Life was simple before God. Follow your desires and take what you want and that was all that mattered. Behave enough to keep a job going, keep friends as long as you needed something from them, and at least once a week – do something reckless!
But I knew, even back then, that it didn’t feel right, it didn’t ring true as to how I should be living and treating people, and so that small seed kept me in check just enough. I am thankful, eternally thankful for that seed because without it I would have gone off the rails completely and who knows where I would be now, probably in prison.
If you want to live as your old self following the ways of the world and following every whim that comes along, then stay away from God. Once you let Him into your life He will completely destroy your old self – after all, baptism is the death of your sinful body, it’s an outward sign that you agree that God can take the lead and inwardly He then manifests!
Don’t get me wrong, God doesn’t destroy the self, your very soul, He just destroys the old self and what comes out at the end is a new self, a sleeker, cleaner you. Sounds good doesn’t it, but in reality, it is a messy fight where God will win and He has the patience of God – He has eternity to wait. Once His grace has chosen you, you are marked.
In the trial of Jesus, we get a choice Barabus or Jesus, and the choice is still here today. Choose the ways of the world, or chose Jesus. Following Jesus is not easy, but it is passionate. Listening to the Spirit within and all He impresses onto your heart can be damaging to the ego, but in the long run, we get an eternal life of Joy with God. I am writing this after I have finished a year exploring the presence of God, not in any theoretical sense, not in a tightly controlled Anglican way or Catholic way, but in a whole year exploring and experiencing God’s presence. It hurts so much now that I have finished that it feels like I must experience Him even more or die in the process. Sounds harsh, but I’m pretty unapologetic in my views that God wants a relationship with everyone, and once you taste that experience you will never be the same – Bishops, Cardinals, Deans, all can stand before you and try to calm your passion down but it will in effect not ever go out. What God has lit let no man try to put out!
Pick love or pick hate. Many people have chanted this over the last weeks, but how have we all played it out, do we still curse one another, do we still gossip and stir, do we still sin, in fact, do many even still believe there is sin for anything seems possible in this culture – Love does not mean, “everything is fine as long as we want to do it”. My old self taught me that, I saw the grimness and dirtiness of life before me.
Come on people Jesus offered a way to take those sins and make us a new creation, how awesome is that – it doesn’t even need surgery to change our DNA, it is simply one sentence that will activate this seed in all;
Romans 10:9
If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
There has to be that acceptance on yourself to let God in, but when you do things will never be the same again. God brings Himself within us and when this happens then we have the mind of God, possibilities are endless and dreams become reality. Dreams becoming reality, is that a dangerous thought? Perhaps so, but our old selves have no say in the matter once, He has been let in. Sure we still make mistakes and act as ourselves but we have had a completely new upgrade, our true selves have been activated.
God has destroyed my old self, utterly, I can’t find it anywhere, nor would I want to, but I have a new body, and I am part of the body of Christ. Whenever I find myself moping around I just remember that thought and say – “hey God, what do you want me to do?” and sure enough when we bring God into the equation things get interesting; From healing on the streets with complete strangers, to strangers who are lost knocking on your door in the dead of night, from roofs being held up to protect us, to animals being sent as messengers as warnings, from people randomly telling you an answer you have just been praying about, to money or jobs appearing to supply a need, from phone calls answering your prayers instantly to prayers being answered in more miraculous and imaginative ways that take many weeks to come to fruition.
God is Good, dangerously Good – always!
Amen
365 Exhortations 
How God is One and has a son ? it’s not logic at all.
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Hi, thanks for your comment.
Logic is something we have created with our minds which are infinitely smaller than Gods. God emptied himself to sacrifice himself so that he could connect with everyone that is suffering. He lives for that relationship with us.
Here is Nabeel Qureshi’s explanation on how the trinity eventually dawned on him.,
Nabeel Qureshi explains, in Islam, “God’s essence, or the very thing that makes Him God, is that He is one: independent, unique, sovereign, set apart, and completely unified. There can be no division within Him whatsoever. Distilling this theology in the context of Muslim-Christian dialogue boils down to this: Tauheed (The Islamic doctrine of Allah’s absolute unity and self-reliance), Islams most fundamental principle, is antithetical to the Trinity.”
You can understand why the concept of the Trinity, that God is Three in One, was difficult for Nabeel, then a Muslim, to accept! However, while in a college class, he began to open up to the concept.
He writes:
“I vividly remember the exact location of my seat because it was there that I first opened up to the Trinity, a moment still etched in my mind.
Projected in the front of the room were three large depictions of nitrate in bold black and white. We were studying resonance, the configuration of electrons in certain molecules. The basic concept of resonance is easy enough to understand, even without a background in chemistry. Essentially, the building block of every physical object is an atom, a positively charged nucleus orbited by tiny, negatively charged electrons. Atoms bond to one another by sharing their electrons, forming a molecule. Different arrangements of the electrons in certain molecules are called ‘resonance structures.’ Some molecules, like water, have no resonance while others have three resonance structures or more, like the nitrate on the board.
Although the concept was easy enough to grasp, the reality proved to be baffling. Mrs. Adamski concluded her lesson by commenting, ‘These drawings are just the best way to respresent resonance structures on paper, but it’s actually much more complicated. Technically, a molecule with resonance is every one of its structures at every point in time, yet no single one of its structures at any point in time…
How could something be many things at once? Many different things? We were not talking about the attributes of something like a steak, which can be hot, juicy, thick, and tender all at once. We were talking about separate spatial and electrical arrangements. What the professor said would be akin to saying that Nabeel is eating steak in Texas while simultaneously napping in a hammock in the Caribbean. As wonderful as each would be individually, it made no sense to say I might be doing both at once.
I was perplexed, and what made it even worse was that no one around me seemed bothered in the least. I looked around the room, agape at their blind acceptance.
But was it really blind? The professor was teaching rarefied science, describing the subatomic world. At that level, things happen that make no sense to those of us who conceptualize the world at only a human level. Even the apparently simply idea of atoms is baffling when we think about it. It means that the chair I am sitting on is not actually a solid object, innocently supporting my weight. It is almost entirely empty space, occupied only in small particles moving at incomprehensible speeds. When we think about it, it seems wrong, but it’s just the way things are in our universe. There’s no use arguing about it.
I turned my glance away from the other students, concluding they had not blindly accepted a nonsensical concept. They had just realized before I did that there are truths about our universe that do not fit easily into our minds.
My eyes rested on the three separate structures of nitrate on the wall, my mind assembling the pieces. One molecule of nitrate is all three resonance structures all the time and never just one of them. The three are separate but all the same, and they are one. They are three in one.
That’s when it clicked: if there are things in this world that can be three in one, even incomprehensibly so, then why cannot God?” [2]
As I have said before, the Trinity is unique and there is nothing that one can point to that is a strict analogy or parallel to it; however, I find analogies such as this one are helpful in demonstrating that the Trinity is not self-contradictory or illogical.
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