Hello, everyone! Long time no post! I thought I would put up some thoughts about an interesting subject that's been on my mind recently.

I've been thinking about Christians and how we tend to view ourselves, and our religion. How often do we slip into the habit of seeing "Christianity" as another religion along-side other religions - Buddhism, Hindu, Islam? How often have we heard people - even Christians simply assume that all the gods of these religions are actually the same (or the same idea)? Think about it - Islam, and Christianity claim to have one god that they worship who is the sole god of the universe to the exclusion of all others. Religious study (which is often from an athiest point of view) supposes that the ideas for both of these gods originated in the same thing - they are basically the same god. However if we look at the communities of followers of these gods, we see a big difference. Even though it's often denied, Islam is not a religion that treats women well. It is predominantly male, and all the promises of paradise are for men. Even though this is also denied, the Christian religion is one that does treat women well. Women have a share in paradise equal to men, and they also have (unfortunately) more privileges than they should due to feminism invading the church. Allah is a unitarian god - he exists by himself. The Muslims claim that he is a loving god. Where does that love come from? What compelled Allah to create a world full of people to serve him, whom he could love, and who could love him? Before all this was created, what object had he to love in order to become the loving god that his followers claim him to be? Without an object, there cannot be love. All is consumed in self. This can explain the marriage relationships between Muslim husband and wife/wives. Women are loved for no other reason than that they are offspring making machines. Muslim people will not reach out to other communities of Muslims who are experiencing trouble. Within their own community they have the ability to love their children, and to care for friends - those who are close to them. But they have no compassion for anyone who is not within sight. The Christian God on the other hand is Trinitarian. Before time he existed in a perfect, harmonious, loving relationship with the other persons of the Trinity. This is manifested in God's people. Christians can love God, because God first loved them. They can love their neighbour as themselves, because God's love is always giving. They reach out to helpless, poverty stricken people who are not even of their own faith, and who live around the world. God and Allah are not the same. It is obvious. You become like the God you serve. If you serve a unitarian, loveless god, that is manifested in how you react to the world around you and how you live your life. If you serve a loving, Trinitarian God your behaviour reflects the behaviour of the God you serve.

In North America, many Christians have adopted the mind-set that religion is something private. You go to church on sunday, you read the Bible in your bedroom, you pray before meals. The rest of the week - the rest of your life is totally unconnected. Why? Because our culture has a "tolerance" for all religions, ideas, anything you could possibly imagine. To risk upsetting someone else's ideas and appearing intolerant, we have to keep all our beliefs private. Think again. The Christian life is a way of life. The Bible teaches that those who are in Christ are alive in Christ. Those who are not in Christ are dead in sin. Therefore the world has two kinds of people: those who are alive in Christ, and those who are dead in sin. We have an alternate lifestyle here. Two opposites - the living vs. the dead. We serve the Living God - he has redeemed us by his grace. We may not be alive in the private of our own homes, and try to blend in with everyone else who is dead in their sin during the rest of our time. We are alive and therefore we should act alive. We are to be joyful that we have received God's grace! God owed us nothing. NOTHING. And yet, because he is a loving God, he sought us out - those who were dead to him, and made us alive. That is an amazing reason to rejoice! What greater reason could there be? Then why do non-christian's in general tend to think of Christians as stuck-up, starchy, always-angry people? These people don't seem alive. That just shows how easy it is for Christians to forget where they came from. Then there are another type of Christians - those are just so loose and will accept whatever and go along with the dead world because "Jesus loves them anyway." That tends to show me that we want to go back where we came from - back into the unbelieving, dead world. This brings me to my next point. As Christians, we are Christ-bearers. We bear Christ's name. When we were starchy, stuck-up, and always angry, we are showing the world that that is what our God is like. When we are loose and go along with whatever is going on, we are showing that God has no standards - he's okay with anything. As Christians, we need to represent God the way he IS. He is loving, but he has standards. Love always has standards. Love is NOT what the world defines today. God is love, and he defines love for us. He chastens us lovingly - we are to do so to each other as well. Sometimes it has to be harsh. We can't adopt whatever comes along next - homosexuality, abortion, God-is-whoever-you-want-him-to-be kind of nonsense, because God has standards. God made us, and God made the standards. God graciously redeemed us who were damned forever in our sin and calls us His children. As his children, he has rules for us, like any *good* parent has. He has given us these rules in the Bible. We are to follow these rules because we love God, and if we love God, then we will also love the rules, because God's rules proceed from God. Christians who follow the rules as strict rules with a "we-do-this-because-we-have-to" attitude obviously have something wrong with their thinking. I believe we are to love God with all our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength. What would compell us to do this? How about the fact that we were dead in our sins, we hated God, we were headed for just and eternal damnation because of our violation of His holiness which can stand no sin, and yet - even through all this, God sent his only-begotten Son, who died in our place, took all of God's wrath on himself which we deserved to suffer from eternally, and put to death our sins and covers our short-comings with his perfect merit so that we can be called children of God along with God the Son himself and enjoy eternity with our Maker, Creator, Redeemer, Saviour?! What better reason to rejoice and celebrate? What better reason to love our Great God? We can love Him, because He first loved us. Here we are in our puny efforts to make a name for ourselves on earth and promote our own fame when we carry the eternal, everlasting name of our God. We are Christ's ones. How often do we drag his name through the dirt, falsely representing Him to the un-believing world; so often ruining and besmirching his Holy Name for the sake of exalting our own and yet he continues to allow us to be His children? Let us strive to represent our Great God as he truly is and be uphold His identity as we would our own because it IS our own. Let us put His name first because His name is from everlasting to everlasting. Our own fame will perish in a short moment, but we are under Christ's name, and his is enduring to all eternity, and though we may be forgotten by the world, Jesus Christ does not forget His little ones.

