For Those Who Do Not Know

The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place,

and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, 

for those who do not know about God.

Disregard the study of God,

and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life

blindfold, as it were, with no sense of direction,

and no understanding of what surrounds you.

This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.

- J.I. Packer, in Knowing God (p.15)

Image via Pixabay

Sunday Ponderings ~ Rejecting Knowledge

Thinking this evening about a verse from our Sunday School lesson this morning. Continuing in the class on minor prophets, and today we looked at the book of Hosea. One of the verses that arrested my attention:

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children (4:6).

 Israel was in decline and being judged by God. They had once followed Him, but now

• The priests were no longer teaching them God's laws.
• They rejected what knowledge they had.
• They would not listen to warnings about their lifestyles, their immorality and idolatry.

The parallelism of Israel's decline to our own nation is striking.  When prayer and Bible reading were taken out of the government schools back in the 1960s, the decline began. Children being educated in that system of philosophy have not been taught God's ways and have grown up in a society of moral decay. They have a lack of knowledge.

Many of those who have had the teaching of God's ways have rejected it. That is their own doing. I have a friend in her early 30s who has the knowledge from years and years of being taught about God, yet she rejects Him and His ways. She has an anti-God, recovery from religion, freedom from religion agenda. It is sad to see her so empty as she pulls others down into the pit with her. Yet it is her own choice. She will not listen. Thousands upon thousands will not listen.

But God continues to pursue the hearts of people. Some of them He lets go their own way and suffer the consequences, but others He draws back to Himself. For that we are eternally grateful.

Has God drawn you? Do you have knowledge of Him? Have you rejected His ways?  Have you given your children knowledge of Him? Does their educational system teach them about God's ways?

I do hope you know Him. I do hope you pursue knowledge of His ways. I hope you haven't forgotten. It would be so sad if you have. And, oh, the children......

Painting ~ School Is Out, Elizabeth Forbes 1889

Strengthening That Which Remains

A friend and I are getting together this morning for a walk in the cemetery. Meeting in front of the mausoleum. A sepulcher. It's beautiful marble on the outside.

Inside it's full of dead bodies. That's what Jesus called the Pharisees. Whited sepulchers. Marbled mausoleums. Outwardly beautiful. Inwardly unclean. Outwardly righteous. Inwardly not.

It's easy to be like a Pharisee, to clean up the outward and neglect the inward. I like to make lists. It keeps me on track and gives me a sense of accomplishment when I see the check marks tally up. It's too much of a tendency to transfer this to the spiritual. I can check off the outward: right words, right actions, right place at the right time. The inward requires more. It's a matter of the heart.

I want my heart to be in tune with God. "How blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD. How blessed are those who observe His testimonies, who seek Him with all their heart" (Ps. 119:1-2). I have a longing to know God. One of the ways I learn to know him is by responding to Him through His Word each day.

Another way is going to church and listening to our pastor teach God's Word. We're in a series on the Seven Churches in Revelation, and not long ago he talked about the church at Sardis, which had no commendation given to them. I've been thinking about that.

"To the angel of the church in Sardis write: ...I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die..." (Rev. 3:1-2).

I don't want a name, a reputation. I want Christ-like transformation in my life. I want to know God. I've been reading Knowing God Through the Year by J.I. Packer. I especially like through-the-year books that I can jump into anytime and ponder day by day. One of the readings is "Law and Love," based on Psalm 119:97, 10, 125.

"Oh, how I love your law! How sweet are your words to my taste!... Give me discernment that I may understand your statutes."

Packer begins with these questions: "Do not all children of God long, with the psalmist, to know just as much about our heavenly Father as we can learn? Is not the fact that we have received a love for this truth one proof that we have been born again? And is it not right that we should seek to satisfy this God-given desire to the full?"

Knowing God through His Word--so that my heart might respond to it and my life be transformed by the renewing of my mind. And so I strengthen that which remains to be strengthened.

Walking with my friend today. Walking with my God today and tomorrow....and into eternity.

Image ~ Cemetery, by Stockvault
via Freepik

Hope in Our Hearts

I called a friend to see if she might want to get together sometime this week, out into the beautiful sunshine that we're expecting. "No, I'm really not interested in...." I've been trying to reach out to her, but mostly been put off because of her lack of interest. She sees very few people and seldom goes out of her home. If I didn't realize that she is lonely and in need of friendship and has serious bouts of hopelessness, she'd be so easy to give up on. But that isn't God's kind of love, so I'll wait awhile and try another door.

I know how hopelessness feels. I was there once myself. That and God's love is what compels me to reach out to her and to comfort her with the comfort that I received. I know the importance of God's touch through a human hand. But I fear that perhaps my sequestered friend has been medicated to the point of not feeling much at all beyond herself. It has dulled her senses and awareness. There needs to be some penetration through the barrier that secludes her from reality and the joys of living, to awaken her from her numbness and to help her see that God, in his rich mercy, can rescue her from hopelessness and fill her with joy and peace.

And give her hope in her heart.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, 

so that you may overfow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13

J.I. Packer writes in Knowing God--

I have been a believer for more than half a century, but only recently have I appreciated how pastorally profound Paul's prayer was--and is. While there is life, there's hope we say, but the deeper truth is that only while there's hope is there life. Take away hope, and life, with all its fascinating variety of opportunities and experiences, reduces to mere existence--uninteresting, ungratifying, bleak, drab and repellent, a burden and a pain.

People without hope often express their sense of reality and their feelings about themselves by saying they wish they were dead, and sometimes they make attempts on their own life. But hope generates energy, enthusiasm and excitement; lack of hope breeds only apathy and inertia. So for fully developed (as distinct from partly diminished) humanness, there needs to be hope in our hearts.