Patience...Impatience

The first quality of love mentioned in 1 Cor. 13:4 is "patience"...or, sometimes, long suffering

In Strongs, it is "to be long spirited, that is, (objectively) forbearing or (subjectively) patient: - bear (suffer) long, be longsuffering, have (long) patience, be patient, patiently endure."

In other words, briefly, not IMpatient.

The Lord is patient with me as, over the years, He has been steadfast in giving me opportunities to learn patience, to not be impatient (which, alas, He did point out to me is the equivalent of complaining - quiet murmuring).

He uses different ways of achieving His purpose (and how thankful I am that He is tireless, unyielding, determined to accomplish this, for He shall (!!!) conform me into the image of His Son...which I ardently desire). There is tribulation (all kinds of pressures, obstacles, interferences in my plans, and lots of "little" bumps in the road)which teaches patience ...and then.....there is time.

Yes, time. Today, everyone wants things to be done NOW, to move NOW, to be corrected NOW, to be ready NOW. God forbid that we do not have the fastest computer, quickest response on the telephone...and how about the fellow on the highway that "dawdles" (isn't going the speed, or greater), or doesn't move quickly enough after the light turns green.

And to see our impatience illuminated, all we need to do is to observe the check-out line at our favourite store (or any store). Yes, here indeed is a sampling of our hustled impatience - finding the shortest line; inwardly steaming when someone (gasp, choke) needs to have a price check or (even worse) wants to write a check!

Yes, we have come to a time when we now quantify almost the whole of life with...TIME.

Even in "Christian teaching" there is the idea of impatience, for are we not to "redeem the time"? Important to realize that this "redemption of time" has nothing to do with moving faster, getting more out of a day. It has to do with "the transference of earth's time-value into celestial (heavens) value by utilization of the Divine viewpoint; thus we redeem its worth for the present, and for the age to come."

My Father has dealt with all this in a very simple way - a reminder, forcefully made, if you will, that MY times are in HIS hands, NOT the other way around. HE rules in ALL things, and that includes my time - each second, each minute, each hour, each day...yes, every nano-second, to be exact.

And so...this reminder, ever present, has made a significant difference in how I view time...and thus enables me to become ever more patient, and therefore, much less impatient.

And knowing Father, there is more to come. How thankful I am for such insistent, amazing, unrelenting, incredible love...

Thank you, Lord.

First fruit...

In his book, Sit, Walk, Stand, Watchman Nee speakls about looking out over an orange grove and seeing dots of orange colour on the trees - the first fruit to ripen and be ready. However he assures us that EVERY orange, every piece of fruit, shall be harvested. None thrown away, or wasted.
And so it is with God's "first fruits" - the "fruit" that has been made ready to pick in this age. Now. Yes, those that He has called and chosen now are His "first fruit", part of His Body now. However, He assures one and all (as did Watchmen Nee) that ALL will, in his own order, be "picked". HIS time, HIS way.
Being a "first fruit" does not mean that we are special, better than any other (i.e., any one orange doesn't decide to be "first" - that is up to God)...it simply means that God has so ordained our "order". 1 Cor. 1:26-30 makes it clear (and The Message is delightfully blunt): "Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life [a first fruit]. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, nor many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to exposé the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of your can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have - right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start - comes from God by way of Jesus Christ..."
Surely such makes it clear that we are a "first fruit" because of what HE did, NOT because we "made the right choice," or were wise enough to accept His "offer" (such a word is not in scriptrue. Salvation is NOT an offer). No, it is because HE chose us - in His time, and for His reasons, and for His purpose.
Therefore, I can/do rejoice that while I am a first fruit, in time, in the ages to come, ALL will come...to Christ Jesus, triumphant and victorious Saviour of ALL; and then God Almighty, Sovereign Ruler of the universe, shall be ALL in all.
Amen!

Sharing thoughts

It has been a while since writing anything - thoughts have come, to share, but...seems I am away from the computer, or...
Anyway, a friend sent me to a site where I could hear the music, and see the words, to a wonderful song about God's love. It is a bit long, so will share the last verse [and refrain], which says it all:
The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell;
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled,
And pardoned from his sin.

O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints and angels song.

Recently, I watched a video, Agent of Grace, about Dietrich Bonhoeffer...it is a stirring reminder of cost of discipleship, and the peace and joy, in the midst of suffering Toward the end of the movie, shortly before his execution, he says these words: "... after the war, Christians will speak a new language, one which was relevant to the rest of the world, a language that would be powerful, and often shocking, because it would say to the world that God has declared peace with men." Glorious words, prophetic words, of our God and Father, Saviour and Lord, who is working ALL things after the counsel of HIS will...which is the salvation of all. Amen.

