Ok let me set the context of this "3" thing for you a bit... It's an analogy from a Star Trek episode where I was kinda asking God for a "fleece" ("Bad K", Matthew 12:38-42) and was saying to Him "Why can't you just do the same thing for me that you did to allow Data (AKA Mr. Logos) to figure it out...?"
But He did... (fortuanetly He had mercy and grace on me) the whole day I wouldn't stop seeing "3", not the first time though, it happened in the past too when I was talking to one of the sisters in my seminary class:
"Oh no no... it's NOT A COINCIDENCE..." (I won't share the rest of what she told me here though, but gave me the 'original meaning' of the "3")
Micah 6:8 (New International Version)
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
"And I won't go back...back to how it was..."
Whether you are walking with a broken/hurt back or knee/leg... or in a much more metaphorical way, this is our task...
Romans 1:20-23 (New International Version)
20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
It's not "burning bush moment..." it's burning bush momentS! Like I have been saying "God has no limits..." You know like "Vroom Vroom"... "GOD SPEED..."
John 3:19-21 (New International Version)
19This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."[a]
"We can know God, but we cannot always fully comprehend him..." -PF
John 4:21-23 (New International Version)
21Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
"Use the spiritual forces Christians..."
John 3:31-33 (New International Version)
31"The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all. 32He testifies to what he has seen and heard, but no one accepts his testimony. 33The man who has accepted it has certified that God is truthful.
Why is it I blog? How do I reach out to a global audience with only local tools? Just how do I really or can I really turn this into a "God-cast".
"You need to ASK for it" -AJ
John 4:41 (New International Version)
41And because of his words many more became believers.
I dunno what it is (ok maybe I do..."textbook answer"), but the TRUE MEANING of the ***3*** just seems more clear today... :)
I'm re-posting a comment here that I originally printed and brought with me to MCBC's praise night on 04/24/2009, I was expecting I might get a call from a friend to go elsewhere after that night to talk to the friend I was planning to talk to, but didn't get a chance to talk to him till 05/08/2009:
"This is why I say God's will is even more beautiful unfolded over TIME..." -AT?
I didn't realize what was the true significance of this "no scripture" text then, till after talking to a friend and he explained some "C&B" concept to me. It turns out these words, although "no scripture", "no scripture" were either the C or B afterall... from what the Pastor told me that day:
"You need to gain true acceptance from God, not others, your church or even your loved ones... but from God..."
It has scripture now, because God showed me the scripture this morning "...rejoicing comes in the morning." and now I am able to blog some "scripture" to go with it. HMMM...
"Oooooo.... mmmmmm.... this is Our God..."
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...the next generation
Not sure who invented it, but presently, it has been a number of years ago now that I have heard someone express that "a generation is ...
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To be accepted whether or not we deserve to be accepted has always been an outrage to careful and rigid moralists. To the ancient Pharisees, for instance, it looked like the most wicked bargain ever offered to a sucker full of shame. In their straight-line moral bookkeeping there were two kinds of people: people who are acceptable enough to be accepted and people who are not. If you are one of the second kind, too bad for you.
Graceless religion worries that grace will turn a spiritually homeless person into a freeloader. If you can be accepted without being acceptable, why try? It is a fair question.
The answer to the question could begin with a comparison. Who has the better crack at living an acceptable life? A child who is warmly accepted by his parents from the start? Or a child who was abandoned and left with a persuasive hunch that she was rejected because she did not deserve to be accepted?
To make my point, I want to tell two stories. One of them is the story of Racehoss Sample. The other is the story of C. Prescott McCaernish. Racehoss is a real man's real name. C. Prescott is a made-up name for a real person.
Racehoss was Big Emma's boy. Big Emma was a smashing prostitute who made a living by providing gambling and bootleg liquor along with the sex she sold in a shack near a railroad stop in middle Texas. Racehoss got in Big Emma's way, and she resented him for it from the start. She beat him whenever she was drunk, which was a good deal of the time, and made him know that he was less than worthless.
When he got to be eleven years old, Racehoss could not stand it anymore and took off; he ran away to nowhere special, riding the rails wherever they took him, riding them with bums and hoboes, and, along the way, becoming a creature of volcanic rage. The Second World War broke out, and the army found him but soon found it could not tame him. He went AWOL every month or so, and each time he did, he got into a fight and was sent to jail for assault and battery. Finally, they sentenced him to thirty years in the Texas state penitentiary. Here he learned for sure that if you treat a person like an animal, he becomes one.
The worst punishment they had for untamed prisoners was confinement in the tomb. The tomb was actually a four-by-eight-foot basement cell with no windows and two solid-steel plates for a door, a solid slab of concrete plates for a door, a solid slab of concrete for a bed, a missing slab in the floor to pass for a toilet - the stench lingering on from occupant to occupant - and absolute darkness. This is where they stuck a prisoner who forgot to grovel low enough to suit his white boss, locked him in there for twenty-eight days, with one cup of water and one biscuit a day, and one meal of mush every six days to keep him alive.
