"At last..."

...this post has come along.

We'll see how well I can think this out and write it seeing how late it is and how long it has been since I meant to write this post. But, I do think that I need to do some thinking/explaining about all those scriptures.

Here goes...

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These scriptures can be split into two basic topics; the first two on humility, asking for and taking correction, the second two on love. Both things I need to work on more.

First, the passage from Revelations tells us that in order for God to come into our lives, we must ask Him. This is a common theme throughout the Bible. Many times and in many ways (one of my favorites being tied in with the shepherd metaphor) He explains to us that God will not sneak into our lives through a back way. We must ask Him to come into our lives and open ourselves up to Him. He wants to be a part of our lives. We have been given the gift of free will to either ignore His knocking or to open the door and let Him come in.

Opening the door to God takes quite a bit of humility. In asking Him into our lives, we must be humble enough to realize that we need Him to live. We must realize cannot make it through this life alone, without his help and guidance.

Once we have humbled ourselves enough to let Him in, we then need to humble ourselves even more to acknowledge and take His correction. This is where the passage from Hebrews comes in. We have the comparison of God to a father. The Father, not a father of flesh and blood. Sometimes I wonder how it is that I can so easily take my own father's correction, yet have the hardest time allowing myself to see and accept the Lord's correction. Paul brought out some great points in this epistle about this. We respect our fathers for correcting us and showing us the right way to do something. Yet, as soon as God comes along to correct us, we ignore Him, give Him excuses, think He doesn't really know what is like to be us or what we are going through. WRONG! And yes, I am guilty of these same things. I am quite the pro at excuse making. God knows us better than we know ourselves. He did make us, after all. And yes, He has been human before. Didn't He come down to us and live among us? Isn't He Jesus, His son? (Ah, it's wonderful how that Trinity thing works...) Also, God does not correct us because he hates us or wants to punish us. Just as an earthly father will correct their child because they love them and don't want to see them hurt, so does our Heavenly Father correct us out of love.

This bring us to the second topic. Love. And also God's grace and mercy. From my favorite psalm, "[God] hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities..." (Psalm 103:11(?)) The Lord loves us so much that no matter how bad we are or how far we stray, he will always love us and forgive us. Back to the metaphors and examples, we have the many shepherd metaphors (oh how I love those ones...) and the prodigal son, and the Children of Isreal being led for forty years, and though they keep making mistakes, God keeps with them and keeps helping them to grow and learn. It is all out of love that God will keep knocking everytime we kick him out of our house because we want to do something our way and not be bothered by him. It is because of love that he will keep correcting us for the same stupid sin that we make yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, even hourly. (Though he will get angry if we are that hard-headed and don't even make an effort to change our ways and earnestly try our best not to sin.) It is love that 1 Corinthians 13 tells us is the greatest thing.

And it is love that is the greatest thing we can give another human being. Forget the whole loving your enemies because it will "heap coals of anger upon their head." You shouldn't show them kindness just to anger them more. That's perverting God's truth. You must learn to love them from down in your heart. Something I have been working on for awhile, yet it also transcends to family and friends and strangers. The best way to show others that God is real and true and alive in you is through your love. Romans makes it clear that we "owe no man anything but to love one another." Isn't that also one of the two great commandments? If we truly love someone, there is no way we would even think about breaking any one of the ten commandments.


And I think the flow of words has about stopped. There is my commentary. Now for bed and awaiting any comments anyone out there has...