Beware the religious

Well do I remember an alcoholic friend. He was a member of same church as I after his wonderful conversion.
If pressed he would tell of those days when his wife would come to haul him home from the gutter after a drinking spree.
He finally found the power to say No to booze and the joined the church where he found that power.
However his wife left him. I have always thought that she was too blame. He was my friend after all, but this morning as I thought again of this friend of long ago perhaps it was she who found that it was impossible to live with a religious person. Living with an alcoholic may have been easy in comparison.
Religion has after all been too blame for war, strife and almost any of humanities woes.
Is this not the reason I wrote Adam's Clay, if not to show that true Christian faith is against religion?
Jesus seemed to go out of his way to show up the religious leaders of His day as frauds and liars, but are not faith and religion the same thing?
Never! Faith is in what God does and religion is what I have done. The two cannot be further apart and explains the problem with religion and why it has caused so much trouble.

Ockham's razor slashes again.

At first it horrified me. I used Ockham and his razor to slash away the story parts from Adam's Clay, leaving no more than the essential thought. I found that my book had reasoned away the need for God's design of the World.
Since the book is a allegory of the Spirit filled Christian life you can understand my panic.
In the story Sam Goma has learned how to time-travel, both forward and back in time and while he does this he can change things - to design and change the design, for better or for worse, and do it over and over until he creates the design with an acceptable outcome - something I would normally expect God to determine.
This strange turn of event was precipitated by Sam's converts burning churches, temples and mosques ( a la Martin Luther's followers) and he is considering his options. One is to go back in time and change things and prevent the disaster.
This is when I applied the razor, but is the thought not simply profound? That we as God's instruments - Spirit-filled Christians - must carry out God's Plan.
If by some 'miracle' we discover time travel, it is not so that we can 'fix' a flaw in the design?

Here's the challenge - even if we cannot travel through time, we can still change the future - to implement God's plan and design for the future, by fixing things distorted and damaged by the law of sin and death.
Maybe if we start doing things correctly we may yet experience the wonders of time-travel.

A Letter to the 21st Century Church - Chapter 1

I bring you good news. Jesus is alive. Through him, we too are alive, because Jesus defeated death for us and saved us from two things. Wonder of wonders he saved us from SIN and DEATH and from everything associated with these two curses on humankind.

You may say to me, "Geoff, what do you mean by that?"

We cannot separate the two concepts, sin and death, by much. Like the meaning of words soul and spirit, they are closely associated and often used interchangeably, but then perhaps incorrectly.

Preachers and bible teachers major on the thought that Jesus died for our sin. We understand how the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is sufficient, and satisfactory to take away the penalty that we would otherwise need to bear.

They may go as far as to explain that part of the penalty for sin is death, but that is about as much as we learn about it

As a result, while we understand clearly that God has forgiven and forgotten our sin, we are not at all sure about what has God done with death?

It can only mean that God has forgiven and forgotten our death, right?

Our experience tells us something different, so we reason that we understand things incorrectly.

The 'death,' which the bible associates with sin, that is gone and past away, cannot mean what we read. Therefore, we invent something that fits. Something that we cannot experience, but something we can only accept by faith, so we reason it must mean 'spiritual' death.

This introduces my first point; we so readily accept things that bible scholars tell us from the pulpit without question. If it means spiritual death then surely it must also means 'spiritual' sin.

Spiritual sin is as meaningless as spiritual death.

Geoff, are you saying that death means death, the death that happens when someone dies?

Yes, but we cannot accept it. Therefore, we don't, and so we die. As I read the Acts of the Apostles, I get the distinct impression that they believed that death had passed away. It is what they believed, well until many of the flock actually started dying and then they started preaching that some other generation would be the one, never to die.

More and more, today we hear the question, "Is our generation, that generation?"

Many thanks to Prophet Kobus of Spirit Word Ministries for bring this thought to our attention. See the link to Spirit Word Ministries on the left panel.

A Letter to the Churches of the 21st Century - Introductions

Grace and great joy be to you all.

Writing a letter to the church implies that I am writing to all the people in the church. In addition, I can assume that you are a Christian and that you call yourself a Christian.

Okay I have defined you. Now allow me to introduce myself. My name is Geoffrey, but you may feel free to call me Geoff, pronounced like the name, "Jeff."

I became a Christian when I was at High School and now am about to turn 65 years old. Hence, I have seen many signs and wonders, heard many sermons, and read countless explanations of the meaning of doctrines and bible teachings, but that doesn't give me my authority to write to the churches. My authority is as fresh as the latest thing the Holy Spirit within me, has whispered to me in that still small voice which has such an imperative that there is no confusing the source.

Have I trained as a preacher? No, I am a computer programmer, and trained as an electronics technician. All that proves is that I have some measure of logical thought capacity and some understanding of how computers work.

You may ask me, 'How does that help you when writing to the church?'

Well, not much, except that I need and have a reasonable explanation for my faith, why it works and the way it functions. In my books and articles, my aim is to share this with others.

The Purpose-driven Blog

When writing anything, it helps to focus one's thoughts on the intended audience, the reader.

In preparation for the hoped for publication of my novels, I am typically addressing my thoughts in this blog to my future readers of 'Adam's Clay' and of course to my family and friends, but I have recently been challenged to also address the Church.

Novels are normally fictional, however there is a deeper meaning to my stories and as such, the truth and the fiction might become confused. I would like to document my intentions here in this Blog.

Not all my views will be acceptable to everyone and more so, because my opinions are not always the conventional, sometimes perhaps even unique. It would please me greatly to generate controversial commentary that I could publish with my explanations.