There it is - a little scattered and disorganized, and I may possibly have contradicted myself. I may read this later and disagree with myself on a few things, but here's the thoughts as they tumbled out. If you got this far, hopefully it inspired some more thought! God bless!

Timbrel

Here's one of my favourite Hymns: Ah, Holy Jesus. By Johann Heerman, 1630.

Family is something that is almost worshipped in our culture -- that is, as long as it's the right size. My parents have gotten a lot of flack from people because they have 8 kids -- it started happening when people found out the fifth one was coming. Thankfully the church we are apart of is very supportive of large families. Several of our members are expecting their 8th and 9th additions. However, in most churches large families are sneered at -- but it's the Christian people who need to have larger families. It's us who are supposed to raise up the next Godly generation -- and at the rate we're going, it's going one heck of a small one.

The Bible says that children are a blessing from the Lord; it seems our society today, including Christian society, has gotten into the habit of rejecting these blessings. We don't want God's gifts.
In most old cultures, the more children you had, the more respected you were in your community. To be barren was the ultimate curse. Think of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah -- all these Biblical women were unable to have children, and all looked on it as a shameful condition. Eventually all of them were given children by God to show his power and ability to pour out blessings, which were not only for the good of themselves -- but for the good of the future nations that came from them or were lead by them. In the Bible, barrenness is a sign of death. People were cursed with it -- Michal, when she rebuked David for dancing in the presence of the Lord, had no child to the day of her death; when God was unhappy with his people, there was barrenness and miscarriage. When Abimalech had taken Sarah from Abraham, his land was cursed with barrenness -- the wombs were closed. When the Lord blessed Israel he blessed them with children so that they increased, for example, in the land of Egypt they were blessed by the Lord and they increased in number until the Egyptians were afraid of them. (The Eyptians practiced birth control - so the increase of Israel to them seemed huge.)

