The Offender

The act of inflating myself helps me to see how worthless I truly am. My only worth comes from what Christ has done in me. Deep down, I know that whatever attacks that someone makes on me are warranted because I am a sinner. Being a sinner means failing to give the glory to God. I fail in this constantly. Any comments that someone makes about myself should be viewed as valid but also needs to be balanced with the fact that God the Father has forgiven me for all my sins and it doesn't matter what a person says about me because God accepts me on the basis, not of what I have done but on what Christ has done for me.

How do I react to someone who has offended me? I can pray for them. "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven...Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" Matthew 5:44-45a, 48.

This means I need to be patient and kind to my enemies and not be jealous if God blesses them. I don't need to be arrogant if they stumble or say something in ignorance. I need to care about what shows them the love of Christ and to bring them to Him. I don't need to take into account if they do something hurtful to me. I don't need to take pleasure in self-righteousness and puffing myself up over them but in the righteousness of Christ. I need never get tired of this person being around or forgiving them. I need to believe them when they say something positive about themself. I need to hope that they are saved and become like Christ and patiently endure their mistreatment (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).

Behaving Oneself Unseemly

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. ~ 1 Cor 13:4-7 (KJV)

Love, agape in greek, is God's love. It is the love that is defined by what it does or doesn't do. It is not an emotion. It is a fruit of the spirit that manifests itself in selflessness (disinterest) in favor of the good of others. There is the brotherly love of phileo that is referred to elsewhere, but the love that is described here is God's own special love that only comes from someone who is born from above or born from the Holy Spirit.

The specific part that I want to focus on is the "Behaving oneself unseemly". This verb is translated in the greek as: to be unseemly. It is used in 1Co_7:36 «improper»; That is, to act in such a way as to expose a virgin to a dangerous situation or contempt; and in 1Co_13.5: «is not unseemly».

How would I act unseemly or improper toward someone else? Maybe in the case of acting in such a way with a girl that would make me feel more important or powerful without caring for her good or reputation. Men in our society do this all the time. Learning how to womanize and attract women so as to have their way with them. Buying the 'axe' cologne or listening to advice on how to 'get a woman'. These attempts focus not on selflessly loving and looking out for the good of the opposite sex but of glorifying ourselves to create an idol that someone will worship so that we can gratify our selfish and sinful desires or some perverted craving for praise, approval or attention.

Another way of behaving myself unseemly would be to say or do something that would cause someone else to be looked at with shame or disrespect. How about playing basketball against someone with the intent of showing them how pitiful their skills are in keeping us from scoring or in scoring a goal against us. It is getting the better of someone specifically to lift ourselves up and put them down. This can happen in work when we point out someone else's failures so that we can laugh with others about someone so that we don't look bad.

This behaving ourself improper towards others has wide reaching implications. This is just one of the ways we can fail to show love to others. Conversely, if I want to show love to someone else, I think about their good and what will show them honor. With the opposite sex, I treat them with dignity and kindness. I don't look for ways to glorify myself at their expense. I don't look for ways to dishonor God's command to treat them "as sisters in all purity". In my dealings at work, I give thought to how I speak to people to not do so dis-respectfully or flippantly. I think about the way that I address others.

In light of this, what are we to conclude? Is my life progressively moving toward treating people with more respect and caring less about my own glory? If not, maybe I should re-examine my own salvation to see if I even have the Holy Spirit at all.

Studying the Bible

I like to use books when I study the Bible rather than the internet. I find that in using the internet, I get distracted too easily and get nothing done. I invariably begin browsing for books on Amazon.com or look at some programming web page or update my online photo gallery or something equally useless. There are however many good tools online for Bible study. A few of them are as follows: Blue Letter Bible, and e-sword. E-sword is a program for download with modules. Blue-Letter-Bible is an online Bible study tool that my friend Mike recommended to me.

I find myself being increasingly more old-fashioned. Writing a letter instead of an email, wearing plain clothing, and books. I am creating quite a good collection of Bible study materials and enjoy using them. I do however realize the power of PC and mac programs like Logos Bible software or e-sword. I do like to use programs like that because they have great articles by dead preachers that I like to read.

