The Rational Rabbit Hole no. 15

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword [of division between belief and unbelief].”

Embrace the Within.

Jean-Baptist Alphonse wrote this phrase in French back in 1849 and how much of the truth is contained in these words, “The more things change, the more things remain the same.” After my return recently to Christianity, I see that even though I have changed in my faith and understanding of God, there are many folks still playing the same games with God and the world of mankind. I see that many are still missing the warning of Christ present in both Matthew and Luke about serving two masters or two gods. If you are unfamiliar with that warning, then here are two translations of those warnings:

“How could you worship two gods at the same time? You will have to hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t worship the true God while enslaved to the god of money”(Matthew 6:24 TPT).

“It is impossible for a person to serve two masters at the same time. You will be forced to love one and reject the other. One master will be despised and the other will have your loyal devotion. Your choice between God and the wealth of this world is no different. You must enthusiastically love one and definitively reject the other”(Luke 16:13 TPT)

And I see that folks are still trying to follow the ways of the world while saying they are following the ways of Christ. That doesn’t work out well in the end for your soul. My time away from Christianity was in my failure to see that the problems I had with Christianity were not problems with the Father, Son, or Spirit, these problems I had were with people getting caught up in things that were not Christian. Now, after my return to the Word, I see that much of those same problems are still evident in folks playing church. Over the past two decades, I see this played out in Catholic churches in the Easter and Christmas Catholics. I see folks online posting scripture and still morally confused. I see folks professing Christianity BUT lacking a love of God which lies at the core of both the Ten Commandments and Christ’s Two Commandments. Without loving God, the path forward is problematic.

In my days away from Christ, I wasn’t the most immoral of beings. I was looking for a set of guidelines that made sense for my life. I found a lot of those moral guidelines in libertarian, stoic, voluntaryist, and anarchist philosophies. BUT those ideas were not the end of my journey as I thought they might be. My journey for truth led me to the Truth. You can live a moral life. You can do good without being a Christian. You can practice the nonaggression principle, you can respect the right of choice, you can live a life where you do not hurt people and do not take their things, BUT that is not enough to make you a Christian. Being moral isn’t enough to make you like Christ.

You can be a good enough person without being a follower of the Almighty. You can do well enough as an atheist or an agnostic to be morally centered and not filled with hypocrisy. Then what’s the point of calling yourself a follower of Christ and not being morally centered and being a hypocrite? I just don’t get it. You can’t serve two gods.

There is no peace within your nephesh when you are playing games with God. There is no peace within your nephesh when you are trying to do right by the kingdom of men and the kingdom of God. The great thing is that you can stop. You get to choose your level of involvement. You get to choose if you are all in for Christ or if you want the approval of the world of mankind. BUT you are not going to get both. Your nephesh, your choice.

Peace to your house. Bless your being. The kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyNepheshMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #EmbracetheWithin

The Rational Rabbit Hole no. 14

“Depart from evil and do good;

And you will dwell [securely in the land] forever.

For the Lord delights in justice

And does not abandon His saints (faithful ones);

They are preserved forever,

But the descendants of the wicked will [in time] be cut off.”

Psalm 37:27-28 AMP

Embrace the Within.

I am using a lot of my summer to do some much needed study in The Bible and I am beginning to learn that my understanding of what I thought I knew about God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit and mankind was rather flawed and wrong. And this from a person that was raised in a church with a Christian family and spent a lot of time in and out of churches and looking and reading and thinking about all this religion, philosophy, and spiritualism stuff. I am pretty much misinformed and wrong about a lot of it. And what it took to figure that all out was a passion for learning about what was in The Bible. What exactly did God’s Word say about all the things I thought I knew?

Well, let me tell you, I have learned that there are a lot of stories about how flawed people are. If you are looking for a person to follow by example in The Bible as a pillar of morality from birth to death, then there are going to be a lot of folks that miss the mark. So, looking at the folks that are good role models is a place to start. And one of the main themes I see in that narrative is from one of the Psalms I read today which simply states, “Depart from evil and do good”. It really is that simple and yet that complicated at the same time.

As I have continued my journey over the past fourteen days, I can tell you that doing good is not as easy as it sounds. And I am sure, if you are walking the same journey, then you can also bear witness to the difficulty of doing good in a world flawed by the sin of mankind. We don’t make this journey easy on each other. We are flawed and broken people that sometimes feel a need to do evil things out of boredom, out of ignorance, and out of choice. And there are many temptations and distractions out there that can turn our head from good and make evil look better. BUT, good is what our nephesh yearns to do, to feel, to be. That is why we feel shame and guilt when we begin down the road of evil. As we begin to dirty our nephesh, we feel the voice inside us telling us that we are wrong and we should go back. And then another voice might tell us that we are already going down that path so we might as well continue. BUT, we know that we can get back to doing good. And we know that we should be doing good. And that is the choice we are always facing in this life. Are we going to “Depart from evil and do good”?

Doing good is not easy, it is not simple, it is not without hardship and sacrifice. Doing good is selfless and requires that we lose our ego. Doing good opens us to laughter and ridicule and condemnation. Doing good, though, is the path we get to choose. A path that is supported by God and the justice of the Almighty. A path that has the Son and the Spirit to also help us along our way. A path that has other brothers and sisters in Christ to give us support. There is support out there when we do good even when we might feel so alone. We are never alone in this journey.

Peace to your house. Bless your being. The kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyBodyMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain #EmbracetheWithin