More Thoughts On Family

I read this, this morning, and reflecting upon it, I see some things that tie in with what I posted earlier regarding seeing who and what ‘family’ just might be.

As our loving Father brings in the needed and ongoing separation between our spirit and our soul, that internal separation will spell (and spill out) more often than not an external separation, i.e. great loneliness, and isolation, but there is a divine and loving heart behind all of this newly discovered prolonged pain.

It has nothing to do with trying to be better than (there is nothing sacred about being sanctimonious) or trying harder to please God by trying harder. But in fact it is us being drawn into a realm of reality that yielded to will bring forth Life out of death, Light out of darkness, but it is a process, being processed by the very Word that was fully processed by the same Father, our Father!

How many times has this same story unfolded through out the centuries, from the earliest of times even shortly after the church was birthed on the day of Pentecost?

“Christians have always tended to transform the Christian Revelation into a Christian religion. People tend to transform Christianity into a religion because the Christian faith obviously places people in an extremely uncomfortable position: ­ that of freedom guided only by love and all in the context of God's radical demand that we be holy.”

I wonder as I am being awakened in this new world of His reality, ‘without holiness, no man shall see God?’
The Holy One is in His temple, in me, but is this reality worth all that it will cost me?
Lord, be it done in me according to your Word!

Rich

Faith vs Belief by Jacques Ellul

Belief provides answers to people's questions, so as to find assurance and provide a solution; so as to fashion for themselves a system of beliefs. Faith is not to supply us with explanation, but to get us to listen to God's questions. Belief talks and talks, it wallows in words, it takes the initiative to explain. Faith listens patiently. Belief brings people together, joined in the same institutional current, oriented toward the same object of belief, sharing the same ideas, following the same rituals, enrolled in the same organization, speaking the same language. It has the social benefit of consensus and identification. Faith individualizes. It has to do with a personal relationship with God in which God confers each with unique identity. Faith separates people and makes them unique, set apart for what God wants to do. Belief is antithetical to doubt. It is the basis of fundamentalism; people unbending in their convictions, intolerant of any deviation. In their articulation of belief they press rigor and absolutism to their limits. Belief is rapidly transformed into passwords, rites, orthodoxy. Faith recognizes doubt. Faith puts to the test every element of my life and society. It leads me to question all my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs, and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity."

taken from Jacques Ellul - Living Faith.