Listening to God Together

I don’t know about you, but I want to be God.  I’ve always wanted to be God, ever since I was a baby.  I want things my way, in my timeframe, with everything just the way I imagined it. And I’m not the first creature to feel that way.  Creatures have been saying that since before the foundations of the World.  One in particular probably comes to mind at this point— The God of This World, The Serpent, the Prowling Lion, old Lucifer himself. I’m not proud to echo this sentiment, but there it is.  If we’re honest, I bet we all do. When I stamped my 2 year old foot and cried in anger, “NO! ME do it!”, that was actually me exercising Fortitude— the dubious gift that God allowed us after the Fall so that we were able to stand up and carry on.  Otherwise, I suppose, Adam would still be lying in a heap at God’s feet, crushed by the weight of his sin. But God made Him able to get up and leave the Garden—and the Tree of Life—behind. The problem with Fortitude is that it makes us believe t

Philippians 2: 1-2  Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, 2 make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Were you around during the Jesus Movement in the 1970’s?   I remember it being so exciting!  To be a Christian was to be a New Creature— and I felt like a new creature.  My eyes were opened to things my parents never knew.   My parents, children of the Depression, had been devastated by their families’ practice of Christian Science.  There was a lot of painful baggage they carried because of it. I’m sure they thought I had lost my mind when I came home to “witness” to them about how they were sinners and needed saving.  In Christian Science there was no such concept as “a sinner”.  You either recited “The Truth” and got well, or you were sick and they shamed you for not believing correctly

We all rebel.   Oh, we cloak it in softer words—  We resist.  We avoid. We individuate. We differentiate.  We refuse.  We run away.  We talk back. We protest. We riot. We don’t believe. What is a two-year old’s favorite word?   NO! During our development as a child we need to define our separateness from our parents.  That’s part of being the individual God made us to be.  But the seed of Sin infiltrates that plan, entangling itself with the God-given design of differentiation and individuation, and begins to twist the strands together until it becomes difficult to see where one leaves off and the next begins. While we are designed to be an individual who becomes one with God and each other, we start into the sketchy realm of sin when that individuation becomes disconnection and aggression.  Unlike the sinless Lamb of God who gave Himself over to sin for us, we talk about our rights and  what we are entitled to .   And in fact, we were created to live forever in a per