Recall that Jesus said, ‘The truth will set you free.” Truth is not true because we believe it but because it is reality. And knowledge of truth is a great freedom giver. I heard Dallas Willard tell of the person who believes there is gas in their tank (when there is none) as they begin a long drive. He goes on to say that truth is what the person will run into down the road a ways. On the other hand if that person knows the reality of their tank being full of gas, they will know the truth and they will be set free from guessing or just believing or even hoping.

In the same way Jesus tells us that we should know the truth, John 8:31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Jesus on another occasion said that he was in fact ‘the truth’. Here he invites people to embrace what he says, telling them that to live in such a way will give them freedom to be alive in this world without worry or fear. There is a certainty to life in Christ. Not arrogance but a certainty to which he has invited us. That to live in him means we understand such things as love, forgiveness, going the extra mile, giving of our treasures and having no fear of what death might be able to do to us.

So fill your tank today and drive on. There’s a lot of life to experience.

So I am thinking of an analogy to help with the idea of salvation and discipleship. Here it is. You have been arrested in a foreign country and deposited down a deep dry well to wait our you days. There is no escape, no way for you to claw or climb your way to the top of the well. And so you wait and pray that someone will come along and rescue you. Oh, some passerby sees you but leaves as others too come and regard your plight for in this foreign land there is no willingness to help this stranger, you.
Suddenly someone appears at the well  and calls down to find out if you are alive and ready to come out. You breathe a sigh and a thank you and soon you are on your way up the side of the well and over the top and safe in the arms of this stranger. Saved. Saved? Not quite. You are still in a foreign land. The rescue is a major step to freedom but not the last one. The stranger tells you to follow him, do what he says, place your confidence in him for the rest of the journey. One day at a time. ‘Every day’ he says, ‘there are new plans for reaching a place called home, but there is no need to know them until the day presents itself.’ Are you ready for this journey?
What does the analogy mean? Oh, I am sure you have guessed it by now. Being saved is a lot more than having your sins forgiven, being rescued from darkness. It is a life long journey with Jesus as the Master teacher. He was sent by God to not only rescue you and me but to lead us, guide us through the darkness of strange foreign territories to a land promised to all who will follow. The rescue is just the beginning.
There’s tomorrow and tomorrow and the next day and well, you get it. As each day unfolds there is a new opportunity, some would call challenge, to follow the Master. We are not ‘home’ yet but we are on the way and all the while, well, home has been implanted in us so we are never without hope.
So keep on keeping on, as they say.

Are You Conscious? There are two ways one may go through life, conscious or unconscious. The unconscious person is the one who lives by the world and by one’s own ego. This is the person who says they can see well and all the time they are really blind. This is the one who is in charge of his or her own life. This one is he or she whose ‘self’ is dependent on the relationship to the world either in accord or in reaction. This ‘self’ has no idea how to be ‘not of the world’ and thus whether he or she knows it is so much a part of the world even in the name of religion.

The conscious person is one who is blind but inwardly sees. Jesus once told the religious leaders that the reason they were truly blind was because they said they could see. They saw only what they wanted or were able to see. (see John 9:41) The conscious person is truly aware of their self that stands in opposition to the self that is Christ in them. The conscious person is not afraid of their ‘selves’. They know that to see is to look past that self into the Kingdom of God where the self is truly loved and nurtured by none other than the community of God which we term Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the conscious person who can truly love for their self is not at stake anymore. The person of Christ has been formed in them.

Perhaps this is why Jesus said to Nicodemus (John 3), ‘no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he or she is born again’. In order to be conscious and see clearly we must receive our birth from God. We are invited to new eyesight that is Kingdom seeing. The world around us is bathed in the Kingdom of God where righteousness and joy and peace and love reign supreme. But we keep slipping into unconsciousness, which takes less effort actually than being conscious. Being conscious requires discipline of the body and mind. Lazy people are unconscious. They have their routines and even religious observances to numb them to the Kingdom of God. The great thing about being conscious is that all we need do is seek it, want it and pursue it. Was Nicodemus willing? We think so by how the whole story ends.