Given all these examples, we could say today that our society is dead. Children are looked upon as a hinderance. If you're a stay-at-home mom, you get ridiculed. To me, the role of a mom is the greatest one there is. You are the one who is going to make an impact on the future. To raise up the next generation is not an easy job, but it is extremely necessary, and for our society, a Christian generation is especially necessary. Even for Christian families now, 2 kids is the norm. Our society is so taken up with selfishness -- look after #1 is the moto. If you have kids, you're less likely to have so much time for selfishness -- you have other people to think about. Our culture is so *me* centered that no thought is given to what comes next. We don't care what the world is like when we're gone -- as long as we have fun while we're on it. Feminism plays a big part -- women are busy doing whatever they can to qualify themselves for worldly *respect*. "I had to fight my way to the top -- why should I give up MY life to look after a bunch of snotty kids?" Well, the answer is: Because, as a woman, God has called you to do it. We have to get back to seeing children as a blessing, and not a hinderance. We're working to make the world a better place, and that won't happen all at once. To do it, we have to have a broader vision. It is our job to help advance the kingdom of God -- not only by evangelizing, but by raising up the next generation to be a healthy and Godly one. One of the first commands was to "Increase and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." We still have a long ways to go to subdue the earth, so three cheers for big Christian families, and stay-at-home moms!

Today I was thinking: when I was little my parents taught us that animals do not go to heaven. One day (I must have been 8) my family was visiting some friends of our who have a farm, and one of their baby horses had to be killed because it had a badly infected hoof. The kids were devistated about it, and I, tactlessly, after learning that they believed they would see their pet again in heaven, loudly proclaimed that animals do NOT go to heaven -- and offeneded them I believe. Anyways, I was thinking about whether or not animals really do go to heaven, and why or why not. Obviously, I still believe that they do not -- my reasons are that animals, unlike people, do not have a soul and therefore are not redeemable. Also I believe that the kingdom of heaven is only for those who believe on Jesus' name, and are saved from their sins. Animals don't have a will to choose whether or not they believe something, and live, independent of knowledge, to the glory of God, by doing what they were created to do.

Why did God create animals? He created them to glorify himself. They, unlike people, do not have the ability to think for themselves and decide right and wrong. They know what they should or should not eat, because God created that instinct in them. They know what is good for them and what isn't, and they live from day to day that way. God also created them for people's use. We use them for food, and labor, and pets, and they also cause us to praise and acknowledge God for his amazing imagination in creating so many different species and types. Like I said: for his own glory. So that they themselves would glorify him by living as they were created to, and so that we can see them and give God glory for that great things he has created.

God cares for all his creatures. Matthew says that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without God's will -- but aren't we (into whom God breathed his spirit) of much more value than they? 
I conclude that God created animals simply for his and our own enjoyment, but he did not create them in his own image, or breathe life into them. They were spoken into being, man was formed. They are without the will to choose their own life style. God did not send Jesus to earth to pay for the sins of animals, therefore animals are not saved, and will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Unlike people, there are not laws forbidden by God which they can, or cannot transgress. Animals are not born in sin. They are born with instincts to live to the glory of God. Man would have been born with the instinct to give God glory, but since the fall, they are automatically sinful. Animals do not have God's spirit in them -- which makes them inferior to man.

Therefore man cannot be classified as an animal (though people would like to think so -- for some reason  why do we want to be animals??) I answer myself: Because if we were animals, we would be free to do whatever we want. Humans would rather be classified as animals because they don't like the feeling of being accountable to a higher being: a God in who's image they are made. We don't want the responsibilty of trusting and believing in something we can't see. But the very fact that we aren't animals proves that we have the ability to fight against God's hold on us. Animals don't fight against God: like I said, they live for him. We simply can't be animals because God has endowed us with the ability to reason. We don't like that God has made it so that we must carry the responsibility of whether we live our lives for his glory, or for our own. We want to be 'animals', but being like animals, without the will and reason, revolts us because we take great pride in the fact that we are so highly 'develped' in our mind. In other words, we don't want to be made in the image of God, but we want the privilages that go with it. That leads to the bizzare thought that if nature picked us, humans, to be the species of 'animal' to become so highly evolved, it could easily have picked any other animal... right? We could have a world of horses and skyscrapers. Humans would actually acknowledge that they could have been the dumb beasts grazing in the field rather than accept that God made us in his own image and given us the ability to reason and create. In fact, they would RATHER believe it. It seems humans would stop at nothing to degrade themselves in order to deny God.

This post got a lot longer than I expected. So if you managed to get down this far, thanks for reading!