Absolute certainties and God.

They see religion as a cancerous infection that has pervaded the corridors of time, leaving a bloody streak of violence down the hall. To them, religion is an illusory coping mechanism begotten by our desire to transcend the temporal world. God is viewed by them as a fictitious, greedy, judgmental bigot waiting wistfully in the heavens to strike down any who deviate from his impossible moral law. Seeming to be sure of themselves, they believe that the abolition of God is necessary for the advancement of mankind. They have arrived at this place of anti-theism with certainty, shooting down the idea of God as if it is for the intellectually naive and/or the ignorant. However, this certainty cannot be valid as far as to deny others acceptance of God as truth. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, to be sure it (an opinion) is false is to suppose themselves incapable of error; to assume their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty, an assumption of infallibility. Given the preponderance pertaining to God there must also be a fair number of people who are certain of his existence. Due to our fallen nature and incapability of fathoming the things of God we cannot claim an absolute certainty by plain reason, or, to put a more secular way, we haven’t developed enough, or have not been equipped with the proper reasoning skills to claim an absolute certainty. If we accept that there are no absolute certainties deducted by plain reason, we have to also understand and accept the consequences of such reasoning, namely that for every hint of certainty on the issues of God on both sides, there is an equal amount of uncertainty due to the absence of absolutes. Some are swayed on either side of the fence on this issue, but that requires a step of faith in either direction. To claim one to be right and the other completely wrong would be to nullify everything I have previously said, but we can consider the validity of each step of faith. Given our desire to taste the wonders of this world, our drive for sex, money, pleasure and ease of conscience we could very well understand why the idea of God’s nonexistence might be beneficial to us. These desires exist in all of mankind inherently; it would seem to be fitting to call this a starting point. If this is our starting point at birth, it would seem much more difficult to go against it and incline ourselves to God than to simply continue living fully for ourselves. Of course, there are positives to the idea of God, mainly the idea of salvation, to put it concisely. But even with this idea in mind it is not without its difficulties to stay inclined to God and go against the grain of this world, constantly being attacked, scoffed at, refuted for an “illegitimate” faith by those who have claimed an absolute by plain reasoning and seduced by our interminable desire for pleasure. The idea of God is equally as valid, as far as reason is understood, as the idea against it, and when considered with rigor, the right step of faith to take. I will live for God; it would be against conscience to do anything other.

I am the protagonist:

I am the protagonist: an introverted man drawing on perceptual senses to formulate a thesis about life. There is an indomitable antagonist; his name is Death, and we must make amends.

Veracity.

This life is certainly perplexing. Begging to be questioned, it taunts and seduces all: from the ignorant to the intellectual, from the peasant to the King, from the athiest to the preacher, from beginning to the end. If I have learned anything from this perplexity, it’s that a person cannot simply accept, without question, anything that comes his way no matter how socially accepted it may be. No matter the idea, one built on shifting sands will fail as the plates of life shift, catapulting one into a weary search for truth again. The one brave enough to face the mirror, embrace veracity and self reflection, and avoid self deceit will bask in light of truth. One who ignorantly follows will slowly bury himself; asphyxiation will come.

Honest Questions

“I want real faith, not the type that is manufactured and manifested only in churches. I want faith that permits me to look into the mirror and honestly and earnestly tell myself that I believe there is a God, and that I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and he died so that I may live. I want to do this when no one is looking or listening so that I can earnestly pursue a life of truth, instead of a life of misery and internal conflict veiled with everlasting hope and faith.”

