It's been three months since I last shared a post on here. I have not been avoiding doing so but just overwhelmed with starting a new business. Please understand that turning 60 this year and starting a new career has taken most everything I have to keep up. I enjoy the challenges of life and sometimes take on more than I can do at once. I guess that's because of slowing down more. I could blame it on age or I could blame it on the dog but I don't have a dog, so I guess it's cause I'm getting older.
This post is in memory of George Macdonald and the wise contemplation's he has written about over the years he visited this earth. Please tell me what you think of this. I must say I agree with what he has written and feel we need much more of this in our lives.
Have you ever felt like King David…?
“God are you avoiding me? Where are you when I need you? (Psalm 10) “Quick, God, I need your helping hand! The last decent person just went down; all the friends I depended on are gone. Everyone talks in lie language; lies slide off their oily lips. They double-talk with forked tongues. Slice their lips off their faces. The braggart tongues from their mouths. I’m tired of hearing… “We can talk anyone into anything.” (Psalm 12) Long enough, God, you've ignored me long enough. I've looked at the back of your head long enough. I've carried this ton of trouble, lived with a stomach full of pain. Long enough my arrogant enemies have looked down their noses at me.” (Psalm 13) …and are hearing… “Run to the mountains; the evil bows are bent, the wicked arrows aimed to shoot under the cover of darkness every heart open to God. The bottoms’ dropped out of the country.” (Psalm 11) From the Message translation of the Scriptures.
Times like those we wonder …do we really know God? Is He really there? Am I in unreality about all this? Is there a way to eliminate these doubts in such disturbing times? What does a real relationship with Christ consist of?
There are verses of scripture that should make Christians tremble a little….
Matthew 7:21-23…There will be some terrible surprises if what you thought was the will of God turned out not to be. Depart from me!!
Hebrews 10: 30, 31…He will judge His people...and it could be terrible.
2 Corinthians 11:4…If only 30 or 40 years after the church began there was other (false) versions of Jesus, His Spirit, and His message just how many do you think there 2000 years later ? False messages resulting in false concepts of Jesus resulting in false Spirits result in false ideas of the true Christ will. Who knows who the real Christ is? Who can we trust?
Colossians 1:13-20…reveals what God the Father knows about Christ. Are you following this one?
Luke 10:22 … No one can know the Father or the Son unless Christ chooses to reveal Himself to. So who does He reveal Himself and the Father to?
John 14: 21…here is the answer…if we obey him He will show us who He really is.
Ephesians 4: 17-24…But we must be careful ….for that did not come just by divine illumination…it also comes through divine learning as we depart from what we know is wrong and do what we know is right.
“Do you want to live by faith? Do you want to know Christ aright? Do you want to awake and arise and live, but do not know how? Get up, and do something the master tells you. The moment you do, you instantly make yourself his disciple. Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one single thing because he said, “Do it,” or once abstained because he said, “Do not do it.”…It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in him, if you do not do anything he tells you. If you can think of nothing he ever said as having consciously influenced your doing or not doing, you have no ground to consider yourself his disciple. To such he says, “Why did you not do the things I told you? Depart from me. I do not know you!” Yet you can at once begin to be a disciple of the Living One by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying Him.
We must learn to obey Him in everything, and so must begin somewhere. Let it be at once, and in the very next thing that lies at the door of conscience! Oh, do not be as the fools who think of nothing but Christ as a theological person to be discussed, and do not set themselves to do his words. What will they have to answer for, such teachers who have turned the regard of their listeners away from the direct words of the Lord himself, which are spirit and life, to contemplate instead various plans of salvation that they twist out of the words of his apostles!
There is but one plan of salvation, and that is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ! And that belief is no mere mental acknowledgment about him, but involves nothing more, nothing less than to take him for what he is …our Master, and to take his words as it he meant them, which He did.”
(Knowing the Heart of God, p.30-31 George Macdonald).”
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