The memories of impressions on our lives have been scattered by the winds that blow across our memory banks.
Some of these impressions were made by circumstances involving perhaps tragedy, shock, a pleasant surprise, or a fantastic adventure. Other memories were perhaps made from a book, a teacher, a parent, a friend, or a pet. Memories imprint by emotional experiences such as happy love and sad love. It is these influences that greatly affect our thinking and who we become in life. Our personality is molded by events from the past and present, and affects how we adjust to life.
When I was young, my mother, more than any other person, shaped my emotional personality and the morals by which I would try to live up to. My dad influenced my toughness, my courage, and the humorous side of my personality, along with Red Skelton. My brother and sister caused me both frustration and happiness. I learned because of them to be tolerant and sharing. The many arguments and frustrations we had prepared me for interacting with people. My relatives, childhood friends, and girlfriends made quite an impression on me too. The military exposed me to reality in the world outside of my family and friends.
My parents, my sister and brother, and my wife and children have left their footprints on my soul. They still walk with me across the sands of timeless memories. They helped form my passions and pleasures, my talents and purpose – my personality.
More than any others, Jesus Christ (my Lord and Savior), the Holy Spirit, and Bible doctrine have been my awe-inspiring soul-mates. However, Jesus Christ has affected my life more than anyone else. Jesus Christ is the most impressionable person who ever lived. His impact on history is incomparable and never-ending. Christ is the ever-patient one, full of lovingkindness and forgiveness. He disciplines me almost continuously but His discipline becomes blessing as I constantly adjust to His authority and forgiveness.
Oh, if you only knew Him as he wants you to know Him. Go to the Cross of Christ, kneel at His feet, look up and see the nails that pierced Him. It is your cross – He is nailed to your cross in your place. He died for you in your place. He is ready and waiting right now for you to turn to Him. You cannot get to God except through Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).
If only I would have kept a daily or weekly diary highlighting the events that still whisper to me from somewhere in the stillness of the past. In contrast, the certainty of God’s Word is that it is a highlighted diary of the past, present, and future. It ever records God’s patience and love for humanity. What a tragedy that people live their entire lives unaware of the intimate power of Scripture and God’s Love.
PARADOX AND CONTRAST
Life is full of paradoxical experiences; paradox is one of the paths to wisdom. It is the reality of thinking and the experiences of created life. God has made faith a justifiable course of belief and action. Reason cannot stand alone without God. Therefore, to me, both faith and reason point to God. Creation, too, demands a creator. The sun is still in its assigned orbit and things are just as they were since the beginning of the universe, except changing.
The incarnation brought God to man in physical form so we could see Him, touch Him, and hear Him. That was two thousand years ago. Today, He can still be seen, felt, and heard by the voice of faith and the Word of Truth. The Bible is the thinking of God – His Mind in print (1 Corinthians 2:16).
In life, there is both pain and joy; war and peace. But which is paradoxical and which is contradictory? Peace and war are contradictory. Pain and joy are emotional and therefore a paradox.
Faith and reason can never be mutually exclusive. Faith requires reason and reason requires faith. They are a mutual necessity.
The greatest paradox in life is that Jesus Christ is both fully man and fully God in one person forever. He is the “hypostatic union“ of man and God. Jesus Christ, as God, is exactly like God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, yet He is the only member of the Godhead that is true humanity.
Paradox is not contradictory, it is perhaps best described as two sides of the same thing. Evil and good are contradictory. Satan and Christ are in total contrast. Light and darkness are mutually exclusive. Time and eternity co-exist, yet there is no time in eternity.
God preordained history by His foreknowledge, while at the same time allowing volition. The perfect righteousness of God preordained imperfect history. The perfect justice of God allowed the injustices resulting from the wrong choices of history.
Life is an ego trip that requires humility. Life is a guilt trip that requires forgiveness. Life is contradictory and paradoxical. Life is faith and reason. Life is beautiful and tragic. Life is pain and suffering, peace and joy, love and hate. Life is full of memories, good and bad. Life is making memories every day. Life is living that is ever-learning life.
You cannot separate the heart and the mind – the two are one. You cannot separate man from God, but God can separate Himself from man. The soul and spirit are separate entities, but the soul is lost without the spirit because the spirit is how we worship God.
We live in a paradoxical world – paradox is a fact of life. Change is inevitable, except with God, He is immutable. While God is immutable everything else in existence is changing.
Man’s soul is designed by God to respond to God and to be filled with the spirit. The insatiable void in people is caused by their own rejection of God. Rejecting God is rejecting the life-link (Jesus Christ). Many people yearn for God in their souls, but fill the void with worldliness rather than God.
Life consists of countless decisions. Life is living out the development and result of decisions that make the stories of life. These stories were written before the foundations of the world, yet we live them based on our own free will decisions. We live in the now, one moment at a time in timeless moments. The end of our life has been known from a beginning that was not a beginning from eternity past.
We are servants to the fate and the God that we choose. We can serve God or serve self. When we are self-serving we are God of self, rather than God.
When we learn to stop wanting, when we learn to be thankful, when we learn to love and forgive, then we can learn the true meaning of peace and joy. When we understand the necessity of the cross we understand that Christ paid for our sins and He earned for us our forgiveness. When we realize that the Father accepted Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, then we too must accept His sacrifice and drop to our knees. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” once, forever (Acts 16:31a).
Life without Christ has eternal consequences. Life in Christ has eternal repercussions of the glorious kind.
When crisis comes, it is an opportunity to see God more clearly. What faith asks, God will reveal. What faith believes is important. If we do not know God as we should then we cannot trust Him as we should.
God is not indifferent to us nor to our thoughts and needs. He is different in thinking, action, and results. We must/need experience His forgiveness, His love, His mercy, His strength. We learn to trust Him in time of need and crisis. We have the opportunity to watch the Lord fight our battles and make us victorious in life. These learning experiences are imperative to maturity in our Christian walk, and to an intimate relationship with God. He is personable and caring, very caring, and He proved His love on the cross. He proves His love with every crisis, every situation.
Christ is our Lord God who suffered for us, and He walks with the believer through every trial and suffering. Christ also holds your crowns of reward in Heaven. He will give them to you on that blessed day at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
God does all the work for salvation and the Christian life, yet God gives us the rewards for allowing Him to do so. That is incredible. God is perfectly awesome. Man is contradictory. Man’s philosophy is all about man. God’s philosophy is all about the restoration of man. We are the getters, God is the giver.
The Bible is a piece of Heaven – a gift from God the Father just as Jesus Christ His Son is the greatest gift ever given. We, the body of believers, are the Father’s gift to Christ because Christ died for us and we are His reward, known as the “Bride of Christ,” a “Royal Priesthood” forever.
The Bible is a piece of heaven bound to be written upon the hearts of man.
In closing, I have never really left the road that leads through the enchanted forest of childhood. I have been so challenged by the beauty of thought and thinking and by the contradictions of “good and evil.”
When, as a child, I saw a painting of Christ nailed to a cross, I was shocked by the cruelty and suffering.
Then I realized Christ suffered for me in my place, and I cried.
We are nothing without Christ – He is everything without us.
Just thinking: A paradox is a statement or argument that derives self-contradictory conclusions based on valid evidence and deductions by acceptable premises from norms and standards, ones which do not allow for such paradoxical conclusions, except in extreme circumstances where there is no other explanation.
Happy Studying!