Sharing thoughts

A special prayer, worthy of sharing... Father, we bow before the depth of the riches of Your wisdom and knowledge. How unsearchable are Your judgments. Who has known Your mind? Or who has been Your counselor? Who has ever given to You that You should repay him? For from You and through You and to You are all things. To You be the glory and the power and the honor forever and ever. Amen. Jan Antonsson.
And this - short and sweet, from someone who wasn't even a Christian...
"It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is unbelief - the other is
contempt." Plutarch

Sharing thoughts

Jus think - our wonderful, incredibly loving Abba (Daddy) Father is: Multiplying blessings and grace
Nullifying all curses, AND
Converting ALL foes!!!
Wow!

Sharing thoughts

Oh, my, another entry of some length, but...again, it is well worth taking the time to read. It concerns free will; and those who know me will not be surprised at the content: UR and Free Will?
by John R. Gavazzoni
Whenever the issue of theoretical free will is raised, I must
confess that it pulls my string, since I'm still persuaded that there is much fuzzy thinking about it, even within UR circles, fuzzy thinking at a very fundamental level. So, here I go:
One cannot sort out the meaning of freedom of will, without addressing and including the element of the bondage of the will. While a serious consideration of the bondage of the will is, especially to the western, institutionalized Christian mind, a scandalous and offensive consideration, our predecessors of no less stature than men like Martin Luther, who have passed the torch of truth-seeking on to us, were not of that mindset. They spoke to the subject with a boldness that did not hold sacred the childish notion that men have, left to themselves, either in the microcosm or macrocosm, the power to determine anything.
I'm afraid, brothers; if I may be so bold, that I don't agree even with the comparatively reasonable position that men have determinative power of will in even the smallest matters of life. We are conscious of making decisions/choices all the time, and because we make those
choices---which suit to wear for an occasion, where to invest our money, what to order from a menu, which freeway to take to avoid the worst traffic---that these are necessarily exercises of freedom.
I don't understand it that way. After 53 plus years of the study of scripture, observing the complex of my choices down through the years, and being a student of human behavior, my proposition is that a will is either in a state of bondage or freedom, or in the throes of a mixture of both as the precedent to choices and action of any sort.
As to the bondage of the will and its unfolding in choices and actions, it seems most clear to me that said bondage came from the free will of God to subject all creation---of which we are part---to futility (a most seminal way of describing bondage). Having been---by God acting
freely---subjected to the bondage of futility, that is, "penned up in disobedience...." (that, surely, is descriptive of bondage), all our choices have something of that constitution until we are set free by the
sovereign grace of God in Christ.
Though accomplished by God in Christ for all of us, this setting free involves an eonion process in which what was already accomplished in Christ, is demonstrated and proven in us by Christ in us. What is true of us in Christ becomes experiential by Christ in us. That is the only freedom that scripture speaks of. Nowhere are we told that freedom of will is some kind of autonomous capacity of the human creature, but rather, it is something that God does for us, namely, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
"Whom the Son sets free, is free indeed." Free to do what? Free to sin? Certainly not. That would be an oxymoron. Sin emerges out of bondage, and righteousness out of freedom, and the only freedom there is the freedom of God, and grace is a matter of causing us to participate in God's own freedom.
What is the nature of that freedom? It is that quality of the
Divine Nature which makes God impervious to being limited/bound by anything/anyone so that He would not be able to bring to fruition the totality of His holy desire. God is free to be God, nothing, even in the least measure, being able to thwart Him. Having assertedthat, I hasten to add that God in Christ, freely gave Himself over to bear our bondage with us to bring us to a greater glory than we ever would without that shared crucible with God. Jesus wanted to make it
very clear that His death for us was not a matter of men taking His life, but of Him giving it----freely.
When we are caused by God to share in that freedom, we choose and act in accordance with our true nature in Him. When we are in bondage, we are in an existential state of a disconnect from Christ within us as our life, and we make choices out from bondage, not freedom.
So what about even all those mundane little decisions that we make every day? You think that you're just doing what you choose to do, because you choose to do it, bringing to bear upon those decisions the best of your intellect, emotions and experience. I think not. Most folks
have little understanding of all the forces that come into play in creating choices.
We do not make choices by some ability to reach into ourselves where God, supposedly, has given us some measure of autonomous sovereignty. God is always either dispensing freedom-creating grace, or temporarily withholding said grace, with the effect being bondage of the will. The forces that work upon us, and within us are a complex of genetic-inheritance; family nurturing, or the lack of it; chemical and/or hormonal balance or imbalance, religious, familial, and cultural presuppositions and biases, with all of that traceable back to God's
desk.
Ask yourself how much control, even in the matter of life's little choices, the crack-baby has. Ask yourself how free a man or woman is to be sexually healthy and normal by any definition, who has been sexually abused. Conditions not traceable to any choice on their part circumscribe and hedge about everything that they do.
Allow me a very personal example. I'm still working part-time, that is, I'm semi-retired from the shoe-findings business. I work almost entirely at home, by phone, still serving some of the accounts I handled for years when full-time employed. This semiretirement involves my
needing to drive into L.A. to our company's warehouse every 4 to 5 weeks to take care of some things that require my personal presence there.
One of my coworkers has a disposition similar in some respects to my own, but in many ways, we are very dissimilar dispositionally. He is a mild sort of fellow; remarkably patient and reasonable, rarely, if
ever, seriously tempted to aggressive confrontation, and certainly not any of a physical sort.
I, on the other hand, am a classic mix of the temperaments of my mother and father and grandparents in that, though I'm known in ministry and in my sales work as a man of patience and levelheadedness, I am subject by temperament to an almost constant pressure to, at some point of interactive disagreement, to invite an unreasonable person out behind the barn to "settle the matter like men," and that in a way, and to a
point of such finality, that only one of us will return from behind the barn in relatively good condition.
That I haven't done such a thing for a very long time is, trust me, attributable to the grace of God, and the grace of God, alone. And that, was not of my choosing; I was set upon as a wild teenager by Christ in a manner much like Paul on the Damascus Road, and if you'll read that
account again, you'll note that Jesus did not offer any options to Saul.
Returning to the example of human victimization that creates bondage in lives: Now, it seems to us, that some people so victimized choose to avail themselves of help, while others do not, and we interpret such difference as individual freedom of will---that somehow, where the rubber meets the road, they, themselves, determine their
futures penultimately (I know that we all agree that, ultimately, no human being determines their eternal destiny, that's God's determination, a determination He has already made, and will carry to fulfillment), but I believe scripture is quite clear that when a life is
turned about, penultimately, or ultimately, it begins, follows through, and ends by the initiation, power and fulfillment of God.
There is a will, the will of God, that is at work, and that will,
in the short term works in part by creating circumstances by which, unavoidably, men's wills are bound to and by sin and death as a preparation to assimilate at a cellular level the grace of God that brings us to share the glory of God, but always with the operative principle: "Except a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it
abides alone."
Well, I hope I've not come across as arrogantly pedantic, but I believe we are in a day when the Spirit of Truth is driving us to an in-depth scrutiny of truly fundamental theological issues. That is, we're in a day of theological revolution, and what is driving it is God's insistence that the utterly unqualified determinative nature of
the will of God in all things be upheld to the glory of His grace, and done so without carrying over any of the hideous and/or infantile conclusions of Calvinism or Arminianism.
JG (John's e-mail address: john-gavazzoni@webtv.net)

