fiddler329

I realized a while back that the most powerful part of prayer (at least from the human perspective) is really "petition." We're told "ask and you shall receive" and it's easy to take that promise at face value and go along praying for health, wealth, and happiness or whatever. But it doesn't really work like that: the promise is more accurately "ask for something that's in the will of God and you shall receive." So ideally when you pray, you should be praying for things that are in God's will. The catch is that there are very few things we can be absolutely certain are in the will of God. Makes it real difficult to know what to pray for and how it feels to be praying in the will of God. So what's important about "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done" is that it consists entirely of things that we're absolutlely certain are God's will. There is absolutely no doubt whatesoever that God's intention is that His kingdom will come. No doubt that His will will be done. Even if we don't understand the details of God's will the way we understand more concrete things, when we pray this prayer we are 100% in synch with God. I know this is skipping ahead, but I think I'd be willing to say the same thing about the rest of the Lord's Prayer as well. "Give us this day our daily bread" is a statement of complete reliance on God for sustenance of all kinds -- definitely God's will. Ditto for forgiveness both for ourselves and from us towards others. Reciting this prayer ought to be one of the most ecstatic things one can do, but unfortunately most of the time people rise once a week, recite the words when they're told, then sit back down and go on to the next thing in the service. I mentioned in passing above that we probably understand "more concrete things" better than we understand the will of God. Asking for help paying the rent or healing for a parent does seem pretty concrete. But I've found that it's not really concrete at all. God's will may be that His idea of "help paying the rent" means that you're going to have to move to a less expensive place. God's idea of healing for your parent may be to bring him/her home quickly. Yes, our prayer was answered, but we have to be entirely ready to notice the answer and recognize it as a blessing even when it's nothing like what we expected. And my experience has been that most of the time it will be nothing like what we expected. So it doesn't really matter whether we understand what sense we're asking the Father's kingdom to come or exactly what it means for His will to be done here on earth. The point is to ask and to know that when you DO ask you are absolutely in sync with God's will and there is no doubt that what you ask will come to be.

Repentence is always about doing the next right thing rather than beating yourself over the head for something you have done in the past. The latter is just a sure way to get caught in a cycle of unforgiveness. In Hebrew the word for repentence is "t'shuvah" which literally means "to turn around." The idea is that it is not enough to just say "I'm sorry." You must turn your back on the behavior for which you are repenting. In the future whenever you have a choice to behave that way again consistently choosing something else will demonstrate that you have truly repented.

This is easy to say, but not very practical. Assuming that you're of a mind to speak to this, the situation where a homosexual acquaintance is a member of the same church that you belong to is probably uncommon. There won't be any church elders to help out: it's up to each individual to decide how to deal with the situation. None of us are any less "the church" than a minister or elder, so this makes perfect sense. And that takes us back to what you suggested in your first paragraph: love the person while you hate the behavior. It's not as difficult as all that on this or anything else for that matter.

There's an extremely fine line that needs to be trod here. It's one thing to say to a homosexual friend "I believe that when you practice homosexuality you are living a life that is completely unacceptable to God." That's a pretty cut and dried statement and one that has no sentimentality attached to it, either positive or negative. But one must ALSO say to this friend (or son or daughter) "I will love you unconditionally no matter how you choose to live your life." When we place conditions upon our love or our prayers we aren't walkiing the walk. If you truly love a person you will never put them out of mind or out of your prayers. And it's not necessary to pity them or to participate in their lifestyle in order to do this. Saying "Thank you for inviting me to your commitment ceremony, but you know that I cannot attend because it condones a way of life that I believe is contrary to God's will" is a perfectly loving response. So is gently refusing to meet a friend who is cohabitating at their home or even going out to dinner with that friend and their partner. But there's no reason why you should not meet that friend alone for lunch or invite him/her to an event. Your relationship is with your friend, not with his/her partner, and it's up to you to lovingly choose to keep it that way. Your friend may choose to take offense and storm off, but if you truly love him/her you will treat this as a temporary state of affairs and continue to pray and (if appropriate) to stay in touch. Deciding that when someone rejects your statement of a biblical principle 3 times that you should give up is simply arbitrary and there is no support I can think of for making that kind of decision. There just isn't any option to walk away. The disciples were real blockheads sometimes, but I don't recall that Jesus gave up on them after 3 tries.

