Chapter 10 from Pilgrim's Progress

Questions

The Lords Day

Marketing day for the soul!

What are we shopping for?

Where do we go? 

What do we need? 

Why do we still have needs, as Christians?

Who is supplying us?

There are indeed many blessings from celebrating a Lords Day Sabbath.  Lord Sabaoth, His name,from age to age the same.  Do we believe that?

Be Glorified Today?

Oh we sing the diddies...

They are a blesssing, but sometimes misunderstood.

I think that the Hymns are like the dictionary for the diddies!

Father, I know that all my life is portioned out for me, The changes that are sure to come, I do not fear to see. I ask Thee for a present mind! Intent on pleasing Thee.

What an in depth perspective of what we are asking in "Be Glorified, Today" Help, Lord for me to keep my sanity in the midst of the crisis. Help Lord, me to keep my eye on the intention of my life that I have set for myself.

Like a pivot, on the tennis court: would you know how to do it, were it not instructed to you. Can we be sure, what we are praying in Be Glorified? I don't want to be outside of Your will, but I can't possibly know what that is. God's will isn't mystical, in terms of obedience. But we make it so, when we pray such bland and unspecific prayers in corporate worship. Help! is the prayer when I am drowning But Present mind prayers, when my soul can think to articulate my request.

Father, I know that all my life Is portioned out for me,

And the changes that are sure to come,

I do not fear to see;

But I ask Thee for a present mind

Intent on pleasing Thee.

I ask Thee for a thoughtful love,

Through constant watching wise,

To meet the glad with joyful smiles,

And to wipe the weeping eyes;

And a heart at leisure from itself,

To soothe and sympathize.

I would not have the restless will

That hurries to and fro,

Seeking for some great thing to do,

Or secret thing to know;

I would be treated as a child,

And guided where I go.

Wherever in the world I am,

In whatsoe'er estate,

I have a fellowship with hearts

To keep and cultivate;

And a work of lowly love to do

For the Lord on whom I wait.

So I ask Thee for the daily strength,

To none that ask denied, And a mind to blend with outward life While keeping at Thy side; Content to fill a little space, If Thou be glorified. And if some things I do not ask, In my cup of blessing be, I would have my spirit filled the more With grateful love to Thee — More careful — not to serve Thee much, But to please Thee perfectly. There are briers besetting every path, That call for patient care; There is a cross in every lot, And an earnest need for prayer; But a lowly heart that leans on Thee Is happy anywhere. In a service which Thy will appoints, There are no bonds for me; For my inmost heart is taught “the truth” That makes Thy children “free;” And a life of self–renouncing love, Is a life of liberty. Hymns and Meditations, 1873

Repentance

Michael Lemays book The Death of Christian Thought tells me that I let my racist bent get the better of me in my response to a book reading that punctured the vestiges of my racist mentality.  I do repent for that and realize that it is principalities and powers that are the attackers in such a battle and not racial or hair texture bents.(although I think there is some providential relationship that we are supposed to notice.). Still I wouldn't dare believe that it has been revealed yet what that relationship is.

The essence of the argument is that Christian Thought is dying in our era, some blame it on Laodicea and some on decisionism and some on racism.   I think we must untangle a woven web of different vines that are choking out Christian thought.  It is my belief that the legend of Merlin and Camelot was an expression of an awakening to the power of Christian thought.  The fact that Merlin is seen as dabbling in the magical,  contrast of the power of Lancelot,who was raised in a Biblically educated family,seems shadowed by the completely superstitious era that we are looking at there.

If we can whittle away the other characters for a moments glance, there was a family who raised their son to believe the Bible and he rose to some prominence in supernatural powers...  There was a lot of supernatural wizardry going on, but coming out of the dark ages, any of the wonders of progress would seem wizardry to those people.

My point to bring it up is that we can either return to those dark ages and allow thought to rot under the cannibalism of idolatry as we see it and God may allow us to see Camelot-like restoration or the complete annihilation of our culture, or we can recoup the ancient landmarks and pick up the pieces of Christian thought, while we have the opportunity.  Only a fool would want to go back to the dark ages, but there may be some nuggets of truth that our entire culture missed in the translations of what happened in the Rennaissance.   I don't think we need to go back there to see it.

Let's untangle the vines which are choking out the Word from our culture.  It's not mystical it takes effort and mental effort.

"colorless Evangelical Thinking".

The Unchristianizing of the English thinking mind?

The growth of a polytheistic world view in thinking and the rejection of Christian testimony as legitimate in e public arena...

