gaybird's Xanga

Almighty Maker of My Frame

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:53:34 GMT

Almighty Maker of my frame!
Teach me the measure of my days,
Teach me to know how frail I am,
And spend the remnant in Thy praise.

My days are shorter than a span,
A little point my life appears;
How frail at best is dying man!
How vain are all his hopes and fears!

Vain his ambition, noise and show;
Vain are the cares which rack his mind;
He heaps up treasures mixed with woe,
And dies and leaves them all behind.

O be a nobler portion mine!
My God, I bow before Thy throne;
Earth’s fleeting treasures I resign,
And fix my hope on Thee alone.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:06:08 GMT

"There are only two types of people in this world: those who know that they're selfish and proud and capable of terrible things, and those who don't." - Tim Keller

Last 3 pages of Mere Christianity

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:56:01 GMT

"It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call 'ourselves" out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of 'little Christs', all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented- as an author invents characters in a novel- all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to 'be myself' without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call 'My wishes' become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I begin to have a real personality of my own.

At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

-C.S Lewis

Abraham Kuyper

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:24:08 GMT

"The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality, in the full and vigorous prosecution of our life. It must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence." -Abraham Kuyper

The Biggest Lie

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:47:29 GMT

"Since the garden of Eden, a lie came into our hearts: if we lose control and we unconditionally live for God's glory, we'll be unhappy." - Tim Keller

X-mansion

Fri, 22 May 2009 18:16:30 GMT

My last day living in the mansion

On Suffering

Thu, 14 May 2009 15:28:58 GMT

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and finitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky

"For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
- 2 Corinthians 4:17-18

"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."
-Romans 8:18

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!"
-Revelation 21:1-5

I don't believe in God because...

Mon, 11 May 2009 05:28:00 GMT

I was at a bar recently and talked to guy who claimed to be agnostic. It was a really friendly conversation. We were talking about the effect of English Literature on modern culture. He knew I was in seminary, so we actually started talking about the Bible, and he told me why doesn't believe in God. He said "I don't believe in God because He has to speak to me directly for me to believe in him, and he hasn't done that"

I didn't say anything in response, but just continued listening because I wanted to hear more about his worldview. I didn't try to evangelize to Him or anything. But it took me a week to really process what he was saying (using the stuff I learned from ST 101).

I respect his doubts and his statement, but at the same time, if you pull the thread a little bit, you see his how arrogant his presupposition is. The reason why I think his statement was so arrogant is that it demands God's revelation to submit to you. Instead of you submitting yourself to God's revelation, you're actually saying that God must submit to your human mind and to your standards of reason. You're saying that you're the center of the universe, and that God must submit to your standards. And for any human being, from experience we know that our judgment and standards are fallen and messed up. So when you say something like "God needs to speak directly to me," one of your underlying beliefs is that the human mind holds the ultimate standards for what is true and false. So you're basically saying that the human mind is the ultimate arbiter of truth. And if that's true, then I am fully justified in starting a communist regime and starving millions of people to feed my military because my mind told me so, and everything must submit to my mind. It takes a ton of faith to believe that.

But God has spoken to us directly through everything around us. God has created this universe and everything in it. The fact that the molecules in your body stick together right now reveals God's kindness, power and sovereignty. God is the Ultimate Interpreter of all truth, and human reason must submit how He has revealed Himself in Scripture. The human mind is not ultimate. The Bible even says Jesus Christ is Truth incarnate (John 14:6). But human beings hate that idea, and constantly look for ways to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

God has spoken to us ultimately in Jesus Christ. He's shown us who he is. He is the God who dies for His enemies to save them. There is no other god like that in any other religion. This is what the Bible calls us to believe. Doubt your doubts and go to him.

(Christians do this in a slightly modified form. They pray, "God, if you do this for me, then I'll really believe in you and worship you." And when they don't get it, they get all bitter and stop believing and they say "God didn't give me this, so I don't believe in him anymore." But when you say that, you're not loving God for who He is, you're using God for His stuff. You want all the benefits you can get, but you don't want Him!)

In Sicily

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:21:21 GMT

Last night I dreamed that I was in Sicily at some clothing store. The store owner was North African, and I was like a CIA agent or something, and I needed some information from him. First I talked to him in Italian, but he wouldn't cooperate. So I grabbed him and slammed him into a chair and interrogated him in Arabic and English. I used 3 different languages! It was sweet.

I went to that place in the picture above about 8 years ago. It's in Modica, Sicily. All the kids hang out in that Plaza at night. I had diarrhea the second night I hung out at that plaza.

Rosemary

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:31:29 GMT