with your creator.

The wonderful privilege of everyone who has been born again is the possibility of ongoing communion with the Creator of the universe.

As creatures we were made to be vessels carrying a treasure (2 Cor. 4:7).  That treasure is the Holy Spirit.  Intimacy with God is being what we were meant to be, filled with the Holy Spirit.

There is no more intimate picture than a vessel filled with a liquid.  The vessel itself knows nothing but containment of something greater than itself, something which it feels touching every inside surface.  Every so often the Owner comes and tips out the precious substance for someone else’s benefit and then tops it up again to overflowing.  Overflowing is the better state for a vessel.  Then it is not just containment and the inside surfaces that know the joy of intimacy but every part of the vessel, even those parts that are outward facing, feel the joy.

Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment was to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.  You cannot love God in this way if you don’t have intimacy with Him.  You cannot love God in this way unless you are filled with the Holy Spirit.  You must be born again, yes, but you must also yield and let Him fill you on an ongoing basis.

Dedicate some time every day to intimacy with God your creator.  Hear what He is saying to you.  Do what He says. Repeat daily.

Autobiographical, His Story, Prophetic Writings, Prophetic?

Pathetic Fallacy

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Back when I was doing my Leaving Cert English course Shakespeare’s King Lear was on the curriculum.  I’m not sure was it my teacher at the time or a textbook but one of the phrases used was “pathetic fallacy”.  It referred to Shakespeare’s use of the weather in the play to reflect the action on the ground.  At the height of the worst tragedies that fell on King Lear the storms raged the worst:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurour and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!”

King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2 by William Shakespeare

So the now forgotten commentator called this kind of matching of the elements to the moral events on the ground “pathetic fallacy”.

The attitude that such connections are pathetic lies is now so ingrained into our thinking that anyone who even remotely suggests in our “enlightened” western humanist society that God might have something to do with the weather is likely to face the worst of scorn.   And, indeed, caution is always advised when attributing any specific elemental actions (e.g. fires, earthquakes, floods, droughts, etc.) directly to God’s judgments especially at macro levels like nations (notwithstanding the fact that these acts are all called “Acts of God” for insurance and other purposes).

However, the bible is quite clear that God is in control of the weather whatever we might be told by English teachers or otherwise.   Here is one example taken from Zechariah chapter 10 in the Old Testament:

“Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime;
    it is the Lord who sends the thunderstorms.
He gives showers of rain to all people,
    and plants of the field to everyone.”

Zechariah 10:1

I have a number of reasons for drawing attention to this current drought and asking the question:  “Is God judging Ireland?”

One of the reasons is that I woke up with a vivid dream this morning.  In it, I was in a train travelling through the hills along the coast.  It could have been from Greystones to Bray or somewhere similar.  On hills away from the coast fires were breaking out all over.  There was a solitary fire man fighting one of them.  I didn’t see any houses go up in flames just gorse and hedges.  But there were a lot of fires and not enough firemen.

To be fair, you wouldn’t have to be much of a prophet to predict that in this weather in this country.

We are all enjoying the fine weather.  Ireland is known for its rain during the summer or indeed at any time of the year and so any respite from rain is usually welcomed by the majority of the people.  However when it comes to judging nations the bible does have quite a lot to say.  Usually judgement comes in the form of an invading force but in Zechariah chapter 14 there is this verse:

 “If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, they will have no rain.“

Zechariah 14:17

The context in this case is (probably) the millennium rule of Christ on the earth which (probably) has yet to happen.  However the principle is the same:  When God holds back rain it is not a good thing.

church, Discipleship Series, General Principles

Disciples, Saints and Overcomers

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According to the bible, God’s eternal destiny for you is communion with Him and fellowship with the church.  Communion and fellowship starts from when you are born from above (John 3:8) and continues for eternity.  Evangelism, by contrast, just lasts for this life.  After God ushers in the new heaven and earth (Rev. 21) there is no more opportunity for people to transition from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of life.  This makes evangelism critically important and if you did nothing else but tell people the good news of Jesus’ death for our sins and resurrection, you will not have wasted your time on this earth.

However, the bible includes a lot about communion with God and fellowship with His people.  As examples, Jesus tells people about the narrow way in Matthew 7, Paul quotes a number of old testament scriptures on the subject of being God’s sons and daughters at the end of 2 Corinthians chapter 6 and John records Jesus’ words on abiding in John 15.  But there are many more examples, in fact, depending on how you read it, you could say the whole New Testament is mainly about these two things:  communion with God and fellowship with His church.

In fact I believe that when God inspired the Scriptures (particularly the New Testament) he inspired them with mainly one class of people in mind.  Jesus called these people “disciples”, Paul went on to describe them as “saints” and John wraps up the New Testament by calling them “overcomers”.   The three words are not synonyms but they are closely related and they also have a sense of progression in them.  Being a disciple/ saint/ overcomer is God’s ordained way of having communion with him and fellowship with the church.