There is a misconception of the word faith embedded into our humanistic ways of reasoning that can hide a person from themselves, serving as a cornerstone of a faith built on shifting sands. This misconception is that  logic should justify our faith at every corner. Everyone around me at the time I wrote the lines above would say I was a believer: a faithful, God-fearing man. Little knew I was a wreck inside, at war with my own thoughts and reasoning, contradicting myself on the outset of every thought that passed through my mind. I relied on logic to justify my faith, which means if something I learned from the bible contradicted the world around me or my ways of reasoning, I would question the existence of all that I thought I placed my life in. After weeks of intellectual rigor, I looked into the mirror and began honestly questioning myself: the scariest thing a person can do. Being honest with yourself can beget seemingly horrifying consequences, but it must be done in order to progress in a faith rooted in something real. I asked myself: Do you really believe? Fighting against honesty, I said yes, and then immediately said no.

Weeks later, I stumbled across Ephesians 2:8 which reads: ” For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves,

it is the gift of God

After realizing what true faith was, believing in something of which there is no logical proof of, this put everything into perspective. I could not believe if I relied on some sort of human, philosophical justification for my faith, for that was not faith at all. If a human’s litmus test for Christianity is justifying it through logic, then there is no faith, but rather a fickle time bomb ready to explode when triggered by any form of worldly, and even adolescent, reasoning. But a faith from God is a faith that transcends all human logic, a faith placed in a believer by God that cannot be oppressed. Faith is believing in that which there is no logical proof of; therefore expect worldly logic to contradict your beliefs at times. God-given faith is faith that permits a person with tears in their eyes and a world falling around them to look into the mirror, when not a soul is looking or listening, and tell themselves they believe, and know that they are heard by God.

Stationary Revolutions.

I am sitting still in a room. A cup of coffee sits to my left without the slightest hint of a ripple within the mug. The chair in my house on the corner of the block in my neighborhood that rest in the outer skirts of halls, which lies in the northern part of Knoxville, which is positioned in the northeastern part of Tennessee, which is located in the southeastern region of the United States,which is in the northwestern hemisphere of the planet Earth that rotates on its axis at over a thousand miles an hour, which altogether is circling the sun at 67,000 miles an hour is not moving. It seems ignorant, albeit true, to think that if it were possible that a person could sit motionless above the atmosphere of the earth and look down through a telescope at me that I would be spinning like a top at its fastest point. Nevertheless, I sit here motionless in my unmoving chair next to my rippleless coffee pandering about all these things which seem indubitably imaginary, but are most certainly true.

I look up at the stars and pretend I can count them. I believe if I count the stars I can estimate how many there are out there above us. I can count 25 stars above my house before I forget where I began counting, so I know that there are at least a hundred stars above Tennessee, bringing me to believe that there are an estimated 5,000 stars above the planet earth. You know that is wrong, but would you be more apt to believe that there are an estimated 100 thousand million stars in our galaxy alone, and there are millions upon millions of galaxies beyond the milky way? This fact is incredibly too much for me to fathom. I can believe there are a vast number of stars when viewing them from my back porch, but my natural human myopia will not let me go beyond the ones in viewing distance, and certainly not beyond the galaxy that I am sitting still yet spinning in.

I believe the earth spins because I see the leaves change to autumn colors and I feel Jack Frost’s cold arms embrace me. And although I cannot possibly fathom it, I know that there are millions of galaxies beyond ours and that the planet we call home is a mere spec of dirt floating around in a vast Universe. I cannot completely fathom a creator and preserver of all things. But I bask in His glory all of my day and shout praises to His name throughout the night; I find comfort in His sovereign hand and fear Him who ordains all that comes to pass. May it never be that faith becomes believing only in what our minds can penetrate, for that is not faith at all.

There is no better time.

There is no other day more worthy of living for God than that of which we breathe the air of the moment. Every sunrise is one ordained by God for us to see once more and therefore necessarily a day ordained to bring glory to himself. There is no better time to sin than another, and there is no more perfect of a time to repent than directly thereafter. No sunday is a better day to praise him than any thursday; There is no better time to call upon his name than that of the moment. There is no need to trouble yourself with the thought of sinning tommorow, for you may then see your repentance today in vain as it has enough troubles of it’s own. There is no better time to live for God than another, but the greatest time of all must always be that of the moment when reality is sure.

