Chronicles of Diversity

22 November 2006; Volume 8, Issue 35

PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/thankcap11-22-6.pdf

I trust that at least some of you tried on your cap of continual praise last week. To review, CAP is the acrostic in which C stands for Condemnation, A stands for Adoption, and P stand for praise. If you didn’t try it on, or if you gave it just a brief test, perhaps you really didn’t believe in it’s power. After all the CAP as I presented it has some roots in Calvinism, and Calvinism also gave us TULIP, and that irresistible grace and limited atonement stuff.

However, the world is full of all sorts of empirical evidence to suggest that grace is resistible, and to state that it is irresistible to those who are the elect of God really doesn’t add much but circular reasoning to the whole argument of election. Nonetheless, I do have good news for you this Thanksgiving week. Here and only here you will receive the Rhema word for you Pentecostals, the rest of you will have to use your heart and reason to understand its merit. Finally the long discussion of free will throughout church history will be solved. Aren’t you excited? I know I am! Praise the Lord.

The great answer to free will, and personal choice and how God deals with humanity can be summarized as follows: Everything God does comes from His determinate nature. In other words, God doesn’t need to look down the tunnel of time an predestine those who will respond to him with saving grace. He created the tunnel of time, therefore if He is really God, He from time’s creation, already knew all the results.

Mankind however, even in his pre total depravity nature was created as an indeterminate creation. That is why God is God and man was created, or for sake of this argument evolve from the dust of the ground. Now within that indeterminate setting we can argue heavy things like free will, or in modern America, buying big screen plasma televisions. We can trust that God controls our future, or test that reality.

In short, everything that we do, does not normally work out the way we planned. We could amass a tremendous fortune of monetary wealth and choke and die while eating a cup of yogurt. We really don’t know the future, even though we do everything within our power to control our destiny, both spiritually and materially. Furthermore, we do it continually from when we wake up in the morning until we many times do not restfully sleep at night.

There are thousands of churches of so call Christianity who for a price will make you feel good about all the choices that you make. There are very, very few that give you really good news however. That good news living in the doctrines of historic Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth in His birth, life, death on the cross for the sins of man, and His bodily resurrection from the dead, can give you a determinate future.

That should make everyone jump at the chance, to put on their cap and shout for joy. But sadly that is not the case, because we really do like to use our indeterminate nature as our crutch, our excuse, for falling short of even our own marks. We really do all this spinning and hurrying just so that we can believe that we can beat the only true determinate nature of our lives, that is death.

I have noticed as we plunge headfirst into the 21st century that we no longer even look at deeper things of life, it is all so shallow, buy more stuff and you will find fulfillment.

I have in iTunes and on my iPod the song, “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette,” by Leroy Van Dyke. My mother had that record as a 78 when I was a wee lad, and for my whole life I can remember the chorus of that song.

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette,
Puff, puff, puff it, till you smoke yourself to death,
Tell St. Peter at the golden gate
That you hate to make him wait,
But you just got to have another cigarette.

I paid my 99 cents to download the song so that I could hear the rest of the lyric. Actually the words of the song are very hostile to smoking in any sense. At the time I was that wee lad, both of my parents, as most people were smokers. Smoking is no longer cool in America, and even excessive drinking except those addicted to alcohol. Nicotine is supposedly more addictive than even heroin. The point however is that even the Seattle Mariners, or the Seahawks, a mountain of cool stuff, or even Jon Courson’s mp3s. can be that crutch we use to tell St. Peter that I can’t go to heaven right now I just have to get another substitute instead of a true heavenly fix.

I guess I just sort of picked on Jon, because while he would probably define your cap a praise a little different than I do, he would probably tell you to wear your praise cap continually also.

Psalm 117

Praise the LORD, all you Gentiles!
Laud Him, all you peoples!
For His merciful kindness is great toward us,
And the truth of the LORD endures forever.

Praise the LORD!

Thanksgiving has become the day of indeterminate celebration. I understand this year there will be three NFL football games to watch. Now is that a reason to be truly thankful? We don’t want to eat too much because we have to get up early Friday morning to celebrate materialism’s triumph as the world’s only true religion. Much to the chagrin of even militant Islam.

However, Thanksgiving should be celebrated as a time to give thanks to the God who created the universe, for the gifts that he has bestowed upon you as family and friends and also to you as an individual. The greatest of these gifts in this world is to understand you have been adopted without merit to be one of His children. But it is the nature of all gifts to become mundane if you don’t use them or pass them on. This Thursday is a day, along with Christmas when those gifts can be shared through love, to those who have not been so richly blessed.

Praise the LORD!

Our Recent Chronicles:

Beyond the good; PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/beyondgood10-11-6.pdf
What’s up? PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/whatsup10-18-6.pdf
The Audacity of Reality; PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/audacity10-25-6.pdf
The Audacity of Christ; PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/christ11-1-6.pdf
Phylogenesis Economics; PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/economics11-8-6.pdf
Wear your cap; PDF link: http://www.wondersprings.com/2006pdffiles/wearcap11-15-6.pdf