Lately I've been thinking that if God is holy and just, and He is truly loving, then his way of salvation  would be to bring all mankind into his will. What glory would God get to have a large number of his creation go to"hell"? This would mean that God had failed in his creation of mankind.

I've read some writers who said that God is sinless, holy, and just...

Today I turned 61.

Today I began to think about Jesus as an idol and I began to do a Google search to see what others have said about this. Among others I found an article titled "Smashing the Jesus Idol of Churchianity"

As I thought about it more I began to realize that idol worship is anything that takes us away from living the life of service that God intended us to live.

When we willingly make a sacrifice for someone, we open our hearts towards that person. When we make a sacrifice, we move other things, other thoughts, out of the way. This enables a clear channel between us and that other person.

On the first Friday of each month we open our home to our friends, neighbors and people from church who want to come over and play table games. Last night was game night at our house. Our living room and kitchen were filled with food,  tables, chairs, games, and people. It was a lot of fun.

During the earlier part of the night I had been playing another game. After that game ended, I looked around at what the others in the room were playing to see if there was some game I could join. 

In the recents past weeks I have been getting back into exercising with an aerobics exercise video. Even though I used this same video a year and a half ago, it's almost like I'm beginning again. I've going a little slower and paying careful attention to my foot placements, my steps, arm movements and the like. As I begin new exercises I still make lots of mistakes. In addition I've only put a medium amount of effort into it, largely because there are times when I'm unsure about foot placements or hand movements etc..

I've been giving a lot of thought about how to reach people and to teach them how to live godly lives, to live correctly and honorably. It is all to easy to "condemn that which is evil", but is that really helpful? It is very easy to destroy and to tear something apart. It is much more difficult to build something of value. I looked up the saying "overcome evil by doing good. I found where in the Bible it says this: Romans 12:21. As I was looking it up I read the verse in context and saw that this was all good, so copied the whole section here:

I'm not a fan of In-Your-Face Christianity in any form. True witnessing involves our consistant daily behavior over a long perion of time. Any words (and keep them few) are only validated if they follow our long and consistant behavior of acting with true love, honor, virture, truth, etc. both in our lives and towards others.

It could be said that practicing the virtues cause growth, but it goes deeper than that. Just practicing the virtues can make us just as legalistic as following the law. For us to truly grow we must take the spirit of the virtues within us. We must look at the meaning and the intent of the virtues. This is more that us taking the virture inside of and saying, for instance, I love people. For us to truly have love in our lives, we must become love. Just as God is love, we also must be love. (This applies to all the virtues .....) What does this mean practically?

Men want so "see" instant results. They want to say a few words that will cause people to want to  "accept Jesus" So they preach scary sermons to try to scare people into heaven. Preachers tell about an angry God who will send "unrepentant" sinners to a Hell where they will be tortured forever and ever. "Come to Jesus and escape the flames of hell."

This blog entry is a ... of my thinking about writing an article about what God is. That article will be found here.

In some ways, finding the truth is relatively simple. We just find out things as they are. In some ways finding the truth is complex because we often have to do a lot of inner work (finding and correcting our defects of character the prevent us from seeing the truth.)

Adult behavior is taking on the challenges of life and working through them through to completion ... Adults are constantly working through many challenges at one time

Immature behavior is only doing what is required.

To say that this earth is anything except how God planned it to be is to say that God is not in control, that God is not God.

Although my wife is mathmatically challenged she has been homeschooling our two children. My wife has been doing what she could, but she hasn't been holding my son to the line, making him work out all of his problems. Although I've told both of them repeatedly that my son needs to work out the problems completely, Joseph has still been mostly just writing down only the answers, not the answers with the formulas. A couple days ago I told my wife that I would take over working with my son and his math. I have been making him work out all his math problems and label everything correctly.

In the Bible it says, "we have the mind of Christ."

What is Christ? What does that mean? How does that practically work out? If Jesus "christ" as the son of God, and if God is love (as we are told), then could it be that the term "christ" is what refers to our motivation, our desire, our wanting to do what is right?

True religion is helping the widows and orphans in their distress. True religion is not true religion because it is call by a particular name. Just because a building or a group of people are called "christian" doesn't mean that they are true followers of God.