A juxtaposition of sin, before and after regeneration.

Before regeneration, sin did not oppress me, nor did I constantly loose to it; I was sin. I did not seek to oppress it; for I did not possess the ability to even desire liberation from the bondage of my own nature. By necessity I chose evil, necessarily because of the fact that I could not choose good. My choice to sin was indeed free and what I desired to do; however, all of my desires were evil, rendering me a slave held captive by my own fallen nature, which in no way possessed the ability to please God. This limits the definition of free. I was free in the fact that I could make choices, whether to wear the blue shirt, or perhaps the red shirt, to commit this sin, or maybe that one. My freedom was not limitless, but rather it was limited to choosing which sin I would gladly partake in. To call myself totally free would be both a mistake in denotation and disgrace to the word itself. A toddler has the choice to choose which sin it will partake in as well, and I was no more capable than an impenitent giant toddler to choose God. Now, after hearing the word of truth, the gospel of my salvation, and also having believed and marked in Christ with a seal, the promised holy spirit, I encompass the ability, only by the monergistic action of the holy spirit, to have the slightest inclination to please God, which brings with it the ability to engage in war with my sinful nature that has not ceased to attempt to oppress the Good of which I now desire to do. It is not, however, that impeccability comes with regeneration, but the ability to war and potentially defeat sin is the product of salvation, along with the process of justification, and one day glorification as I my lowly body will be conformed to that of Jesus Christ.

Hey Mom, where does faith come from?

Would a person ask for something if they alone were capable of satisfying their desire for whatever it may be that they are lacking? A person might ask a friend for a stick of gum, and actually possess their own gum at the same time. In this situation the person asking for the stick of gum simply does not want to use away the last of the gum they have; they might prefer to save their own gum for later. But if there was no price for gum and it was available to anyone and everyone at any time, then the only reason a person would ask someone else for a stick of gum is because they themselves were inadequate to retrieve the gum. If the person asking for the gum is inadequate, this must mean that they are now at the source of which the gum is being dispersed freely and they are asking for a piece of the free gum. This would mean that the gum could only be dispersed through one individual and through him the gum was available to anyone and everyone indiscriminately. The same coherent reasoning can be applied to asking for faith from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. When a person is having doubts, it is both proper and necessary of them to ask Christ to increase their faith, just as the apostles did in Luke 17. People do this more often than they think. When a person prays for strength from God to get through something or when a person prays for the ability to trust in God before they start some difficult period in their life, which I have found to happen quite a bit, they are ultimately asking for faith. Now that we can agree that you, as a believer, ask God for faith and that faith is given indiscriminately to all at the cost of nothing to them through one individual, namely Jesus Christ, we can also agree that since you ask for it, you must be inadequate of attaining it yourself.

Ephesians 1:13 reads: And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 2:8 reads: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith…

Both of these verses indicate that you have been saved through faith, or “having believed” you were given the holy spirit. No one has the Holy Spirit that is not regenerated, and given a heart of flesh. Therefore it is necessary to not simply view faith as something you ask for or receive after you are regenerated, but it is to be understood as the means to which you were regenerated. The Greek word, which is translated as faith, is pistis (noun) and believe, is translated from pistevo (verb). The word believe (Greek verb “pistevo”), according to Strong’s Greek Dictionary, means: to have faith, therefore we can affirm that believing and having faith are one in the same.

We have agreed that you and I are both inadequate to attain faith ourselves, which is why we ask God to increase our faith. If we are incapable of increasing our faith ourselves after regeneration, how much more inadequate were we as impenitent unregenerate sinners? This is too say that we did not muster up the faith at the hour we first believed to bring us to salvation. We can now affirm that we could not have had anything at all to do with our faith at that glorious hour, which leads us also to believe that we could not have chosen him, but that he chose us.