Racehoss spent a considerable amount of his time in the tomb. In the sixteenth year of his captivity, he contradicted one of the guards and was locked in again, but it was not the same this time. This time he was terrified as soon as they shoved him in. He heard a sound as of rushing water nearby, and he knew for sure it was going to seep in and drown him. He went crazy.
"I...ran around the walls. Then rolled on the floor like a ball...I mauled myself, scratching and tearing at my body. Slumped, exhausted on the slab, I covered my face with both hands and cried out, 'Help me God!! Help meeeee!!'...
"And then -
"A ray of light between my fingers. Slowly uncovering my face, the whole cell was illuminated like a 40 watt bulb turned on. The soft light soothed me and I no longer was afraid. Engulfed by a presence, I felt it reassuring me. It comforted me...I breathed freely. I had never felt such a well being, so good, in all my life. Safe. Loved.
"The voice within talked through the pit of my belly. 'You are not an animal. You are a human being.' And 'Don't you worry about a thing. But you must tell them about me.'
"After that, God was real. He found me in the abyss of the burning hell, uplifted and fed my hungry soul, and breathed new life into my nostrils."
When they let Racehoss out, they weighed him and noted that he had gained five pounds.
The way God came to the tomb for Racehoss Sample may not be God's normal route to the human soul. God did come to him, however, and what Racehoss experienced when God came was pure grace. The only message Racehoss got was the word he had ached to hear just once from Big Emma, and now he heard it from God: you are accepted.
What came of such easygoing grace, a grace that accepted a sinner and demanded nothing but that he tell people whom it was he met in the tomb? A good deal, actually.
Racehoss walked out of prison on January 12, 1972, at 9:45 in the morning with ten dollars in his pocket. Later on, he wrote his memoirs, but we learn elsewhere that he was the first ex-convict ever to work out of the governor's office, the first to serve as a probation officer, and the first to serve on the staff of the State Bar of Texas as a division head. He was given the Liberty Bell Award and was named the Outstanding Crime Prevention Citizen of Texas in 1981. He received a full pardon and changed his name to Albert Sample in 1976.
I take Racehoss Sample's story as an exhibition of the truth that grace becomes a positive power in a shamed person who is accepted by grace without regard to whether he is acceptable.
Now comes the story of C. Prescott McCaernish. He was the son of a minister of the gospel than whom no man could have been more acceptable. The message he heard from the beginning was: "Your father is a great man of God, and if you can be half the man he is, you will do well." He heard it from his mother and from everybody around him, and he never forgot.
So C. Prescott devoted himself to the kind of life that might make him acceptable in the eyes of God and his father. The first thing he needed was to feel a call to be a minister. He felt one. By the time he was forty-five, he stood, six feet of pulpit eloquence in a flowing blue gown, preaching three splendid sermons to more than two thousand splendid believers every Sunday morning.
Was he half the man his father was? To 95 percent of the people, he was more than the man his father was. What was wrong with the other 5 percent? He gave them more. And then some more. He was available to everybody. Need some counsel? He would make time. A daughter's wedding? He turned it into a pageant. A delegate to the national assembly? More than willing to go, run for high office if the call came. Boards to be on? What were evenings for?
But on the inside C. Prescott McCaernish was a frightened child ashamed that he would never be the acceptable man his father was. He found someone who had a talent for accepting unacceptable men; she nestled him, warmed him, excited him, and accepted him. She took him in; the congregation put him out.
Here lies C. Prescott McCaernish: a casualty of viral unacceptability syndrome. He had grace in the palm of his hand, but he could not close his fingers around it and take it to his lips. He worked in the atmosphere of grace and breathed in the smog of shame.
Grace genuinely experienced is not really dangerous at all. What is dangerous is the wearisome, joy-killing heaviness of living without grace. You can be sure to tell a life lived with grace and one without by where acceptance is sought. Ultimate acceptance sought in others rather than from God results in the heaviness of joylessness.
"Oh No....."
But basically she finally gained the courage, the strength and most importantly the "liberation" of not being afraid of dying for what she believed in... I was touched! My eyes watered, but I knew then that my faith is not in Vain! And as I was telling my cell group earlier on in fellowship when we had our summer retreat sharing about how ***faith, hope and love*** are all the same thing... but without love, you can't have the other two either I guess!
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"
You need to give credit to Lewis Smedes, the author whom wrote most of this post which is taken from his book Shame & Grace (pages 111-113). It's only right to quote and credit someone else's work when you're writing...
"I'm beginning to see the *3*rd comment... interesting, I've never read that book, someone just dumped this really long comment on one of my blog post years back, but whoever you are, thanks for pointing this out, I've been wondering who the author is for a long time, now I finally know....
"It's only right to quote and credit someone else's work when you're writing..."
"My boyfriend and I were kind of like that... We didn't see each other for *3* years... we've dated for *3* months and now we're getting married..." [Mindy Cho]
"Samantha the Samaritan"???
AH...so this is how all the other circumstances tie in and why you were saying to her: "do not commit a Romans 1:23" :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_and_Effect_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
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