I can totally understand you are busy and you telling me you don’t have time to answer something is fine, even while you asked me questions on two unrelated subjects and are now asking for a more indepth response that you don’t have the time to appreciate. It’s totally fine.
I tried to have that conversation as the thread will show. Besides my comments being ignored, something about the supposed meaninglessness of non-Christian lives became a bigger concern.
In case you or anyone else missed it, because I didn’t quote your question in my reply.
Nope. I saw it. I read it. I understood it.
I”m wondering, among other things, where those fit, to whom God has not made himself known, though?
Ripe for the harvest is my first thought.
I don’t know what you’re getting at, Mike.
I don’t have time to draw you out. Feel free to pull your thoughts together and spell it all out for public view. I look forward to reading a fuller explanation of your thoughts and then trying to discuss them with you and others. But phrase by phrase is not possible for me.
Ripe for the harvest means those who don’t know God are free to be introduced to him… sorry for oversimplifying it, I thought that would be a meaningful statement as it is something that Jesus referred to when he said the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.
Knowing God can be complicated as that book I recently linked makes clear, but I do not think it necessarily has to be.
Not to leave my previous comment hanging in mid air. I’ll add that knowing God is only possible through Jesus Christ, and there is an important apologetic for this found in Acts 2:14-36. An apologetic that I am so glad to have found in Craig Keener’s magnificent commentary on Acts. The section for Acts 2:14-40 composes 600 pages for the digital format I am using. There he writes:
“Peter makes an argument from Scripture that the risen one is the Lord (2:25–31, 34–35), an argument from the testimony of eyewitnesses and the Spirit’s present confirmation that Jesus has risen (2:32–33), with the resulting conclusion that Jesus is the Lord (2:36).”
The argument or testimony from Scripture is specific in this passage which relates to Peter’s context. In a broader context, like a dialogue I might have with someone who is unfamiliar with the testimony of Scripture, I think it would be worthwhile to go through John Walton’s brief survey of the OT which can be found here:
My big takeaway from that course was how valuable the presence of God was to the people of God in the OT world. I’m going to give it another listen as I would like to see how he draws out the promises for the New Covenant.
(10 minutes into the first lecture and it is better than I remembered. Numerous rich allusions to the New Covenant promise of Immanuel.)
I tried meditative prayer, but I suffer too much from “monkey mind.” Here’s a different type of contemplative prayer that incorporates the body:
Haha. Tractatus is such a weird book no one would publish it until Russell agreed to write an introduction explaining it, but Bertrand didn’t understand it either. Wittgenstein went through it line-by-line with him and still hated Russell’s intro. By this time, their relationship was like the scene in Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon lights his math research paper on fire and the professor puts it out in a panic. If you want to get the gist without the headache, Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk, also a friend of W’s and a philosopher in his own right, has a fantastic short book.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Wittgenstein/dp/0393328201
Here’s why Russell had such a problem with Tractatus:
I believe I can relate. Thanks for the article. Maybe there’s something there for me.
Judging from where and when he wrote it, how could it be anything but weird?
This is what I mean by the most important things, reflected in my fictitious headlines.
This is the lifetime of hard work of being a Christian.
In the context of Asbury, I can only repeat, it’s too early to know if this is a revival or an mass emoting. I am well-familiar with the grip of powerful emotions and the pressure of them from around me. Real revival leaves lasting changes that lead to that long obedience in the same direction. And it doesn’t have to happen in a public setting; mine hasn’t. How can we possibly know yet, if that’s what has happened — or how many people will have taken on the long route? This is the work of a lifetime.
It feels like the rules have changed for those who confess Christ and those who do not. I’ll need to reflect on this a little longer to be sure.
Seems like abiding in Christ to me.
I’m sorry I missed this. What headlines?
In the longer post I quoted Peterson in. Headline about the husband caring for his wife, and whatever the other one was.
At work today. My break is done, so I wont be back for a while.
It seems like, and this is my gut feeling, which is very preliminary and open to correction: you are extremely skeptical of a believers testimony different from your own and considerate to the point of (nearly) agreeing with the unbelievers testimony.
I am skeptical of many things. That doesn’t mean I never believe things, but want some evidence of the truth of the matter. By nature. I am rarely an early adopter of anything, and question myself, when I am.
Anything popular, eye-catching, obvious puts me on guard. Since childhood. It’s how God made me and others like me. We are the unwelcome counterbalance at the party. We can’t help ourselves. Once my kind has tested the spirits, we are likely to join in, where and how we feel comfortable.
I can’t change the hard-wiring. God gave it to me and the church for a reason.
Honestly, I said this to a friend of ours, I like this toughness about you.
It had to do with a comment you made to Klax about a bloody mouth, and was very impressed by the grit I saw.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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