As any follower of Christ should know, he is worthy.  But, what exactly does that mean?  Do our lives reflect in any way that we believe that he is worthy?

I know that most of the time my own does not.  Sure, I praise him.  I adore him.  I love him.  I talk to him.  I listen out for him.  I look for him.  But am I really serving him like I should, if he is worthy.

To define worthiness is to understand that he is great.  He is excellent.  He is valuable.  He is important.  He is deserving.

We sing about how great our God is.  We know when we need, he supplies, when we hurt, he heals, when we cry, he wipes our tears.  And even though you probably don’t have any doubts, I sometimes do.  And he sends what I need to overcome them.  He loves me and forgives me and accepts me as I am and that is just a small part of why he is worthy.

We celebrate his excellence.  Just look at the magnificence of his creation.  When each of my grandkids were born, I went to see them at the hospital and one of the first things that always caught my attention was their tiny fingers.  So small and delicate, some not much thicker than a matchstick, yet they worked just like my own.  As they grasped one of my fingers, I marveled that something so tiny worked just like mine did and also had a surprisingly strong grip.  And the fingers of a baby are just the beginning.  Even though with twelve grandchildren, that did give me 120 amazing little symbols of God’s excellence.

We all have different ideas about value.  Some find money valuable, some knowledge, some power, and some prestige.  Some find family valuable, some friends, and some pets.  Some find solitude valuable, some a noisy crowd, some a quiet few.  Valuing something or someone is simply seeing it as very important.  Since this is so, God is the most valuable.   He is the one who actually provides all the things that I have listed here and any other thing that anyone values.  And even without those things, he is simply all we really need.

God’s importance just cannot be overemphasized.  Everything I have said so far would not even be, without him.  If you believe in him, and I did not for so very long, then you know that every day that you wake up, you owe to him.  Without him, nothing that exists would or could exist.  And just think of the fellowship with him.  As I said, there was a time when I did not believe that he was real, and I was a miserable, depressed person.  I did not love, except myself, and could not love.  I am still learning how even now.  And he helps me by, and in, his closeness.

What does he deserve then?  He deserves me.  And he deserves you.  He deserves my praise, my adoration and my love.  He deserves my time, my attention and my thought.  He deserves my effort and my ability.  He deserves my obedience and my labor.  He deserves so much more than I am or can give.  So I simply have to give him all of me.  You have to also.

He is worthy and we need to start showing him we believe it.  There are so many ways we can do this better than we do.  Thinking about this, I have come to realize we blow it right at the start.
What is Sunday to you?  For me it is the day I go to church.  I go to serve (teach) and worship.  I go to praise and get fed.  I go to rest and receive from God.  This is probably what a lot of us do.  And there is nothing wrong with this.

If we think about it further, how much preaching and teaching and singing do we allow before we start getting a little frustrated?  Doesn’t the pastor realize I have some things to get done this afternoon?  A little extra work would get me so far ahead next week.  Penney’s has a great sale and it ends today.  The game starts at two o’clock and I still have to eat lunch.  The kids are bringing the grandchildren over.  Just how much time does God need?

But what is Sunday to God?  Some of us confused Christians like to say Sunday is the Sabbath.  I do not think it is.  God began his work on the first day and he stopped on the seventh.  He called it Sabbath and it was for rest.  He did not need rest, but he knew we would, so he set the example.  I believe Saturday is still the Sabbath and we should still be resting on it.  I believe if we truly used the last day of the week as God intended we could have real rest.  The week’s battles could be laid at his feet and he would guard and protect us in our downtime.  (Thoughts from a warfare worldview)

Sunday is the first day, the Lord’s day.  It is the day our work starts.  What we do at church is only the beginning.  We need to get up out of bed with the knowledge and attitude that this is the day we start our weeks work.  And we start by meeting our God and King for his guidance, equipping, and blessing for this week’s mission.  We have to realize our work is warfare.  The work he began by creating has been corrupted and usurped by his and our enemies.  Our work (mission) is to take it back and help to restore it.  By noon or a little after, most of us are done.  We have given almost all we are going to give to God this week.

