21st June - 2011
What an adventure this life with the Lord Jesus Christ living in us really is! Each day I can see the hand of the Lord Jesus working in my life. You take this great immense and unformed lump of problems & chip away using the chisel of the word of God with the hammer of the spirit and what you get left is clearly a picture of the provision of Lord Jesus - THE HAND OF GOD.
Yes, I am definitely rejoicing in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Our eldest son left me a very nice surroundsound system with massive speakers. It has all sorts of imports and I mainly use it to play DVDs using its sound system and streaming the video to my multimedia projector. This image fills the entire wall at one end of our front sitting room. I haven’t been able to get around the back of it to look at all the different inputs that are there. With a bit of help I was able to discover two rather neat ones. The first was an FM radio aerial input - now I can listen to the radio with extremely rich sounds. The second import was for an audio in from a tape player. I was able to utilise this to allow audio import from my netbook computer into this very rich sound system. I have been listening to the radio a little bit and especially the ABC national radio. I heard a program about Doctor Who, who is a favourite of mine. The program dealt with the psychology of fear and evil. If you are a Doctor Who fan then you will know who are the really evil beings who appear throughout the series from 1963 onwards. I found the conversation interesting because they discussed the origin of our modern concept of evil. It was interesting because they got involved in a discussion about to corrupt philosophers who have managed to influence our modern way of thinking and more importantly, the modern Bibles which so many receive as the word of God. Socrates & Plato, well Socrates first, suggested that good came about through rationality and academic excellence i.e. the cultured and informed mind led the pathway to goodness. Therefore, the absence of rationality and culture led the way towards evil. Jesus Christ said that loving God and loving people lead the way towards good. Therefore, hating God and hating people lead the way towards evil.
Why this is interesting to me is because the Greek pagan philosophers and their various definitions and connotations of Greek words are used to define Bible Greek words rather than allowing the Bible itself to define its own Greek words. Our Lord Jesus Christ perfectly understood good and perfectly understood evil. In fact the Bible freely speaks of “the mystery of godliness” & “the mystery of iniquity.” If you really want to know what evil is & what evil stands for you need to go to the word of God, but beware, a word that says it is the word of God that has been adjusted by the definitions that come from the pagan Greeks like Socrates and Plato are going to tend to steer you in the wrong direction. A careful study of the King James Bible and modern translations into English of the word of God show there is a marked tendency to downgrade evil and its consequences hell. You may choose to trust the pagan Greek philosophers to provide the “true” English meanings of the word of God, but I certainly do not.
We have the midweek meeting this evening and I must say that I am eagerly waiting for the clock to arrive at the start time. Over the last couple weeks the copies of the book that I have ordered for us, to give us a jumpoff point for a study in the book of Hebrews, have been steadily arriving here. I’m not sure if we have enough copies to start this study but if we don’t start it there remains the Sunday message that I prepared that I didn’t actually Minister. I know at least one of the folk have to work & another will be sleeping before going to work, but that will still leave some of us to meet together in the name of Jesus Christ. Even without any Bible study there is a great opportunity for us to join in prayer. Our planet seems to be in a rather fragile state at the moment but worse than that is the state of the humans that inhabit it. We need to pray that the hunger for peace with God through the blood of the Lamb increases across our globe.