In studying the Bible, I have a good literal translation, a Vine's and Strong's Dictionary, a greek/english new testament and maybe one or two other translations that are less literal in case I am meditating on a scripture and don't have a good Bible dictionary handy. If I am studying a verse such as Matthew 5:3, I have learned to look up certain words in the origional greek because they often have a wider meaning than the translators used. I know there are certain ones who believe that THEIR translation has the all-supreme-exact-infallible translation of that word from greek to english. In reality, those people linguistically ignorant. Any person who has learned to speak a language other than english had to come to the realization that every language has words that translate differently and there are in many cases no exact translations for similar words.

An good example is the difference between the renderings in the Bible of, "be merciful" and "be propitiate". The english versions of the Bible render Luke 18:13, "God, be merciful to me a sinner!" or something similar. The real translation should be, "God, be propitiate toward me the sinner!" In webster's dictionary, propitiate has almost the exact meaning that the Greek word, hilaskomai has: To conciliate (an offended power); appease: propitiate the gods with a sacrifice. Basically, the tax collector(publican) is asking God to apply the atoning sacrifice to him not to just be merciful to him because God is the kind that just forgives those who ask him. God is not that way.

So we must come to him realizing that our God forgives us through the passion of Christ, that is the suffering from the wrath of God poured on him because of our sins. Because Jesus took our sins upon him on the cross and we must come to him broken and humble, knowing that we deserve the wrath of God and offering no defense on our behalf. We must know that God is just in condemning us and that he cannot simply overlook what we have done because he demands absolute perfection and are not perfect so God requires either that we pay for our sins or that we humbly submit to God's verdict and ask for the forgiveness based on the suffering of Jesus for what we have done.

What should that inspire in you? Namely a life sparked and energized by that reality to live for God rather than yourself. You are a pathetic wretch apart from living your life in light of that reality and submitting to God's ownership of you.

My Mom's Blog

I read my mom's last blog post and I am very glad that she is my mother. God blesses us with mothers and it is a travesty when we don't treat them with love and kindness. Mom, if you read this, thank you for who you are and for bearing with my disrespect, disobedience and self-love.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We are responsible for what we do in this life. God does offer forgiveness but not forever. We can not continue willfully living in rebellion and think that God owes us forgiveness and empathy. We must realize that men are called to repent and turn to God.

Mom's Last Blog

Love Comes From Purity

"Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God;" - 1Pe 1:22-23

What I believe this means is that purity doesn't come from being born again, it comes from obedience to the truth that we have already believed. There is a progression here:

1. obedience to the truth (the gospel of repentance and belief in Jesus, Mark 1:14-15)
2. resulting purity
3. sincere brotherly love
4. encouragement to pursue a deeper love for the brothers

To purify one's soul comes from having been obedient to the gospel of Jesus which is, "repent and believe in Jesus for the salvation of your souls." This is confirmed from the very beginning of the book where it says in verse 3: "he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,".

Of course, being born again, is a new heart and new life. A new feeling toward God and a realization of ones own dependence on God to live the Christian life. The living hope is Jesus. He is alive and we all hope to attain to the ressurection of the dead. Of course, our hope is a confident one. We are not hoping as if we were hoping that it doesn't rain tomorrow. We "have" hope because of something that we believe. That is more of the idea conveyed when God says, a "living hope".

So, as a result of the new birth that comes from God causing us to understand our hopelessness and need for Jesus and causing us to believe only in Him, we are purifying ourselves because we are new creations and we do this by obeying the gospel that we have heard. That is, the word of God.

In purifying ourselves, we are preparing ourselves for loving our bretheren. The wording of the text implies that without purifying oneself by obeying God's word, one can not love someone even in the most basic sense which is brotherly love. If we are unable to love each other, apart from being born again and thus purified and able to finally love each other, there is no wonder that our human efforts at love are always going to fail. Why? because we are fallen from the perfect state that God created us and live in seperation from his divine attributes. We can only be more like God when we obey him. Why? because obedience to God's word means to put sins to death: "sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry"(Col 3:5). If we don't put sins to death, we are being disobedient to God's word and therefore are not pure, and most likely not born again. The flip-side of this is that without being born again you can not put sins to death or be obedient to God's word!