Sharing thoughts

This entry is a bit long - it is taken from a devotional book by Thomas Kissinger, "The Glory of God, and the Honor of Kings", (from Prov. 25:2), and is the entry for Jan. 12th - but it is, to me, well worth the few minutes it takes to read it (and, Lord willing, digest it): OVERCOMING EVIL WITH GOOD -Romans 12:21 states, "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." This all-important scripture, which speaks of the triumph of all that is good over all that is evil, gives us insight into the method of Almighty God. This method must also become our method. God must ultimately triumph over evil, or it must be said that evil has triumphed over God. PLEASE THINK ABOUT THIS! Here is a quote from Christ Triumphant ( by Thomas Allin ) to further establish this great point. "The question of universalism is usually argued on a basis altogether misleading, as though the point involved was chiefly, or wholly, man's endless suffering. Odious and repulsive to every moral instinct as is that dogma, it is not the turning point of this controversy. The vital question is this, that the popular creed, by teaching the perpetuity of evil, points to a victorious Devil, and to sin as finally triumphant over God. It makes the corrupt, nay, the bestial in our fallen nature, to be eternal. It represents what is foulest and most loathsome in man, the most obstinate sin as being enduring as God Himself. It confers the dignity of immortal life on what is morally abominable. It teaches perpetual anarchy and a final chaos. It enthrones pandemonium as an eternal fact, side by side with Paradise; and, gazing over its fetid and obscene abysses, it is not afraid to call this the triumph of Jesus Christ, this the realization of the promise that God shall be ALL IN ALL" (Thomas Allin) If God is willing to cure all the evils of mankind, but is not able, this is an indictment against the power of God, and surely makes the thought of overcoming evil with good only wishful thinking at best. If God is able to cure all the evils of mankind, but is not willing, this is an indictment against the love of God, and surely makes Him out to be a cruel Creator and a hypocrite as well, FOR HE TOLD US TO LOVE OUR ENEMIES, BUT WILL TORTURE HIS ENEMIES FOREVER.

-Let us shout from the mountaintops that GOD IS ABLE AND WILLING TO OVERCOME ALL EVIL WITH GOOD. To proclaim anything less than a salvation of all men, every man in his own order, is to declare Satan ( the adversary ) as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, making the cross ( the atonement ) of Jesus Christ a failed attempt to reconcile a lost world back to the Father again.

-OUR GOD IS ABLE! OUR GOD IS WILLING!-