Try Something New

Try something new! 

This sounds like a phrase from an advertising campaign that is trying to jolt people out of their regular routines.

This is hard, because we like things that are familiar and habitual to us. This is one reason why we find it hard to give up bad habits and start good new ones.

We are creatures of comfort most of the time, and don't like change unless it has been explained to us in a positive and meaningful way (hence my attempts in this blog).

Often our unspoken fear of failure or looking foolish to other people inhibits our once free to roam childhood curiosity.

I have read information about multi-directional thinking which I find fascinating, as I am definitely an example of a creature of comfort/not great with change without meaningful explanation.

Children and adults are clearly different as we know, and one of the differences is how they think.

Children rely on divergent thinking. They don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, and respond to life with curiosity and play. 

They have few biases, and are not afraid to be wrong (high risk tolerance). Their thought processes are chaotic and associative (look at most children's bedrooms before they are tidied), and they are great at generating ideas. 

Adults rely (mainly) on logic and efficiency. Their prefrontal cortex is fully mature, and they can respond to life with deep focus and systematic thinking.

They have a high level of bias shaped by experience (we know this). Often their risk tolerance is low with a fear of failure or judgment. They are (more) organized and systematic, and are great at implementing ideas (unless they are struggling with procrastination!)

I wonder if this difference in thinking between children and adults, is one of the other reasons why Jesus spoke to His disciples in Matthew 18:2-3

"Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, "Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."

He was clearly teaching about letting go of pride and the desire to be the greatest. He talks about being humble as a little child. 

What if by saying "unless you are converted and become as little children" He was also talking about our thought processes and subsequent actions when it comes to entering the kingdom of heaven?

We clearly can't physically become little children again, so Jesus is talking about our thoughts, will and emotions, and then how we interact with those around us.

What if this also speaks to how we interact in our relationship with God through our thoughts, will and emotions in His kingdom?

What if it means being willing to respond with curiosity,

 to put aside our bias formed through past experiences,

 to risk something without fear of failure,

 and to be open to a new idea?

Like spending five minutes silent and listening to God each day?

The long way home

 Sometimes after we get to the end of ourselves, we get to the metaphorical end of the line, and realize we should go back in the direction we came from. It is hard, because we tend to be stubborn in some measure, and generally unwilling to admit we are wrong.

Sometimes we don't just get to the end of the line, but the wheels come off, and we crash secretly or spectacularly, but either way we know we have greatly sinned.

We are in company with multitudes of others who have also sinned. Let's see how the Bible puts it...

Romans 3:23 "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

This definitively includes everyone, so that any of us who likes to point a finger at others, should stop what we are doing and ask God for mercy.

The account of the Prodigal son is an amazing story of God's love. Read it in the Gospel of Luke 15:11-32.  The Father runs to the returning and repentant son, and then showers the son with blessing and love.

So why do we avoid eye contact with God when we find ourselves sitting in the misery of our own not so great decisions?

He is waiting for us, like the father of the prodigal son, looking out for us to see if we have started to move towards Him. We sit in the pigsty we have chosen, and think it is better to hide from God (as if He doesn't know everything already), than come to our senses, repent and return. 

The enemy of God and of our souls would like us to linger permanently in the pigsty. The devil is glad if our avoidance of God because of our sin behavior stretches from days to weeks to years to a lifetime lost.

The devil is fine if we rattle off religious prayers, without truly thinking about or meaning what we are saying. He is fine with everything except us wanting to repent, return and re-establish who we are as sons and daughters of God, in intimate relationship with the One who has created us and loves us so much.

The devil has a real issue with this, because he knows then we will be empowered by God's Holy Spirit to do some radical life changing things in our own existence and in the world around us.

Anything but that....so the devil lies to us that it is a really long way home, and we probably won't make it, and even if we eventually get there, God is still going to be really angry about what we have done, so it is just a lose-lose situation.

Huge lies...but we can believe them, often because other humans have acted that way to us. 

