THE LEDGE ONLINE
From birth to the grave our life is a series of beginnings.
Life continually presents us with new learning curves in skills and relationships and gaining knowledge and knowing how to live well in all situations.
Whether we are newborn; toddling through new experiences; doing our first day at school; entering college, or moving into the workforce.
As we are developing friendships, maybe finding our life partner; having children; rediscovering our spouse when the children have left the nest; navigating retirement; or being gracious in old age.
In our daily life, we could be being a friend to the friendless or receiving friendship in our aloneness and in all of these experiences, we will always encounter new opportunities to learn and develop.
Learning from someone who is one step ahead of us is always comforting, and learning from the handbook written by our Creator makes the most sense.
We truly hope we will be able to contribute to that learning experience so let's begin ~
Conventional wisdom or rational thought of the moment can be very misleading and repress vast expanses of discovery.
Scholars of the world have many times allowed rational thinking or conventional thought to even put boundaries on what God can do.
Take love for example. Rational Christian thought says love has a limit and not to recognize this is irrational. But that very thinking provides escape parachutes individually of our own making!
Remember what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount we read in Matthew chapters 5 and 6, ‘love your enemies…’.
God’s GPS for our life revolves around one word with two applications. The word is love. The two applications are; love God and love your neighbor. Now, this seems irrational to many people. But we have the example from the text in the Bible when we consider how God demonstrated His love towards us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
Divine healing as demonstrated in the Bible is irrational to them, so they claim God can now only heal through the skills of contemporary medical science. The same rational thought claims the born-again experience of a Christian is more of an emotional event unrelated to the mindset of belief in the Bible on which our salvation stands. Rationality says the death of Christ on the cross is a noble act but to claim there is power in the blood of Jesus through his death in this enlightened generation is irrational.
“Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” (Eph.2:9-10NLT).
"For we walk by faith and not by sight" (2Cor.5:7).
In John 3 Jesus explained to Nicodemus, ‘…that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and that which is born of the flesh is flesh. Marvel not when I say unto you Nicodemus, you must be born again’.
Jesus Christ introduced us to the human irrational of a living relationship with the living God as the beginning of real life, and for Jesus followers, this has become the new rationale.