Imagine your plane is coming in for a landing and the pilot comes on to announce, ‘ladies and gentlemen, please be assured that everything is going smoothly. I am letting God guide our plane. It’s in His hands now.” Most of us would rather know that the pilot was using his instruments to guide the plane to a safe landing. Even the devout among us would hope so.
We live increasingly in a more secular environment where we trust the things of the world to alleviate our problems and create our progress.
As we understand more and more about how the universe operates we have a tendency to place less of our confidence in the sovereign God who governs this universe and some folk come to doubt more and more that there is even a pilot at the wheel of this ship we call the universe.
But I believe that God is thrilled that we study his creation. That’s really what science is, you know, the study of God’s handiwork. We don’t need less of God. What we need is more gratitude to God and reliance upon God to show us the way into the future. We need not be afraid of science closing some gaps in belief. We need to be grateful that God has shown us how to progress and find answers that were once unknown.
But know this- God is the God of the downtrodden, the outcasts, the ‘sinners’, and the lost. So if our science helps us to help them then progress is of use to our Lord’s purpose but if science becomes our god to satisfy our own needs and neglect the most needful then God will surely judge us.
Science and faith go together. We can trust the latest technologies and guide our plane smoothly to the ground, and at the same time love the God who makes it all possible, the God whose intimacy in our lives can never be mechanized or secularized.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.
John 1:9 English Standard Version

I believe that Christ indwells all people.  He is the only one who can give enough light for anyone to even think of God. Anyone who is born into this world has been blessed with the presence of God, whose face we see in Christ.
In Revelation 3:20 Jesus says that he knocks on the door of everyone. I realize that the context concerns the church of Revelation but the words of Jesus may be applicable to anyone who is willing to listen to Christ’s voice.
I address now those who are aware of this light. Do not be fearful that this light has dimmed or even extinguished for Christ will not forsake any of us. There are times when as the song goes, ‘darkness veils his lovely face but still i rest on his unchanging grace.’ God’s grace is not extinguished in this world.  God is sovereign over his creation and nothing will stop that within your soul.  The light sometimes flickers by our own volition or sometimes God wants us to stretch further and look deeper within our souls for his light but it’s always there. Sometimes we just need to look or listen within our own souls for that light, that voice, that presence.  We live too much on the surface of life reacting to the stimuli outside us but not within us.

Dallas Willard writes in ‘The Divine Conspiracy’, “There is now not a single moral conclusion about behavior or character traits that a teacher could base a student’s grade upon.” (p.3)  Willard is making the case that moral knowledge has disappeared from the educational system.  Is he right?  Can we not teach our children that hatred is morally wrong?  What about discrimination?  If a student in answering an essay said that discrimination against others on the basis of their nationality was acceptable, would a teacher be able to mark that comment as wrong?  Surely math, science and for the most part history have facts that are acceptable.  Is that not the case for moral knowledge?  Could a teacher ask the question , ‘Is racism wrong?’ and have a student answer, ‘No.’ And would that have to be an acceptable answer in the education of our children.  I’m not sure.  Maybe there are those of you out there who could answer that for me with some evidences.
I am suspecting that without God and a moral universe we ‘organisms’ are at a loss in regard to moral knowledge and virtue.  I know Congress makes laws, states make laws but where are the citizens getting their information for some moral foundation upon which to make those laws?
Can students today learn the meaning of love, respect for life, forgiveness?  How about reconciliation?  There’s one that the politicians sure could use. Is setting a cat on fire ‘morally wrong’?
Can we not tell our students that killing someone is wrong? Sure maybe we would have to address the issues of abortion, war, capital punishment and euthanasia and somewhere along there we need a master teacher to point the way. Otherwise we just all do what we feel like doing and vote the same way.
Let’s put it this way, fact: 2+2= 4. But are there ‘moral facts’?
Well, there you have it. For the moment. I look forward to your thinking on these matters.