In reality it is not a long way home at all.

God waits for us to turn from our sin, and look to Him for forgiveness, and then to receive His cleansing and grace to move forward again.

This can happen in the minutes of silence when we face God, and allow our eyes to turn to Him again, to start this process of return. We may find we are enveloped in the Father's love, before we can get to the end of what we intend to say about our unworthiness.

God loves us. 

Forgiveness is waiting for us as we turn to Him again. 

Don't believe the lie that it is a long way home.

Sense and Sensibility

 Okay, I'm a Jane Austen appreciator. I don't want to use the word "fan" because it is short for "fanatic", and nowadays that can have some seriously negative connotations. So let's just say I appreciate her writing, and much of her nuanced literary examinations of peoples' emotions and subsequent actions within the settings of her time. 

One of her novels, "Sense and Sensibility" looks at the Dashwood sisters as they navigate the twists and turns of life and love. Really not much has changed today except for there being a lack of balls to attend, and everyone wears more casual/scruffy/gym wear clothes most of the time.

Anyway to my point. Human nature doesn't change. Civilizations rise and fall, external dress codes vary, society expectations alter through time periods, but humans are humans still.

We love, laugh, do or don't dance like someone is watching, and make the same relationship mistakes with each other throughout human history. Starting with Genesis and reading our way through the Old and then New Testament to the very end of Revelation, human behavior has not changed.

Toxic responses, selfish actions, murderous impulses, blame shifting and that is just in Genesis.

God shows us something very clearly through His Word. He shows us His love for the whole world, and He shows us His ultimate remedy to the fall of mankind and plan for salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

He also shows us, among many other things like how to actually live well and safely, that humans are humans from the beginning to the end of human time. 

We crash through the window pane of life hurting ourselves and those around us, often not realizing there is a much better way to experience life.

God would love to show us this better way, and it involves these two areas of response within us, sense and sensibility.

The word "Sense" can mean a physical ability, the five natural ways we as humans experience and interact with the world; sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

It can also mean an inner feeling, like experiencing peace or joy or sadness. It can mean to have good judgment with the phrase "common sense", or to feel or notice something such as sensing danger. 

Spending five minutes with God each day in silence can attune our physical and emotional senses. We can learn to be more aware of God's presence with us, and His guidance through the person of His Holy Spirit. 

To hear His voice is to receive wisdom that we can often not come to in our own ability. We can sense our own emotions when we are quiet too, and be able to release negative ones to God, that are weighing us down or twisting our responses to others.

There is so much here of the richness of relationship with God that He wants us to experience, but we are too often busy crashing through another window pane of life.

The word "Sensibility" means the ability to feel, react or understand deep emotions in response to positive things of life, such as an appreciation of beauty in the physical world, music, literature, art or culture. It can also mean a person's delicate feelings that can be easily hurt or offended.

God is very able to help us in both these areas too, to help us to appreciate the good aspects of life, and bring healing where we have interacted with negative aspects of life and been hurt.

God is so good. There is nothing stopping us from spending time with Him each day. 

Except ourselves.

If we need some help in the areas of "sense" or "sensibility" He is there, waiting for us to let Him respond to what we have said to Him (or want to say to Him) about all our issues of life as humans, whatever era we live in.  

Slow Down

 Most of us live life in the fast lane.

We cram every waking moment with some sort of activity, entertainment, or the gaining or sharing of old or new information about the world around us.

To sit in silence at all is often a foreign concept to us.

Not so many years ago that is what most people did much more of, when there wasn't access to twenty four hour a day neurologically engaging vision and noise.

My grandfather when he was elderly used to tell me about the great excitement concerning the first visual transmissions of an object from one room to another. 

This was achieved by John Logie Baird in 1925 when he transmitted, among other things, a flickering image of a cauliflower from his laboratory to another room.

Let that information sink in for a moment.

It has been just over one hundred years at this time of writing that the image of a vegetable was transmitted between two rooms. My grandfather was at Oxford University in the late 1920's. My grandfather...two generations before me.. was excited about this major breakthrough that he was aware of at university....not a long time ago!