Leone has been busy planting more strawberries from the runners of the old plants. I was looking into an article that tells me that are scientific community has been splicing in genes from fish into strawberry plants to make them last longer. I may have mentioned this before but I am astounded at the arrogance of mankind. Not only do we build nuclear power plants on fault lines but were bold enough to fool around with a very building blocks of life. There is even a trend amongst filmmakers to produce story is with happy endings where genetic engineering has been a major theme within the story. I notice that one of our lady senators is urging us to revisit the idea of nuclear power for Australia in the wake of carbon emissions and global warming & this was put forward just this week! We get all worried about a cloud of volcanic ash careering around the atmosphere and grounding our aeroplanes BUT what about the invisible cloud of radioactive particles that stream irresistibly into our atmosphere from the Japanese atomic disaster. 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster there is an estimation of over 1 million human beings who have actually died and nobody knows the long-term effect of radioactive rain polluting the ground and the amount of radiation that continues to flood into humans to the consumption of the food. The Japanese disaster has been in full flight since February this year & it is so bad now that they can’t have workers anywhere near it. But the fact is there is a continual problem of radiation escaping into the atmosphere. The Australian workers union are insisting that the new cars that are being brought into Australia are checked for radioactivity & there is an attempt to check food for radiation. Going back to Chernobyl the radioactive fallout fell right across Turkey & I can tell you that those extremely soft and delicious Turkish dried apricots that you can buy so readily in your supermarket are in actual fact radioactive. Now, we say, the levels are very low but remember that radioactive contamination accumulates in the body of this type of radiation is dirty. Do we as humans learn anything? When I was a boy we used to have our new shoes, while we were trying them on for a good fit, x-rayed. I can remember looking down at the ghostly green image of my toes nestling inside the shoe. Do we do that any more? No we certainly do not because x-ray radiation is accumulates within the body just like the radiation from atomic power plants &/or atomic bombs. Einstein was sufficiently impressed by the horror of nuclear power that he suggested that we had reached a point that we could never go back from. I’m not trying to be unduly alarmist but I am pointing out that natural thinking is absolutely disastrous. The next thing you know is that we’ll all be talking about “the greater good.” The emperor Nero reportedly played his fiddle while Rome burned and I hope that we don’t put our heads in the sand and pretend that everybody knows what they’re doing.
Apart from all of these fears without within I am determined to walk a life that is as holy as Jesus can make it. With this in mind I guard my heart & while I don’t have perfect knowledge about everything I can walk in the wisdom that comes from above. Remember that God is not against thinking as such he warns about thinking in the power of the natural mind and not considering thinking within the perception of his word.
23rd June - 2011
Today in the mail I received over 20 pieces of paper all to do with different aspects of trying to shut down my business and satisfy the Federal government that I’m entitled to some sort of pension. I get more paperwork in a week now than I used to get while I was working in a large part of my day is spent in collating all this paperwork and making endless phone calls.
I’ve got a few projects up my sleeve and I’m looking forward to getting started on them. Leone is knitting again & she is making adjustments to a white dress that she brought for Sophie. Sophie is due to come to stay for a while in August & we are both looking forward to the event.
Yesterday we trip down to Redfern to pick up my new leg. It is a much better fit although it feels very tight & it looks like a real one! I’m wearing it right now. I must say that I’m extremely grateful to the New South Wales health care system in providing me with such a high level of care and support. I’m sitting in my new chair and I’m able to go to the gym at no cost & I’m glad to say that all my healthcare professionals bulk billing me. What more could a man want?
I’ve been listening to some serious scientific debate on the subject of climate change & it appears that be temperature variation models that caused all this is scarier are somewhat flawed. It makes you think doesn’t it? The problem is that rational debate is almost impossible because of the human ego. You can’t actually make a decision all former perception on rational considerations alone, there is always the element of passion & emotions.
In the meanwhile I’m surrounded by friends, some of them, living in chaotic turmoil. My solution to turmoil is to simply keep my eyes fixed & my gaze centred on the face of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is my centre & he is my enduring rest.
Finish this off now, there was something I was going to bring up but I’ll get to later. I hope you have the realisation that you are in the centre of God’s great heart of love. He is our hope and here is our salvation. Our great need is to trust him to perform the promises that he has promised.
A new blog site
http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/crosslifechurches
Crosslife churches website
Crosslife churches blog
http://crosslifechurches.org/blogs/
My own blog site which often reflects what is on the church blog
http://crosslife.wordpress.com/
Crosslife churches on Facebook
this is a closed Facebook group and you will have to become friends with me on Facebook and get an invitation to join the crosslife churches group
Crosslife churches on Twitter
this is a closed Twitter account and you have to be a follower to be able to read the posts.
If you like cyberspace and social networking I know that you will find plenty on these outlets that will help you and inspire you.
　cheers Danny