So how is one born again? Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel." (Mark 1:14-15). Jesus said it himself, repent and believe. What do we need to repent of and what is the gospel? Repentance means in the Strong's to think differently or afterwards. This means to have a change of mind about what you are doing. For example, you were going to the store and you changed your mind. In other words, you repented. Why? You repented because you decided you could make due with what you had. That idea that you needed the butter or whatever you were going to get was thrown out because you realized that you had something else that would do.

The beginning of our purification process comes from our new birth. Our new birth is the result of Jesus Christ using his Word to educate us about what we need to change our minds about. What we need to be corrected in is our view of self. Everyone is born thinking that they are sinless and that everyone else sins against them. God wants us to get the idea that we are sinful and we sin against everyone else but the most important one that we are sinning against and really the one that we are sinning against is God himself. So what God tells us in the Bible is, "You are a bad person. All your addictions and problems are a result of your choosing to live your life your own way by your own rules and your desire to live for everything under the sun except me. You have worshipped all the created things but have forgotten about your creator who formed you and gave you life."

So God wants us to deliver and account to ourselves about all these things and wake up and realize that we are acutally following everyone else on the road to hell and that we should fall down on our knees realizing that we can't make ourselves "good" or we are not good anyway and that we need God and that our hearts are bad and we need a new one. We confess our sins and our being sinners to Jesus and ask him to forgive us for living our lives according to our own wisdom and submit to God's solution. Namely, give control of our lives to Him! That is what repentance is and what God wants from us. This is the first thing that takes place. We are born again when we repent and subsequently believe in Jesus. This can take place quickly in the life of someone who already belives that Jesus died and rose from the dead.

It was a strange thing in my own life. I believed (really believed) that Jesus is God, that he came to earth born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, was punished on the cross for the sins of all the world and that he died, was buried and rose from the dead and was seen by over 500 people after his resurrection. My problem was that I identified with the world as being full of sinners and that somehow by praying a prayer and believing some facts, I was somehow taken out of the card deck of the "sinners" and had been placed in the card deck of the "believers". So, in reality, I didn't see myself as a sinner but rather as a believer. The problem is that even after a person believes, he never stops sinning and as a result is a sinner for his or her entire life!

The funny part is that God commands us to actually stop sinning and to serve him and follow him and live for him. We therefore are given the impossible task of stopping sinning when it is physically and morally impossible and told that if we don't succeed in this impossible task, we are, going to hell! "No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him." 1 John 3:6.

That is crazy talk! No one can stop sinning for the rest of his life! Everyone has sin! Only those crazy cooks who yell at people on the street believe that! Yep, you are right. I agree with you! Hahaha! fooled you! You thought I was going to tell you that my s**t don't stink. Well it doesn't I take pills so that it doesn't. But for all of you who still have this problem, there is a solution. Stop sinning and therefore you will stop sucking so bad! Why do you suck? Because you believe as you do. You think that it's ok to put up with a little sin. You try to do things so that you can feel like a good person. You go to church and read your Bible using your handy dandy devotional that you picked up off of the church pew. You neglect however obedience to the truth. The truth is to repent and believe.

True repentance has as its fruit, purity. Purity comes from obedience to the truth. The obedience to the truth is a result of a new nature to go along with your old nature. Now, you are in fact born again. This just means that you are able, in addition to choose sin, to choose instead to obey God and walk in the Spirit. Completely stopping certain sins can be achived but not apart from a continued obedience to God. This is how we maintain obedience, through a relationship with God. We do sin from time to time but God gives us the ability to stop say for example, sexual immorality all together. This is achieved through repentance regarding that frame of mind toward it and becoming obedient to God's word instead.

That's all for now. If anyone ever reads this I guess I will finish it. I sometimes get way to tired of writing and lack the skills to organize it well. I also just realize one or two things and since I haven't studied the passage as thoroughly as is needed, tend to ramble a lot.