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thoughts?

What would you do?

A couple walks into the door of the church on a Tuesday afternoon.  Their clothes are worn.  The look cold.  And tired.  They approach you and ask if you can help them.  Apparently they have been going from place to place looking for help and finally they have reached your church.  You ask them “can I help you with something?”  The woman begins to tell you how she was laid off from work last month at the same time as their home went into foreclosure.  For the past two weeks they have been living in a hotel.  Her husband then explains how they have been living off of their savings and now their money has run out.  Tonight is their last in the hotel before they can no longer pay for a place to sleep and are forced to leave.  They just want to know if you could help them.  The wife then continues to tell you that they have a 9 year old daughter who is at school at the moment and they must be at her school at 3:30pm to pick her up.  Once they pick her up, they will return to their last night at the hotel before they will be living in their car.  They are hungry, tired, poor, and asking for help. 

What “recipe” do we use to find the truth of God.  For Christians, we say, “The Scriptures, of course.”  And that’s certainly the way to go.  But what happens when we say, “The Scriptures plus . . .”  I recently came across this quote from Eugene Robinson, bishop in the Epicopal Church, USA.

“First, let’s look at Scripture; but then let’s take a look at how the Church has understood Scripture; and then, let’s put that together with our own experience.  Then ask the question, ‘Is God now revealing something new to us?’  It could be that God is actually teaching us something in this moment that God hasn’t had the opportunity to teach us before.  We have Jesus saying on the night before he was betrayed, ‘There is more that I  would teach you, but you cannot bear it right now; so I will send the holy spirit, who will lead you into all truth.’  God had led us to a new place about people of color, about women, and now, I think, about gay and lesbian people.”

from Karen’s quote for the day email:

In Dunkin’ Donuts this morning,
an old lady wearing a tattered watch cap
started speaking to no one in particular.
“I can’t sleep at night.
I have pains in my chest all the time.
My leg hurts and my children do not love me.”

People waiting in line
hid in their cellphones, looked away
or stared straight ahead.

“I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to turn.
My husband died two years ago on the 27th.”

Everyone pretended she wasn’t there.
The girls behind the counter took the next customers.
The line inched forward.
At a side table, a beautiful young lady with matching purple scarf and hat
looked at the old woman and said, simply,
“Honey, please sit down with me,
and tell me your story.”

We find throughout the New Testament, sections which speak to how followers of Jesus Christ are to behave toward fellow believers or the attitudes which they should have or not have toward fellow disciples.  Here is a list of some of these.  The Christian walk can keep us quite busy.  Of course, these things are all predicated on our love for God.  The phrasing is from the KJV.

When we try to understand just who we are, we inevitably turn to our families and communities. Closely tied to our perception of ourselves is the perception of everyone else, specifically those not in our community. This is what ‘the other’ is. It is the group of people that you define yourself over and against. Generically, for the Christian ‘the other’ is the non-Christian. You could map out the groups along all sort of barriers and lines. The “haves” and the “have-nots”, the Catholic and the Protestants, African-Americans and Caucasians, are all good examples. The problem comes not with the intrinsic differences - but rather the perception of the ‘other’.

The subject of pacifism and whether it is Biblically supported has been a recent topic of discussion here on kingdomready and it is something that many of us have differing opinions about. I have been giving it a great deal of thought recently since many of my compatriots here on the site see pacifism in the positive and I have always viewed it in the negative (being the true view of Scripture that is). But since I respect their opinions and only wish to know and rightly follow the real truth (whether that be how it see it or how my colleagues do makes no difference – truth is truth), I have been researching the subject with an intense focus over the last couple of weeks.

On one of the recent comment threads here on kindomready there has been a lot of discussion about the proper biblical view of war and whether or not a Christian should be involved in it in anyway.  Should Christians be strict pacifists to never bring violence against another person regardless of circumstances?  Or is war and violence sometimes necessary in order to protect ourselves from evil? Here on Veterans Day 2008, perhaps this is an apropos topic to discuss further in its own subject thread.

The following article is entitled “What does the Bible say about war?”  It is from the people at TruthOrTradtion.com who share a great number of the same beliefs of many of us here at kingdomready.  In fact, of the big three main belief areas (found in the “Resources” section here on the right-side of the page), they are pretty much identical.

. . . and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. . . For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.  Matthew 6:12,14,15 (ESV)

From these words spoken by our Lord, we know that we need to be concerned about forgiving others.  Like so many other aspects of the Christian walk, forgiveness can be difficult to nail down since it is something that takes place in the heart and mind of the believer.  I recently read an article* about forgiveness that helped shed some light on this topic.  There were five points listed about what forgiveness is not. Here they are.