According to the New Testament, if you want communion with God and fellowship with the church then you must be born again, be a follower of Jesus (a disciple), be made holy (a saint) and persevere to the end (an overcomer).

church, Discipleship Series, General Principles

Evangelism, Communion and Fellowship

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Jesus spelt out the way of connecting people to God when He told Nicodemus that “You must be born again”.  You can find an account of His conversation with Nicodemus if you read John’s gospel, chapter 3.

According to the bible, the aim of church should be to tell as many people as possible about the good news that God through Jesus Christ has reconciled the world to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:9).  Jesus is the only way to eternal life or heaven (see John 14:6).  Unless you are born again you cannot even see the kingdom of God, never mind enter it and live for ever (John 3:3).

So you must be born again (John 3:5).

There is a very good case for leaving it at that.  If us Christians all just spent our time bringing everyone we knew to the place where they were born again – or at least presented with that possibility – we would have spent our lives very profitably.  This approach to life is called evangelistic and some people who meet God are called to it almost exclusively and everyone who calls themselves a bible believing Christian is called to it to at least some extent.

However the bible has a lot more to say about what it means to be a follower of Jesus after that initial, critical, connection has been made.  If you have been born again God wants you to have two things that he talks a lot about in the bible: Communion with Him and fellowship with others who have been born again (i.e. with His Church).  The Scriptures spend a lot of time dealing with this.

Communion and fellowship are eternal (see, for example, John 17).  Once you are born again and transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of life (Colossians 1:13), communion and fellowship is your eternal destiny.  It is where God wants you to be now and forever.

Discipleship Series, General Principles, Wisdom

Think on These Things

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I have been taking a leaf out of Dr. Caroline Leaf’s book (sorry couldn’t resist that pun): “Switch on your Brain” and used a mind map to do a 21 day meditation on a single thought.

In this case the thought is Philippians 4:8:  “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable; if there is any excellence or anything praiseworthy; think on these things.”

In the mind map above I have taken the 8 words from the original New Testament Greek and put them in boxes around the central theme of the verse.  Then I have taken the most common translations of the Greek words and listed them against each box.  The words in a different colour (e.g. “true”) are the ones used most often, or, in some cases, exclusively by the main English translations (NIV, KJV, NKJV, NLT, NASB, ESV, NRSV).

I have also been spending quite a bit of time adding to the branches the things that are actually true, honourable, right, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent and praiseworthy.  It is quite amazing the amount of things that fall under those categories once you start to expand on them.  There are numerous elements to God, family, church, the bible, work, creation, music, books, films, etc. that fit into each category.  In other words, there are plenty of good things to think about.

Caroline’s basic thesis is that mind is over matter.  More specifically she says that thoughts are manifested in our brains as actual matter.  They grow on brain nerve endings like fruit on trees.  If we spend 21 days thinking on the same thing, that will turn it into a solid ripe piece of brain fruit that can modify your behaviour. Like it says in Romans 12:2: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

She advises that you hear what the Spirit is saying to you about a toxic thought to replace and what to replace it with.  Her book is well worth a read and implementation.

Creation, General Principles

Biblical Creativity: Summary

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God’s creation is wonderful as any, even cursory, look over it will reveal.  I have really enjoyed meditating in depth about the 6 days of creation as it is literally revealed in Scripture.  It seems every day I spend some quality time with God on this subject I get a new insight.

However, I realise that it is hard for any reader to understand the journey I have gone on with Jesus to get to this point.  I doubt if anyone is as excited as I am about the connection between the Sea in Heaven and the water present at creation. Or the fact that quantum physics has been explaining (since the beginning of the 20th Century) some of the connections between the physical and spiritual creations (e.g. quantum entanglement – the relationship between two entities that transcends space and time including the speed of light).

But for those who are still interested here are a couple of mind maps summarising what I have written in this series so far.

Of course you may not agree with the above.  Personally I’m a young earth, 6 day literalist currently which probably means I’m mad as far as many people are concerned.  But I didn’t always hold this position and I would hope that I’m open to having my mind changed on such secondary matters.  The truth about these things matters but not as much as the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection for instance.

Either way I’ve really enjoyed taking the Genesis account literally, matching it with what I know of science and, as a result, getting some neurons connecting in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise done.  God knows whether I am discovering some of  His thoughts in the process, or whether I am, in fact, mad 🙂

Physical Creation

In my blogs on Biblical Creativity to date I have tried to understand what God would have had to do to create something from nothing.  This includes trying to understand what the word “thing” means when there was no such “thing” before any “thing” was created.

It seems that water was there before anything else.  If the spiritual was created first then that water could have been created as the Sea before God’s throne in Heaven.  Formless and void at first, it was the womb from which everything else physical had its birth.

Day 1: We now know that light is a phenomena which has an electric and magnetic component to it mixed in such a way (with a precise range of frequency and wavelength) that we can see it.  It is just a small part of a much larger range of similar possible EM phenomena much of which we use in communication.  Once light was created, we perceive its absence as night.