That is but a little breath in the greater scheme of things.

But we forget this.... because it is all we have known in our lives, increasing as time goes on...this endless noise, this endless business of our minds and bodies.

Our health suffers from living in the fast lane. We are busy and stressed...we become weary, unwell, even very ill.

God has a remedy for this.

 It is called quiet time with Him.

This does not mean consumption of worship videos, or podcasts, or online sermons, although they all have their place to help us in life.

It means being quiet, being still, slowing down long enough to be aware of what silence sounds like....for our minds to recognize and register it...and to then be available in time for God to share a word or picture with us as He has been doing to countless people from the beginning of time on Earth.

In our day and in our situation we need to relearn a normal human behavior that has been mislaid somewhere during the last hundred years.

To be able to be still before God and to listen to Him...even if it is only for five minutes.

Psalm 46:10 "Be still, and know that I am God.." 

When we come to the end of ourselves.

 When we come to the end of ourselves.... That's a very good time to be still and silent before God.

It may be an external situation, a personal relationship gone awry, a family member out of control, a beloved child who has forgotten how to love themselves or others, our own medical plight, someone else's medical plight. In this life there are a vast array of choices to cause us to come to the end of ourselves.

It's not just that "love is a battlefield" as the 1983 song goes, which dates my teenage years somewhat. Life is a battlefield, and we can be bruised and bloodied metaphorically or actually by our interactions with humankind.

I saw a garment top someone was wearing with the words   Human...Kind

If only it were so!

God is not the same as us. We get confused and think He is, but He is definitely not.

If we have had a father or a mother caring for us in life, we often take their traits and layer them over our vision of God. I think we all do it, because we automatically create our own reference points for life.

But then come the issues with our relationship with God.

Absent either physically or emotionally, abusive, controlling, demeaning, cruel, insensitive, angry, judgmental, weak, chaotic etc....all the worst bits of human nature packaged in parents or caregivers who unintentionally ruin our imagination when we consider our relationship with God.

So it is very understandable that we shrink back from being face to face with God without any words, religious or otherwise, to hide behind.

It is scary...and we are scared, much more than most realize.

Because we have layered our defenses so well our inner hearts are often an impenetrable fortress, and then we present to the world that we are fine, and we answer in this way to those who bother to ask.

But to be quiet with God, and face our pain, confusion, hurt and disappointment concerning what we are currently facing in life. 

That's a huge risk we are considering to take.

We fear what if God turns out to be like our Father/Mother/Grandparent/Caregiver? The very people we often turned to when we came to the end of ourselves when we were young, those we relied on and trusted even with their faults.

They let us down. They weren't perfect. They weren't powerful. Sometimes they weren't kind.

God is perfect. God is powerful. And more importantly to the parts of us that are afraid, God is kind.

He is kinder than we could ever imagine. And He likes us. He really does.

He is very interested in helping us when we get to the end of ourselves in whatever situation we face.

I have always loved these Bible verses, and the absolute truth contained therein.

Romans 8:38-39 "For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Maybe God wants to speak to us and give us wisdom in our situation, maybe He wants us to be aware of His presence with us, maybe He wants us to let go of trying to solve everything and entrust the outcome to Him, maybe He wants us to get a revelation of His pure, powerful, ever present love for us.

 What if time with God is the most wonderful and worthwhile experience of our lives, especially when we have come to the end of ourselves? 

What if we are just willing to try... for just five minutes?

Act like you believe it.

 There is sometimes a disconnect between what we believe and how we act. Did I say sometimes? Maybe more than sometimes.

Again original sin is the issue, and our will and desires not being completely willing to leave the former path and walk in a new way, but there is also another reason I'd like to explore. 

I believe we are saved by grace completely. Ephesians 2:8-9 "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast."

Nothing we can do, can add to what Jesus has done for us.

