Category: My Thoughts

Random thinking.

A Moral Sin

by Kathryn Spurgeon, posted in My Thoughts

Should God give us good things because we are morally good? Are we confused when good things happen to people who behave horribly? 

 Timothy Keller wrote the following in The Prodigal God, Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith.

“Here, then, is Jesus’s radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because it is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of father in his own life.

If, like the elder brother, [in the prodigal son story] you seek to control God through your obedience, then all your morality is just a way to use God to make him give you the things in life you really want.

One of the ironies of the parable [the prodigal son parable] is now revealed. The younger son’s flight from the father was crashingly obvious. He left the father literally, physically, and morally. Though the older son stayed at home, he was actually more distant and alienated from the father than his brother, because he was blind to his true condition.

. . .

Because the elder brother is more blind to what is going on, being an elder-brother Pharisee is a more spiritually desperate condition.

“How dare you say that?” is how religious people respond if you suggest their relationship with God isn’t right. “I’m there every time the church doors are open.”

Jesus, says, in effect, “That doesn’t matter.”

No one had ever taught anything like this before.

Good Works

by Kathryn Spurgeon, posted in My Thoughts

A Chinese college student asked us Wednesday about why we do good works if  doing just good works will not make us right with God.

The book I am reading has this quote which helped me – if not her. 🙂

“Our work is intended to limit the effects of the fallen world, to hold back the curse, and to seek to restrain sin’s damage and trouble in our lives and in the lives of those we love. ”

From Through His Eyes, by Jerram Barrs

A Passion for Love

by Kathryn Spurgeon, posted in My Thoughts

Have you ever loved so much it hurt? Loved those unlovely souls who need a tender touch from God? I’m talking about the ones no one wants to think about, like the woman imprisoned for domestic violence, the lowly, blind beggar in India, or the drug addict on the street corner. Those kinds of unlovely.

How do we come to a point where we can show God’s love without pulling back in dismay? Come to think of it, how do we learn to respond in an appropriate Christian way to the horrors and heart-rending monstrosities experienced by the unlucky ones?

I have. I have learned.

I have cried with a woman who killed her child, lost a part of myself to someone who feared death, and knelt beside a sleeping child whose mother abandoned her.

There is a method of spiritual growth that allows us to have that Mother Teresa kind of passion. A passion for love, not just any love, but the kind that moves your heart to tears and your feet to action.

Can you love cross-culturally? Give time to one of another nationality? Allow them to live in your home? Listen for hours to one who weeps over an abused childhood so different from yours? Travel the world to look into the eyes of a lonely widow?

Yes, you can learn to love. I have. By God’s grace, I love. Not perfectly, but, with His guidance through my life, I have learned to love. It sometimes hurts so deeply that I think my heart will stop, but it hasn’t. My spirit just keeps on loving, more and more, deeper and deeper. Made possible only by allowing God’s love to flow through me.

He is the source of love. He alone can teach about true, everlasting love