Conversion

I gave my life over to Jesus about three decades ago. I didn’t know what I was really doing. I had no clue that the Holy Spirit was working inside of me. I don’t know if it was working inside of anybody else. I still remember the person who shared the gospel message, the essential gospel message. He talked about feeling the rhythm of music in his legs, but not in his arms. He was a drummer.

The rhythm needed to move from his legs to his arms. He couldn’t play the drums if he couldn’t make that transition. He said the same thing happened in his life. He grew up with the rhythm of the gospel in his mind. He knew it in his mind but he had difficulty transferring it to his heart.

Today the gospel hasn’t changed from that campfire experience about thirty years ago. Every day I am seeking out that rhythm. I want to make that transfer from my mind to my heart. I think both are important, the mind and the heart, but that transfer is key. It is the Holy Spirit working inside of me delivering through the layers of sin that try to keep it out.

Jesus I pray you continue to allow my heart to know the way my mind knows. Allow your Spirit to work in me.

Love is Not Hell

The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. The Four Loves

God's Reaction to Violence

My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with man in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…if God were NOT angry at injustice and deception and did NOT make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship. ~ Volf