Tag Archive | God

Satisfy My Thirsty Soul

Feb6

September 5, 2012

 Dear Barbara,

One of my assignments in the assignments in the Satisfy My Thirsty Soul Bible study is to write a letter to a friend describing what God has taught me about worship.

I don’t know about worship, but I have learned that I am not a restful soul. Wheneverpicture of book cover I sit down for my quiet time, I always think of other things I should be doing. The obvious thing is that they are NOT what I should be doing at all. I should be composing my mind to worship and to hear what God has to say. When I keep my grandson, I think of what I could be doing on the family business. When all is quiet, I read a fiction book and don’t work on the business at all. I do not sit still long enough (even though my body is actually still, my mind isn’t) for God to tell me what He wants me to do that day. I keep saying I should set aside an hour every morning and spend the entire hour in God’s presence so that my quiet time/Bible study is not just something to cross off my To-Do list. I have been trying to do this for two years!

What I really liked about this book are the chapter names in part two.

I bow my life.I bow my words.I bow my attitude.I bow my work. (My work is my mom, my grandson, and our business, in that order. My husband takes care of himself.)

Laborare est orareOrare est laborare(This is a fine point that almost everyone misses.)

I bow my times of waiting.I bow my pain.I bow my will.Drawn into His presence

 

All of the above, both the positive and the negative, belong to God.

It has been a good study even though I have not been able to incorporate it all into my life. It is supposed to be a 12-week study but I cannot apply that fast.

Have I actually learned anything? Can’t tell it by me.

Love–Susan

 

**note–It has been almost two and a half years. I have set aside that hour every day and I sit for it. Still working on the composing of the mind though. I am slow at application. I should go through it again.

Does anyone else have this problem?

The book is Satisfy My Thirsty Soul by Linda Dillow, published by NavPress 2007.

Burden of Proof – The Magic Table

May20

Recently, a Facebook friend of mine posted this to me in a discussion thread.

If I claim to my friends that I have a magic table that you cannot see or feel, they would say to me, correctly, “Prove it.” You claim that there is a being that no one can see. I say, “Prove it. The burden of proof is on you.”

Let’s change this a bit to an experience that many people have had, pain.

Let’s say you have pain in your back. It is debilitating. Sometimes, you can’t move the pain is so bad. So, you go to the doctor. The doctor checks you out and says, “I can’t find anything wrong with you. Take these pills and rest for a few days.”

The first time this happens, you take the pills, and rest. It does not get better. You go back to the doctor. He does an MRI, x-ray, and blood work. All the results come back and the doctor calls you to say, “There is nothing wrong with you. It’s your imagination.”

“NO! It is not my imagination. I hurt. Something is wrong!”

You know something is wrong. Just because the doctor can’t see anything in the tests, does not mean that your pain does not have a cause. That pain is real.

Christians, at least some of us, experience God as a reality, a positive reality, not as a voice such as the product of schizophrenia, but as the presence, the comfort, the peace that fills our lives. We cannot hand that to you for you to touch. We cannot paint it with colors for you to see.

We can talk about the statistical improbability of DNA arranging itself into sentient beings, or the temperatures or force being exactly right for our universe to have come about, but you have already rejected those arguments (illogically in my opinion). All we can do is describe the presence and tell you how you can have it. We do this because we love you and want everyone to experience the inner peace that knowing God brings. To take that away from us puts the burden of proof on you.

Please read The Scandinavian Sceptic. It is rather long and some points are better than others but the good ones are good, and… he gives references.

 

note: This post deals only with burden of proof.

From the Way Back journal 1

Apr28

This morning, I found this in an old journal of mine and I think it is apropos of my new blog. I should comment here that I think Carl Sagan was a good scientist and a good teacher of science. I learned a lot from Cosmos. My comment about him in the following piece simply referred to his not sticking to science.

 

Thanksgiving 1985

I received a book, These Were God’s People, A Bible History, which had a very apt remark concerning science which especially hit home with me because my father is a geophysicist and I grew up with science in the home constantly.

Historically, the initial reactions of the church, or at least part of it, has been either to condemn those who set forth new views and close the mind to further investigation or else to go into panic over the new discovery, feeling that everything will crumble if we are forced to change views that religious men have previously held. Neither of these reactions are to any avail, however, for they do not change the facts, if they are facts. (e.g. sixteenth and seventeenth centuries–the earth being the center of the universe)

It goes on to say we need to avoid a couple of pitfalls, one being

an anti-scientific attitude that treats scientists as enemies of the faith. The scientist is seeking the truth about the world, basing his conclusions on the best information available to him. This should also be the desire of every student of the Bible. If the Bible is a hoax and the universe is not dependent on God, condemning the scientist will not change matters. On the other hand, if God does rule over it as sovereign Lord, we need not be afraid of anything we may learn about it.

Last Wednesday (11-20-85), we video-taped a program on PBS The Creation of the Universe which I thought quite refreshing after the glut of Carl Sagan we have had the past several years… They said that, as unbelievable as it may sound, we can understand the universe’s operation back to one ten billionth of a second after the Big Bang but that the Bang itself is not comprehensible mathematically and that we would probably never solve that mystery; that the entire universe came from a piece smaller than a quark; that matter was created from void and that they are looking for an equation that governs all the forces of the universe (Unified Field Theory). Many believe it exists and want it to because of the simplicity and beauty of it. They even mentioned the ultimate essence as being God.

Several of the scientists interviewed stated that we were not here by mere chance, that everything was too well-ordered for that to be the case. I thought of the verse that says our God is a God of order. And when they said they could understand this order back to but not including the Big Bang, I thought of Revelation 4:11.

Worthy art Thou, our Lord and our God to receive glory and honor and power; for Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy will they existed, and were created.