The ancient maxim still applies: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To any serious thinker, and especially to the professing Christian, an unexamined life is not an option.
We may go to the house of mirth, to a party, where we have fun, kick back, have a good time, and enjoy entertainment. Parties are not all that serious; we don’t have to be contemplative in order to enjoy ourselves there. Certainly there is a time to laugh, a time to dance, a time to celebrate-a time to have a party. But how much do we learn in those circumstances? Times of mirth do very little for the good of our souls.
Even if it were decided in extreme cases that abortion is an ethical option, the extreme cases should not dictate the general law.
Philosophy was born in the ancient quest for ultimate reality, the reality that transcends the proximate and commonplace and that defines and explains the data of everyday experience.
Satan’s chief device of temptation is to attack the truth of God.
The redeemed of God who are snatched from the flames by the hand of the Lord are still covered with ashes. We remain streaked with charcoal and blemished with soot. We are redeemed, but not sinless. Satan is quick to call attention to the dirt. He wants us to be more conscious of our sin than of God’s mercy.
Christ comes from the Greek word christos, which means “anointed.” It corresponds to the Hebrew word translated “messiah.” When Jesus is called.
Do you not know that God dwells in light inaccessible? We weak and ignorant creatures want to probe and understand the incomprehensible majesty of the unfathomable light of the wonder of God. We approach; we prepare ourselves to approach. What wonder then that his majesty overpowers us and shatters!”13.
Far from God seeking to destroy the “self” as many distortions of Christianity would claim, God redeems the self. He heals the self so that it may be useful and fulfilled in the mission to which the person is called.
The Christian formula for the Trinity – God is one essence in three persons – may seem to be contradictory because we are accustomed to seeing one being as one person. We cannot conceive of how one being could be contained in three persons and still be only one being. To that extent, the doctrine of the Trinity in this formulation is mysterious; it boggles the mind to think of a being who is absolutely one in His essence yet three in person.
If to secure our redemption Christ only needed to make an atonement for us, he could have come down from heaven and gone directly to the cross. But he also had to fulfill all righteousness by submitting at every point to the law of God. By his sinless life he achieved positive merit, which merit is imputed to all who put their faith in him. Christ not only died for us but he lived for us as well.
I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring, but I know that God knows what tomorrow is going to bring. So if God promises that tomorrow will bring something, and if I trust God for tomorrow, I have faith in something I have not yet seen.
The Christian is not a Stoic. Neither does he flee into a fantasy world that denies the reality of suffering.
Don’t ever ask God for justice-you might get it.
To be spiritually dead is to be worldly. It is to buy into and follow slavishly the values and customs of the secular culture. Not only do the spiritually dead follow the course of this world, they follow “the prince of the power of the air.
The more we are in the Word of God, the more the Spirit who inspired the Word and who illumines it for us will use the Word to confirm in our souls that we are truly His, that we are indeed among the children of God.
To me, there is nothing more comforting than knowing that there is a God of providence who is aware not only of every one of my transgressions but of every one of my tears, every one of my aches, and every one of my fears.
When theonomy is abandoned for autonomy, the biblical description of that action is sin. It is the creature’s declaration of independence from his Creator.
That God allows a human being to treat me unjustly is just of God. While I may complain to God about the human, horizontal injustice I have suffered, I cannot rise up and accuse God of committing a vertical injustice by allowing the human injustice to befall me. God would be perfectly just to allow me to be thrown in prison for life for a crime I didn’t commit. I may be innocent before other people, but I am guilty before God.
It was St. Augustine who once prayed, “Thou halt made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it finds its rest in Thee.