Reflections on God … Man … Life
Reflections on living as a disciple of Christ.
Continuing in Finney’s autobiography, I came to another instance of what God taught him about prayer that I think worth sharing. Here is how he explains it: The Lord taught me, in those early days of my Christian experience, many very important truths in regard to the spirit of prayer. Not long after I was converted, a woman with whom I had boarded . . . was taken very sick. She was not a Christian, but her husband was a… Read more »
The age-old controversy over free will continues to plague us. I have very settled views on the matter. Some of what I believe on this is enunciated quite well by C. S. Lewis in a couple of his works. For instance, in The Problem of Pain, he zeroes in on the one who is truly accountable for evil entering into this world: Man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not… Read more »
C. S. Lewis can often take a Scriptural principle and, just by the shading of his words, help us see it in a new light. And he’s always very practical when doing so. On the difficulty of forgiving others, for instance, he reminds us why it is essential that we do so: To forgive the incessant provocations of daily life—to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son—how can we… Read more »
During this Independence Week, I think it highly appropriate to mention I recently finished reading Booker T. Washington’ s fascinating autobiography Up From Slavery. As with the Coolidge biography I noted on Monday, I had given a thumbs-up to Washington’s personal reflections in an earlier blog. Now, having completed reading his thoughts on life and how God wants us to live it, I can enthusiastically endorse it unconditionally. Washington was an impressive man. His devotion to the principle of self-government… Read more »
In reading through Charles Finney’s Revival Lectures again, I was struck by how contemporary many of his statements are. Yes, he wrote this in the nineteenth century, but the application to what we are experiencing today is evident. See if you agree. In a section called “When a Revival May Be Expected,” he declares, When the wickedness of the wicked grieves and humbles and distresses Christians. Sometimes Christians do not seem to mind anything about the wickedness around them. Or,… Read more »
I like the way C. S. Lewis deals with sin and forgiveness in the following passages. First, he unfolds how people often, but erroneously, think of it: If you had a perfect excuse you would not need forgiveness: if the whole of your action needs forgiveness then there was no excuse for it. But the trouble is that what we call “asking God’s forgiveness,” very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses. What leads us into this… Read more »
All day Tuesday, I was seeing tweets via my Twitter account that expressed optimism that the Supreme Court would uphold the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] because it wouldn’t want to repeat the mistake of Roe v. Wade. I was not nearly as optimistic. Technically, the optimists were correct; the Court stopped short of declaring that same-sex marriage should be legal throughout the nation. But the effect of its decision in Windsor—and its punt on the Prop 8 case—is not… Read more »