“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” Genesis 1:31

And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.
Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,
It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence
And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil
Only beauty will call to them and save them
So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false.

The sixth letter
As we think of a church with an open door, we think of one which is warm and welcoming. Yet when Jesus states to the church of Philadephia, "I have set before you an open door" (3:8), He seems to be implying much more than mere hospitality: He seems to imply that He has opened the door to their total reception of Him without that reception being tinged by any form of compromise. He seems to be stating that He can walk at any moment into their midst and find them awake, alert, loving and without shame for any reason. Philadelphia and Smyrna are the only two cities that receive unqualified praise from our Lord.

Happy all the time?
"But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy..."
(Ezra 3:12)

A recent conversation with one of our Centurions reminded me of just how off course the contemporary Church has become.

Persuasive, but to whom?
I have long argued that, in seeking to defend the faith of Christ and to persuade others to believe, we do not make the best use of our opportunities by heaping up arguments and reasons which we find convincing as to why people ought to embrace belief in God. Many insist that we do so in the belief that if we can convince someone to admit that God possibly or probably exists, then it’s just a short step from there to proving that Jesus is God.

Renewing the Church (12)

The fifth letter
The letter to the church at Sardis is written to a church existing under a delusion. A group of people can delude themselves as readily as individuals; this is what the church at Sardis did. They deluded themselves. Jesus informs them, I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. One of the consequences of the Fall is that we can refract reality through lenses which distort, seeing only what we want to us, thus blurring and blotting the true shapes and shadows of the circumstances of our existence.

The conscience in the soul
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a more enhanced and fruitful experience of faith is failure to attend to the nurture of our souls, in particular, the conscience.

For most Christians, I suspect, the “soul” is only vaguely understood. They know it to be a spiritual essence and crucial for eternal life. But beyond that, the soul is terra incognita for most believers. And what we do not know, or know only vaguely, we will have difficulty nurturing to soundness.