When a person comes to the end of this temporary existence, it would be wise to reevaluate their life. Only those things done in trust, love and obedience to God will last. A life void of the Father is vanity of vanities. God is God and a life lived outside of a relationship with Him was no life at all.
The joy that a true believer, a child of God will have when he hears the Father say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into a kingdom that was prepared before the foundations of the world.”
A deep hope that all wrongs are righted. That sin is punished and those who suffered horrendous abuses at the hands of sinners are lifted up. Oddly enough, the problem of evil and hope is ultimately what nudged me back to God from atheism.
Vinnie
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"Jung was blunt. He told Roland that any further medical treatment was pointless.
Stunned, Roland asked if there was any other hope.
Jung held out only one- – that Roland experience a “genuine conversion,” a spiritual transformation. According to Jung, such experiences were rare among alcoholics. But alcoholics who had them stopped drinking.
This shred of hope was enough for Roland. He returned home and began his spiritual search.
Bill, in his letter to Jung, told of his firsthand knowledge of conversion. For Bill, it happened in 1934 during his last “detox” at Towns Hospital in New York City. At that time, Bill was also an alcoholic at the end of his rope. Dr. Silkworth, Bill’s attending physician, laid out the options to Bill’s wife: She could let the authorities lock Bill up, watch him go insane, or let him die.
Bill knew the doctor’s prognosis. “My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit,” he wrote to Jung. “All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything.’”
At that moment, Bill wrote, his hospital room seemed to flood with white light. “I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.”
I had never heard of Bill Wilson, cofounder of AA and I had never heard about anyone having a spiritual experience, Mark, but when I cried out to God, the same indescribable ecstasy flooded my life. I was on that mountain top for 3 months unable to grasp what was happening to me. Turns out, we were calling on the same God of the prophets.
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Though not a Higher Critic, CS Lewis writes much about such issues that drew you out of atheism and back to God. Mere Christianity is short, well written and incredible.
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Yes it is a classic. Some very good stuff inside. I read the Screwtape Letters and his work on Miracles as well. My favorite from him, however, is Till We Have Faces. A bit slow at times but the end packed a deep and meaningful punch for me.
“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered… When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
"I ended my first book with the words ‘no answer.’ I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”
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That reminds me of the Latin anagram that answers Pilate’s question:
Quid est veritas? “What is truth?”
Est vir qui adest: “It is the man who is here.”
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why Christianity is no longer settled for you, Klax?
Because there is no rational reason for it to be whatsoever and never can be, on the contrary. And desire isn’t enough. So one must be kind regardless. And it’s a bit late for that!
Klax, could God do anything to prove to you, and just you, that He Is and that He is worthwhile and dependable? Your desire to love through faith is Godly. I think He wishes that everyone would desire that kind of goal. What could He do for you or in you to assure you that He loves you, personally? How could He help you?
Do I understand correctly that you are now an atheist?
I’m sure He’s doing all He possibly can.
Except in my withering old heart.
Dear God, Klas is so cool, so honest, so smart and clever. And profound. I’d like to ask you to do me, all of us, a favor, if it would be okay?
Touch Klas. Whisper your gentle love in a way that only you can.
You, too, are so cool. Tough to understand sometimes. Confusing, but there’s no one like You. Thanks for your love. You are one big God.
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Ordered this from the library.
Have the book in front of me now and moving my comments to the thread for this book.
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When I’m reminded of the instantaneous transition that will usher me in to a completely new and exquistiely beautiful land with azure skies, arid desert like healing air, a constant gentle breeze with the sweetest smelling fresh, clean air, I can’t wait. Other times, when I feel lonely, it scares me to know that the old bod I was once so proud of and pushed so hard, is dying.
I’ll tell you something that sounds a little goofy. I am looking forward to meeting Him face to face. I want to look him in the eye and check him out. "So, you are the one who saved my life. It’s you! Jesus, I can’t believe I’m meeting you, at last. It has taken what feels like forever to get here, to meet you, to talk to you. To say thanks in person. I want to build my log cabin or a post and beam, gambrel style, superinsulated, passive solar house on 10 acres of a southern facing slope with a great view. I want him or some one there who knows quantum mechanics/physics to teach me about them, spending the first 20,000 years getting all my questions answered and visit black holes and quasars.
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The promise of Jesus to His disciples, that He was going to prepare a place for them, is one that I believe we can claim too.
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These words of Jesus and the Spirit of God through the apostle John, encourage me and bring me hope (a confident expectation) for the future.
Mark 8:34 “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? 37 Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
This is such a STRONG exhortation not to love my life here. I am free to stop caring about myself and to fully set my affections on following Jesus by living a life in obedience to the Spirit’s leading. It’s a command not to hold on to this short, temporary life but to live for an everlasting life that is just around the corner.
1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
This command also brings hope and peace. God orders me to be free from loving this world (present time), the character of this present time. His command frees me from the power of sin, lust of the eyes, boasting of what I have and do, and all the cravings of sinful mankind. He is commanding me to be free.
Thank you Father for such a gift of freedom. Now I am free to love God and my neighbor as myself. And when I die tonight or tomorrow I have an everlasting life to live with my Father.
The closer I get to natural death and physically leaving this world, the closer I get to being with Jesus and the Father.
Don’t you just love it?
Well, Mark…“mature” or not…I presume that, at some future point, I will be surprised — presumably pleasantly. But also just surprised. I am accustomed to the idea that we have media-inspired images of God (does He really talk like Charlton Heston?) and “childhood fantasies” (my sophomore-year English teacher said that when we die, we all go to Disneyland)— and that we may have taken some biblical images a bit literally when they may not have been meant to be taken quite that way. They were “baby talk” imagery to convey an unseen reality. This is not to allegorize every biblical statement, but just said on the assumption that God does not have to tell us “all the deets,” as a friend of mine likes to say. We don’t get to know what we do not yet need to know. The Bible does say that “eye has not seen nor ear heard” what God has in store for His people. And then there is that verse about “once to die and then the judgment” which has all the “good vibes” of being in a doctor’s office waiting for a medical test (in other words — can we just skip that part, please?)…But “absent from the body, present with the Lord” is probably the best image. And the rest of “what it is like” is just a guess! (Maybe I am not mature enough?)
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what is this about “there is no rational reason for it to be …”? What part of it is irrational?
That works for me. I guess the trick is to jazz the young up enough to want it without setting them up for disappointment if they come to think their well meaning English teacher’s version doesn’t fit well with them later?
An eternity on the Tilt-A-Whirl!!! …or standing in line waiting for the next ride? Maybe only then will will discover whether cotton candy has an expiration date!!
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