Day 2: Once God created objects He created the space between them as a immediate consequence.

Day 3a: It seems to me that the idea of physical movement is only introduced at this stage.  One of the most common movements is spinning and that could have been used to separate out the land elements from the overall watery mixture.

Day 3b: Plant life is created before the sun which is just a strong source of the narrow band phenomena called light.  I’m not sure why God did it that way (or got it recorded it in this order if you like) but maybe He couldn’t wait to start doing something that He knew we would enjoy.

Day 4: He stretches out the heavens.  The macroscopic and microscopic levels are the best places to look for contradictions to any simple mechanical understanding of the universe or ourselves. Einstein found them at the macroscopic level and described them in the theory of Relativity and Bohr found them at the sub-atomic layer and described them in quantum physics.  Quantum physics helps us understand free will through Heisenberg’s uncertainty theorem for instance (see Dr. Caroline Leaf’s excellent work for more details of this and other connections between quantum theory and the Bible’s descriptions of spiritual realities).

Maybe one day I’ll write a book about it all.

Well done if you’ve read this far.

Creation, General Principles

Biblical Creativity Day 4: Sun, Moon and Stars

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It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,

It is the glory of kings to find it out.

Proverbs 25:2.

14 Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. 15 Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth.” And that is what happened. 16 God made two great lights—the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, 18 to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

19 And evening passed and morning came, marking the fourth day.

Genesis 1:14-19

Of all the things mankind has done over the last few decades, the joy of finding out new things through space exploration and technology is, for me, something that gives us all a glimpse of the glory of God shining through the darkness of man’s moral decisions.

Since time immemorial the human race has stared at the stars looking for signs. One of the things the bible says about the Sun, Moon and stars that were created on the 4th day is that they would be used as signs.  We use them to determine years, months and days and set our clocks by them.

However when it comes to being signs in a broader sense there are two theories that I particularly like.

The first of these is more speculative and less verifiable than the second.  However I think it has enough support to justify a closer look by those who might be interested.  There are at least two books written by two different authors within a year of each other back in 1892/93 which go into the details.  The idea is that before Moses wrote the first five books of the bible, God had written the gospel in the stars and explained it to Adam who then passed it on to his descendants.

The first of these books is called: THE GOSPEL IN THE STARS by JOSEPH. A. SEISS (1892).  I haven’t read this one but I like the way it starts out.  The second book is called: The Witness of the Stars by E. W. Bullinger 1893 which I have read and found really interesting.  More recent commentators urge caution when following this line of reasoning.

The second, more easily verifiable, sign is the Bethlehem Star.  Click on the link and enjoy the science.  The reason it is easy to verify these days is because the stars and planets have always followed predictable paths through the sky.  This means you can use a computer program to predict where the stars were on any particular night any time in the past.  So when someone says that the Bethlehem Star was actually the placement of two planets (Venus and Jupiter) so close to each other in the sky that they looked like one star then you can get some off the shelf astronomy software and see for yourself.

Another fact about the stars that I really like is the deep space photos that the Hubble telescope took.  The Hubble telescope is the most powerful telescope we have ever placed in space where it can see far more than we can here below the earth’s atmosphere.  Astronomers controlling the telescope pointed it at an “empty” piece of the sky and left the shutter open.  What they saw is an astonishing amount of galaxies.  To say they weren’t expecting that is an understatement.

Like most things they have found out about space, there are usually more questions than answers opened up by discoveries like this.  For instance there is no sign of a “big bang” here.

Creation, Family, General Principles

Biblical Creativity: Light and Life

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In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. (John 1:1).

John the beloved disciple or follower of Jesus was a poet.  He inter-weaved the creation account throughout the opening verses of his gospel speaking of the two main principles of creation: Light & Life.  He wrote:

“In Him was life and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it.” (John 1:4,5).

According to John’s gospel, Jesus is for (or pro) life in the most fundamental way possible.  Like a pregnant woman He has life within Him.  Again, according to John, that life is intimately connected with light or understanding.  The life of Jesus gives understanding.

A few chapters later in the same gospel, Jesus ties together spiritual birth with physical life.  He says it is not enough just to be born as a human: “You must be born from above.”

The fundamental problems with our society stem from a lack of spiritual life.  The fact that so many otherwise seemingly sane people want to deny the rights of physical life to the most vulnerable members of our society can only be explained by this.  There is a darkness that comes over people’s minds when they refuse the light of Jesus’s words.

In Ireland many people have reacted vehemently against the hypocrisy of a religion which, on the one hand, promotes a pro-life campaign and, on the other, denies rights to women and covers up the abuse of children.  As a Christian with no denominational adherence I can fully understand that position.

However should we use that as a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Being for (or pro) life is a more fundamental issue than any religion.  It is tied in with the very nature of God Himself.