4 BEHAVIORS--GIVEN OR RECEIVED--THAT CAN RUIN LIVES

Think back over past holiday gatherings. Were they full of joy? Or bickering? Mocking? Put-downs? Belittling? Godly people and God’s Word can shed some light on how we can bring light and grace to future gathers.

Along the line of family tensions, my lifelong buddy and I, both followers of Jesus, have talked and fretted over wayward children, now grown. Now we’ve discovered a book, shedding light on God’s Word and God’s Word shedding light on this book. The book is called Renovation of the Heart, Putting On the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard.

The author talks about our messed up hearts or souls that need godly formation or transformation.

Consider (even jotting down, if you will), four words. What contributes to messing up our soul or heart or spirit:

Rejection – in my own life: favoritism shown to my siblings, translating into rebellion and reinforced by lack of self-esteem and rejection by dates and unfaithful wives.

Assault/attacks – we observe put-downs and mockery in marriages growing up and as adults, as well as outright shouting & sometimes violence (one wife threw a flowerpot at me. If she had better aim, I’d be dead). As kids, we take these observations in marriages to the playground, where they are practiced in abundance.

Withdrawal – being attacked or guilty of such results in withdrawal or distancing in marriage, and then socially, we self-distance.

Defensiveness – with assaults & distancing in our experience, we think we must defend our every thought and action.

We bring these problems into our own marriage and raise kids who observe them and carry on the vicious cycle. That’s what’s wrong with America and the whole world today, the author says.

God, however, offers ways to refocus our thoughts, feelings and actions to transform our lives. Paul said, follow me as I follow Christ. Few of us dare to say that. Our thoughts have been on our dear Brothers Fred Mackie and Gary Sobol, and they have been examples in many ways of a transformed, humble life. --Summary by Dave Harris  MIND-BLOWING SOURCE

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From stinking thinking to thinking straight & well

Image
CRUCIAL ROLE OF GOOD THINKING The prospering of God’s cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well. Today we are apt to downplay the importance of good thinking in favor of strong faith, and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.  They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in Hume, Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.  They do not realize that they are operating on the same satanic principle that produced the killing fields of Cambodia, where those with any sign of education, even the wearing of glasses, were killed on the spot or condemned to starvation and murderous labor.  Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight. Crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. To take the information of t...
Read more

Challenging our thinking toward more Spirit-oriented study & worship

Image
Some people’s understanding of God keeps growing; their vision of the kingdom of God becomes increasingly richer. They don’t mind being stretched and having to think things through. We can become Spirit-oriented thinkers if we ask the Spirit to help us as we approach Scripture or even the newspaper opinion page or a magazine that stretches us.  We can seek guidance, asking, How does this square with what I already know or think? Is my thinking straight here? Is there something here I need to learn? You can always tell such truth-seekers because they connect the dots between two things that seem to be opposites. They see what others miss, such as when Dallas links a thoughtful, studious approach to life with worship of God. Many people concentrate only on worship or only on study to the exclusion of the other. In contrast, study and worship should flow together. Students of God remain humble when they worship, and worshippers who also study worship with substance and tr...
Read more

Reading goal checked off or meet and know God now?

Image
To read certain verses to fulfill a Bible reading system is not to take the Scripture in, to dwell upon it, to ponder its meaning and to explore its implications. Often, it’s an effort to perform, to check off one more thing I need to do today to be a decent Christian.  This explains why many folks know a lot of Bible trivia but do not meet God when they open the Scripture. To dwell, to ponder, to explore means reading slowly and wondering what life, reality, or even I personally would look like if this passage were really true. It means asking, What is God saying to me today?  TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Read the following slowly: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians ...
Read more