Let’s show him we think he is worthy by trying to at least give him all of ourselves for that one day.  What might that look like?  I am not sure but I would love to read some of your ideas.

I do know that to serve him is to love.  It is to love him and to love others.  This is all Sunday should be.  A day of love.  If we start the week off with love, the rest will more readily follow the same path.

Love you all.

It is a little past midnight and I am sitting in the living room praying, praising, and worshipping the Alpha and the Omega, The Lord of all creation, the God who came down to earth to live as one of us and to die so we can be reconciled back to Him.  Jesus is just so very amazing.  I love you Lord and am so thankful for your Amazing Grace.

It was the summer of 2007 and it was another first for me in my walk with Christ.  I was down, empty, feeling so very far from God.  I had been in His service for a little over five years and had been pretty much ‘up’ the whole time.  Then, sort of out of the blue, it felt like God was so very far away.  It was nothing I did or did not do and it was not because of anything bad in my life at that time.  Work, home life, church, all of these were fine and even great actually.  I could not explain it then and still can’t.

But I can honestly say that my worship was not exactly how it had been.  I may be different than most, but I have some of my best experiences in His presence while alone with Him.  Like right now after Tammy has gone to bed with our youngest grandchild and I have my headphones on and have been reading the bible and listening to music. Sometimes it is in the truck, just praying or worshiping as I drive alone down the highway.

But maybe that summer I had been just a little too busy.  Work had escalated to a level where it was almost like having three full time jobs.  I believe that maybe it was me and not God that had been too far away.  No matter what or how or who, I felt terrible for a while, at least in spirit.

Then I heard this song on the radio.  It was powerful but I could not find out who did it or its name.  But I did not forget it.

The Church of God held the annual camp meeting at Metro Church of God that year and I wanted to go but was not only too busy but actually not very motivated.  But I finally made myself go on the Friday night service.

I talked to a few people, found a seat and sat waiting, not expecting much.  I had talked to a dear friend and minister for a short time and had told him a little about what I was feeling and he had let me know that God was still good and that maybe He would be there for me that night.  I doubted it really.

Praise and worship started and I stood and I did worship God but it was not as refreshing as it had been at times.  Then the praise team started singing this song.  I am attempting to embed this video for the first time and I hope it works.  Watch it now if you want and I will finish up below.

If that did not wake you up to the awesome reality of God then I don’t honestly know what will.  It did it for me.  I don’t know whether it was me or God but the things this song woke me up to that night changed me once again.  And it was right on time because not long after that the bottom started to fall out.

Work ground to a halt in September 2007 and is still not good.  Every month I have to go into a rapidly dwindling savings to pay the bills.  The kids started getting into more and more trouble and are currently at an all time low or high maybe, which is devastating to me and especially to Tammy, my wife.  And she is also having some mysterious and hard to identify health problems, as some of you know.

Before anyone thinks I need a special song to move me, know that I don’t.  Most of this time that I have served Christ; it has only taken a thought of how He reached out and snatched me from the very gates of hell, to spur me on.  But I now believe He used this powerful song to wake me, humble me, and prepare me for these rather dark days I am in right now.  This song that night had me in tears and totally immersed in His presence in a way that I have not often felt.  It has that effect to varying degrees even now.  And I am at peace with our situation in a way that I might not have been.

As I sit here listening, crying and typing I just want to say to you all, that He is our everything, He is Holy, He is Lord, He was and is and is to come and I can’t speak for you but I ADORE HIM.  We must dare to worship the Holy Lord God Almighty in all situations.  Otherwise we just might not make it.

