Delighting in God

I am reading The Pleasures of God by John Piper (excellent book by the way) and I came across a sort of quote by a Clyde Kilby stating eleven resolutions. I see them to be good practices as well as wisdom to be drawn from.

1) At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.
2) Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add not subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, when he said: " There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, then nothing."
3) I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely a another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parenthesis in my existence but, just as likely, ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.
4) I shall not turn my life into a thin straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.
5) I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.
6) I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are, but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis call their "divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic" existence.
7) I shall follow Darwin's advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.
8) I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, "fulfill the moment as the moment." I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.
9) If for nothing more than the sake of a change of view, I shall assume my ancestry to be from the heavens rather than from the caves.
10) Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who call himself Alpha and Omega.
11) I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.

I would comment with thoughts, but I think it best to let you create your own.

The Amazing Control of God

I've recently come to thinking on God and His involvement in our lives. A large barrier I had was the question of God's control over sin and how that concurs with with our responsibility for sin. First of all, I know that God's control is universal Psalms 22:28-29; 103:17-19: Daniel 4:34-35; 1 Timothy 6:15. I also know that God controls the insignificant things Matthew 10:29-31; Matt 10:30; Luke 12:7; He controls the "accidental" (Proverbs 16:33); and He controls the good works (Phil. 2:13) as well as the bad (Acts 14:16). From these verses we see that God does control everything, even sin. Now, we can present the fact that God allows sin to happen and we do the actual sin ourselves, but that leaves some questions to still be answered. One of these being that how can God foreknow what will happen and (since nothing will or can happen outside of this foreknowledge) we still be responsible for doing them, since we can't doing anything else? The trick of this question is in our view of God. God is not bound by time. My best example is in saying that all of time for God is an "eternal present". He is viewing everything we have done, are doing and will do as if it is happening at that moment. From God's perspective, He is just seeing us sin, not seeing that will still have yet to do it. I hope this helps clear things up a bit. 


Also, there is an aspect of "concurrence" which we cannot ignore. God is definitely at work always in our lives, for if we for a moment did not have God sustaining us, we would cease to exist. (Acts 17:28) this implies that without God, we could not sin. Now wait a minute, you may be thinking, doesn't this make God responsible for sin? Not at all, note I didn't say that God causes the sin, He only makes it possible. Maybe an example I read will help. It went something like, think of wood burning. Without God, that wood being burned by fire could not do just that, yet we don't give God the responsibility of the wood burning, we say that the wood burned because the fire burned it. 


Now I may be wrong, so feel free to express your thoughts!! 

A Blogger is Born

Do you like the title? I thought it fitting for my first blog post. Now for those reading this, I am just getting started and I will get better at this! Considering I don't really have a meaty topic for this one, I'll tell of my purpose of writing and how I intend to go about this blogging thing.

I am a Christian. This is a very simple statement. But with it is packed enormous amounts of information on how I will write, along with many questions. I am writing to the glory of God. I think that every single piece of literature should be. Now, I now that there are seemingly infinite amounts of literature out there which do not directly advocate nor bring glory to God. I see these not as worthless pieces of information, but as information that can be used by Christians for many purposes.

I write with a world view that you will see play out as I blog. Since I don't know what blogs are really about, I will have to experiment since I know enough to know that blogs are extremely general in topics. I intend to use this to my utmost for His use. I'll leave it at this.