I have a really tough time with the idea that some of the Law can be "obsolete" while some is not. If any of it is true, then it must all be true. No one would argue that the Ten Commandments or "love the Lord your God with all your heart" are obsolete, so why should circumcision not be equally important? Having said all of that, I'd also comment that "simply" following the Law is clearly pretty useless. It's not that the Law is obsolete, it's that it has lost its meaning and power as a means of worship. ALL of the laws are still valid (including circumcision) but if we aren't already committed to observing them ourselves (by virtue of having been observant Jews before conversion) there's no need to start. Jesus has done ALL of that and more for us, and since he's now inside of us living our life and we in him and living his we don't need to DO the Law, we just need to allow his will to be our will. In a paradoxical way when we do this we are actually observing all of the Law. I'm also a little uneasy at saying that baptism is the sign of the covenant. Circumcision leaves a physical mark: that's certainly a "sign." But what "sign" does baptism leave? It's not really a sign of the covenant, just a moment of public recognition that the individual has fully accepted the covenant. I think I'm more willing to go along with the person who commented that sharing the Lord's supper is the real sign of the covenant. It does not leave a visible sign either, but at least it is something that you can participate in in community and more than just once in a lifetime. None but those who were present at my baptism can witness to that, but every time I share the bread and wine it's a true witness to my commitment.

God never curses. Physical poverty or other problems in this world may be the result of a spiritual attack, but they will never be the result of a curse from God. Others have already pointed out that material wealth is not any easier to handle than physical poverty if you are really paying attention. I have been in situations where being responsible for money (something that I am trained to do) is so incredibly difficult that I would wish I had not been entrusted were I not so certain that the Lord needed me to be doing the job. Either wealth or poverty may be a blessing (and probably is).

Hmmm. I'm not so sure about this. One thing I've learned is that God makes connections in ways that are not immediately obvious to those of us who are affected by them. It occurs to me to wonder if there's a connection between Avram's denial of Sarai as his wife and her inability to bear a child to him. Your comment about maturity plays into this as well: it isn't until much later, after Avram has become Abraham (and Sarai, Sarah) and reached a higher level of spiritual maturity that Isaac is born. As they move through time, they allow themselves to learn more and more how to be servants, and Isaac eventually becomes the ultimate test of their commitment to God. So which was the "consequence:" Sarah's initial barreness, or the necessity to give the child who is eventually born completely into God's hands upon request?

It's been great to have a reminder every day to do some in-depth study especially on a text that I haven't spent time on before. Staying in the Word is what it's all about, so anything that helps me do that is great. I'm not sure how it can be significantly improved other than for you to respond occasionally to comments on the board. What I miss in this format is the back and forth that one normally gets with group study.

This has to be experienced I think rather than understood. This morning I was talking with a young student about Adam and Eve and the snake. I wasn't sure when we started where the conversation was going, so I just did my best to listen and help her think through some of the obvious and not so obvious implications of the text. I finally understood what it was all about when she told me that when I'd first assigned her to read that text last spring she read it as a story and didn't really believe that it was written by God. Then just before the end of school her science class was watching a movie about reptiles and amphibians and the commentator mentioned something about how scientists know that snakes used to have legs because they can see the vestiges of that in their skeletons. When she went back to read the Genesis text again last week she realized that one of the punishments for the snake was that it had to crawl on its belly forever after, implying that it once walked on legs. And this morning what she wanted to tell me about was how that very small concordance of ideas had make her realize that the Bible MUST be true: if you paid close enough attention you'd find concordance with things that are observed to be true, not just things that have to be taken on faith. My listening this morning and allowing the words to come out as they would rather than planning a long explanation were about me speaking and God speaking too. I never could have anticipated this conversation, I just had to allow it to happen and accept what came out. Had I tried to work it out myself I would probably have messed it all up, and my student would never have been able to say aloud that she finally understood that the Biblical texts must be alive, true and given by God. Pretty amazing, eh?

"Everything" is exactly that. The only reason we even have to ask what "everything" means is that this is too extraordinary a promise for us to accept easily. When things don't go the way we think they "should," we worry and doubt. This is where "knowing God" (in the sense of the Hebrew "yada") comes in, and "trust" too. If we allow ourselves to form a close enough relationship with God that we trust him without reservation, we will more easily hear the promptings of the Spirit and will follow them without question or concern. And we won't run out ahead of the Spirit either -- we'll just wait to be led. If we were always tuned in to the leading of the Spirit and never anticipated future developments to the point where we got "locked in" to a particular outcome with no flexibility to recognize that we might be on the wrong path, we'd never worry about anything.