Love you all

Some people will find everything I said in my last post repulsive and heretical.  The very idea that I would try to limit God is intolerable and immediately calls into question my trust in the Bible.  I want to assure all that the Bible is first and foremost where I go to find wisdom and understanding. 

What I do not find particularly trustworthy is the traditions of man.  We all seem almost incapable of leaving our preconceived beliefs out of our discussions and interpretations.  That includes me.  But some will say, who are you to question the conclusions of the great theologians of the past such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, etc.  Even the most prestigious contemporary scholars such as Sproul, Piper, and McArthur hold to the view of absolute exhaustive foreknowledge.  Although that is not the terms they would use.  So who am I?

These theologians have concluded that God is so far above us and different from us that the views I am bringing to the discussions here are seen as simply trying to bring Him down to my level.  But ask yourself this. 

When God said let us create man in our own image, did we or did we not inherit emotions or states of mind such as wonder, surprise, excitement, awe, hope, optimism, and other positive human qualities? These good qualities had to come from God; we did not develop them ourselves. Therefore, what is so illogical about a God who also gives himself the luxury of experiencing awe, wonder, surprise and hope? Or is our God a being that has always been devoid of surprise, wonder, and exploration?  As naturally He would if He already saw everything.

In a view that holds to God having to react to our choices we see a God that loves and enters into a relationship with us.  In a view that holds to God being outside of time and far away and already knowing everything before it happens we actually place limits on God that the Bible just does not show us.

Taking the idea of absolute exhaustive foreknowledge at face value, let’s go farther back in time, even before any being in any world, or even in heaven, existed. Only God exists. God sees everything happening.

Can God do anything different than what God foresees happening?

Foreseeing everything that will happen, how can God choose to not create the angels and especially Lucifer?

So what is in control, time or God?  Prescience or God?

Do you see how a known future seems to force even God under its determining flow?

At this strong, absolutely knowable future level, then even God doesn’t have a choice in creating what He has foreseen. Does it really make sense for God to create all the pain? When you really think about it, in this scenario, how can we not argue over foreknowledge while the rest of the world wonders why we bother?  It must have been foreseen. 

Here, some of you may say, “that is just the mystery of salvation,” but when one confronts the true horror of unnecessary human suffering repeated billions of times through earth history, a God who knew it all along, even before Lucifer, becomes either despotic or controlled by time itself.

Do you see how in the theodicy problem, responsibility has to be placed on God if He knew exactly what was to happen?

Do you see how making God know the future absolutely makes God a slave to the stream of time as well?

All of this comes from the Greek deification of time itself, as Chronos, and making the gods and themselves dependent on Fate.  This is fatalism.  It is very similar to Calvinism, although you will never hear one admit it.  Richard Rice said the following in a book called The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God…

“If at creation God knew with absolute certainty that man would fall, He was not risking the moral harmony of the universe in making man: He was simply sacrificing it.” 

And that sacrifice is not the one shown to us in the Word of God.  Instead we see a different sacrifice because of the fall, the sacrifice of Himself. 

If God does truly, absolutely, foreknow all that is ever to happen, I simply cannot see that true free will is possible.  And the thought of having no free will would make me kiss Christianity good-bye.

In the classic science fiction series, Dune, the complete story is about a family who gain the power to predict the future, but discover that they are in fact creating the future.  Their prescience actually created and they are then trapped in their creations. The first in the line is Paul Atreides.  He seeks the power of prescience but, when he obtains it and has it long enough to realize the nature of it, he just wants to die.  But he can’t until it is the right time to die.  Which will be when he foresaw it. 

The last “god emperor” of Dune decides to breed people whose actions cannot be predicted so no one will ever gain this power again. The thing he ultimately craves is someone who will surprise him.

How else can God truly delight in us if not in our ability to “surprise” Him with our right choices?

Pro 12:22  …but those who act faithfully are his delight.

Jos 24:15  …choose this day whom you will serve, …

It seems Joshua believed, as I do, that we have a choice. 

Love you all