Slavery affected India and the Americas in different ways.  The dehumanization of an entire race of people has remained a global phenomenon.  We legitimize certain expressions of overcoming the repercussions and devalue others.  Whatever gets you on the economic totem pole is actualized.  Religion is valued if it motivates you to get up from poverty and self deprecation.   

There seems some relationship between the way we view our hair and our thinking.  The Indians got the white mans hair some how in the interaction and the American blocks got an interspersing of the complexion.  This complexion phenomenon crops up at very unassuming times.  You can have two black parents have a nearly white colored child with straight hair and a biracial couple have a very dark child.  It seems odd, but that doesn't seem to happen in the Indian interaction.  They keep their moderate tone of complexion and the hair is the only showing of the interaction between them.

I may be begging the relationship between the respect for their thinking that was received and the hair.  I only use it to show the relationship.  There is a relationship between a culture that divorced itself from the African thinking in America and an amalgamation that was allowed in India.   They really respected their maintaining an idolatrous relationship and despised the acceptance of Christianity, because of the conviction that its acceptance brought.   How could a person see Christ in the devaluing of their humanity?

How could a person embrace a religion that relegates them to eternal subhuman status?  We will be judged by our respect for the humanity of others.  White and Black now as even in thinking must find a way to reconcile the unpaganism of our Christian routes, or the polytheism of India stand in the wings waiting to subdue us all.  Reading books on thinking and mind development, the Middle East has flooded the market with philosophies.  While we Christians still think that the growth of Christian thinking is leaning on a crutch of emotional ineptness.

Where are the developments of truly Chritian thought? Line upon line, etc.  God give us grace to recapture the lost comradery to develop a "colorless Evangelical Thinking".

A few thoughts about chasing God's heart

David's strategies and Saul's

Saul started out reacting to conflict...

Saul started out asserting his authority...

Saul started out dividing the people...

The woeful lack of seeking counsel from God or man...

He did not request prayer or guidance from elders

Psalm 23 as David's example of strategizing

Looking at God's perfections and seeking to emulate that.

The concept of giving others what they don't deserve...in a good way

Peacetime strategies...

Not imitating the bad that's been done to me...

Accumulating to yourself counsellors of goodness.

Seeing the kingship as an opportunity to share Gods mercy with His inheritance...

Samuel lamented the disobedience of the people, but he was also swift to bring them back to a view of repentance and obedience as a way of life.

David made himself accountable by writing the thoughts of his heart concerning so many matters.  God helped him sort out his thoughts and reflect righteousness...

I know that I am not worthy to Receive You Lord!

Is the doctrine of total depravity too deep a concept for child rearing?

It seems premature when you look into the eyes of your helpless newborn to suffuse yourself into the realities of what he or she really is.  But it isn’t.  You look into nutrition for this human child.  You don’t go to the pet store or the plant store for its food.  In the same way, you should be prepared for the day when he shows out in the real human way that all children do.   

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers” is my favorite verse when I had been expecting.  Some have entertained angels unawares.   I am still sure that some, if not all of my children may still be Angels, yet I am instructed to rear them as humans even though.  

The truth about their condition in Adam will inoculate them from the shock that their sins would have incurred.  We are born with a propensity to sin, but when we sin we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

The memorization of scripture may have been poopooed as a puritanical relic from bygone eras, but many a millennial Christian has had to make use of their parental home training when negotiating the curves of real life and this has been true of every epoch of time.   Social media and the  Internet and solar powered cars do not change the real and true make up of humanity, nor that of sin.   We need a savior more than we need a new cell phone.  We need a Savior more than we need to post our updated status or Instagram this event.  We need a Savior and all of these conveniences simply enforce the intensity of that truth.

Be the one who knows the depths of truth about yourself.  I am not good on my own.  I am not worthy of the goodness Jesus spent and lavished on me.   I need his undeserved favor

When I come into Your presence:

I would not even presume to think that I know what humility means. I ask Your Word to search my soul, Dear God. I would not even know that I am puffed up in pride, if Your Word hadn't told me so. I cannot humble myself, Dear God because my soul is impotent to such things. I am in pride to put myself forward as an example of worship and praise. You alone are worthy of all the glory and I condemn in my own soul, even the outward expressions of such self aggrandizement as to think that I am truly humble, when I know that I am not.

I look at my hands and remember that you have said to cleanse your hands and to cleanse my heart and remember that I have no power to do so. My expressions are of imploring and exaltation that I know that although I am altogether unworthy of your attention, You promised to cleanse me, even from this day's defilements. I would not presume to take the glory from a holy God in turning my attention to myself. God cleanse my heart and my hands and my mind and make me worthy to lift them unto You in undefiled and selfless worship for Your Glory, because of the blood of Jesus. Amen.