Truth About God ” You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One.’ – Acts 7: 51-52 The Jews have always been afraid of the radicals of God. They have in the safety and understandings of the past and fear the effects of these radicals. But when these radicals like the prophets arrive, they persecute them because they are uncertain about the truth. An example is when the Jews didn’t want to believe Stephen in Acts 7: 56-58, ‘ Look,’ he said, Isee heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’ At this they covered their ears and yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and stoned him.’ A lot of potshots have been taken at the Church over the years. In spite of its obvious imperfections, the Church is the means that has been chosen to carry the message of the Gospel to the world. One wonders why a better system could not have been devised.
Then one realizes that any system that has people in it is going to be imperfect. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago that it was in prison where he learned that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not through classes, not through political parties, either, but right through every human heart and through all human hearts. When we give ourselves serious evaluation, we find things hiding in our hearts that, if we could choose, we would remove. Our hearts have been described as ‘a zoo of lust, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.’ Yet the Church, by its very nature, must be made up of the likes of us.’ Imagine yourself as a living house,’ wrote C. S. Lewis.
The Essay on Poetry Analysis: “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God, For You”
John Donne’s “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God, For You” is an Italian sonnet written in iambic pentameter. The poem is about a man who is desperately pleading with his God to change him. He feels imprisoned by his own sinful nature and describes himself as betrothed to the “Enemy” of God, namely Satan. The speaker has a truly passionate longing to be absolutely ...
‘God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. Heis getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense.
What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage; but He is building a palace.’ And thus is the message of the Church. The gospel is carried to imperfect people by imperfect people. Then those imperfect people are to band together to help one another grow to spiritual maturity, Salvation in Christ, and growth to Christian maturity.
Warts and all.