Ephesians 2:8-For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God

With every new sun:

With every new sun comes defeat. Though stone has been replaced with flesh, often are my sentiments charged with depravity. I received the gift of life, and what have I to give? Nothing that flows from this mouth is worthy; nothing good lives in this flesh. Who am I to call upon His name? To be chosen as a gift to a Savior? To have my lowly body conformed to a King’s? Who am I that the Pharaoh should listen? For I myself am at war with the law inside of me.

O what a wretched man I am!

I cry out the words of Ezra: “ O my God, I am too ashamed and disgraced to lift up my face to you, my God, because my sins are higher than my head and my guilt has reached to the heavens.”

And as I hang there by my transgressions, by my humility, and by my sorrow, my beautiful Lord says to me, “ I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.”

What a Warrior’s Spirit that lives in my members! Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our Lord!

(Ezekiel 36:26)
(Romans 7:18)
(Ezra 9:6)
(John 17:6)
(Philippians 3:21)
(Luke 23:43)
(Exodus 15:3)
(Romans 7:19-25)

Fight the Good fight. On second thought…

A couple of nights ago I had gone out to dinner with some friends around 10:00 p.m. At this dinner, I drank an excessive amount of caffeine begetting a death match between my bed sheets and I throughout the night. Time, as it so annoyingly does, taunted me until I unplugged the alarm clock, only to plug it back in a half hour later. The clock seemed to smile victoriously at it glared the number 2 across my walls. I decided I would take a drive, and simply go about town until I fell asleep at the wheel. At this point in the night, anything would have been better than the jail cell that my once so lovely bed had become.

As I drove through the darkness, with no music to occupy my mind through my nocturnal stupor, I could not help but to think; and when all that I can do is think, I cannot help but to dream up big questions. I started to question my faith, asking myself questions like, ” what if this whole God deal gets old to me.’ ‘Why am I able to differentiate between right and wrong?’ ‘And For that matter, who in the world decided what is right and what is wrong anyway? “These questions were quickly oppressed because I simply knew the answers to them. But then another question haunted my mind. I asked myself what happens if I just quit. What if I just give up on this whole God thing and conform to the ways of this world? The world seems to have a pretty good time. Just the other day I overheard a conversation in which a guy was telling his friend how drunk he had gotten the previous night and that it was the best night of his life because by the end of it, his ex-girlfriend had gotten drunk enough to sleep with him again. I could not help but to laugh at the ignorance of the situation, but I knew there was no joke about it to this guy. Getting drunk, getting laid, getting high and watching illusions on the internet, that was his life, and he enjoyed it very much.

I took a pass through an imaginary photo album in my head to see what my life might look like if I simply decided to give up on this God thing. Picturing myself standing there half-naked with glazed eyes, a beer in my left hand, my right arm slung across my best-friends girlfriend, quite honestly, I laughed aloud at my reflection in the window. However, I knew there was more to it than that.

After the realization of what life would be like if I simply renounced my faith, the very next breath was as if I were at the bottom of a lake, my feet tied to a concrete block, breathing through a coffee straw. You see, if I abort my faith, I am immediately burdened with the rigorous worldly standards of which must be abided by in order to achieve a happy temporal life. Only the goal of a happy life is not an attainable one. As Jefferson so honestly wrote, only the pursuit of happiness is offered. For if there is no God, there is no afterlife; if there is no after life, death places a limit on every joy.

Furthermore, if I abort God, the only source of validation for myself will be that of humanity. This means I will have to join in on the battle to get to the top of the invisible socio-economic ladder, created by humanity, so that I may be accepted and better than the guy next to me. I will have no choice but to build up treasures on this earth, so that I may enjoy my life up until the millisecond before I die, at which time death will render all in vain. Also, if I have truly learned not to conform to the ways of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of my mind, it is now impossible for me to betray my intellect and conform yet again to the illusions of reality.

Even if I betray my God, from the bottomless pits of my soul will be a shriek for something infinite, something that transcends the temporal world, and that something refers to God. In the words of Jean Paul Sartre,”I cannot deny, that my whole being cries out for a God I cannot forget.“