Yet also at the same time we are called, as were the believers in Philippi, to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" Philippians 2:12.

Which is it "saved by grace" or "work out your own salvation"?

Of course the answer is both, but we don't like the answer because we like "either or" not "both and".

I believe our preference is the result of the Greek worldview that most of us in Western civilization are deeply affected by, whether we are aware of it or not. The Greek worldview is very different to the Hebrew worldview (The worldview of the Bible).

One main aspect of the Greek worldview being different to the Hebrew worldview is that the Greek values "knowing over doing" and the Hebrew "doing over knowing".

Stay with me. This will make sense....

The Greek worldview focuses on right thinking, intellectual virtues, exploring truths through human logic and debate, and compartmentalizing things (either/or).

The Hebrew worldview focuses on right conduct, community duty, experimental practice, and confirming contrasting views simultaneously (both, and).

Ahhh.....

This is why there is rarely/sometimes/often/always/ (choose which applies) a disconnect between what we read in the Bible, what we affirm with our minds...... and what we actually act out in our lives.

Or am I the only one with this issue?

We know the Bible, we agree with it, but we don't do what is written there for our and others' benefit and blessing. 

We can argue our theological or doctrinal corner with the best of them, but then do we read the Bible, pray, spend time with God, be part of a Christian faith community, obey Jesus' commands to love one another, and disciple the nations?

We sometimes struggle to act like we believe God and His Word.

It is true in our minds, but not in our actions.

We need to believe in our minds, and with our actions. We are both saved (if we have responded in faith to Jesus' offer of forgiveness, reconciliation with the Father, and His gift of eternal life).

And we need to work out our salvation. 

Can I suggest again, without sounding repetitive although I am already, that spending five minutes being still and listening to God is part of the 'doing' and not just the 'thinking'.

Please consider this...but then also act on it!

Time is money.

 "Remember that time is money" is a well known phrase made popular historically by Benjamin Franklin in his 1748 essay "Advice to a Young Tradesman", although the phrase was already in print in a British newspaper called "The Free-Thinker" in 1719.

So what!

Why am I writing about this in a blog about spending time with God you may ask?

Well here are some thoughts....

"Time is money" is ingrained in many of us even subconsciously. The world has sold us a big fat lie that money can buy happiness or anything else you might desire.

We are often driven by the need to gain or keep financial security for ourselves or our loved ones. Someone wise told me that money never represents just money, it always represents something else.

Money can represent long hours of hard work over many years. It can represent our very real human desire to feel secure. It can represent our worth reflected out to others, the "big house, big car" goal.

 It can represent the chance to change our life circumstances to something better than our former generations experienced. It can represent important provisions for our older age when we are no longer able to work. It can represent many different things to many people.

Then you add the two ideas together that "time is money", and both 'money' and 'time' become precious to our human nature. We then see being still and quiet as something not quite right unless we are asleep.

Being brought up in a strong work ethic family personally, meant my world view was being busy and productive (even if I wasn't earning money) was good, and being still and resting was somehow not so good unless you were completely exhausted.

 It is hard to change our childhood worldview as adults, and it is something I am still on a journey with, although nine months of 'burn out' some years ago, and more recently heart and blood pressure issues, have clarified my focus about the importance of rest and being still on a regular basis.

If time is money, and time is a precious personal resource, what is my view then of spending five minutes of being "still" listening to God?

 Would part of our thoughts, even if we would never dare voice them, say we could be doing something else more 'productive' with those five minutes, either with work or with something very necessary in our lives?

What could be more important or more necessary than listening to the One who created us and would love to communicate with us?

We don't fully understand the extent of God's great love and heart towards us. If we did, we would live so differently.

I'm not promoting laziness, or no money, or a no work ethic. I'm promoting five minutes spent listening to the One who loves us more than we could possibly imagine right now.

Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus his prayer for them, as recorded in Ephesians 1:17-19

"that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power"

I think five minutes listening to God each day is a supremely beneficial use of our time in every way.

How can it be anything else?