The Gospel According to Yeeks

Even Maacah, his mother, King Asa removed from being queen mother because she had made a detestable image for Asherah. Asa cut down her image, crushed it, and burned it at the brook Kidron. But the high places were not taken out of Israel. Nevertheless, the heart of Asa was wholly true all his days. (2 Chronicles 15:16-17) I think I first read this passage when I was around 16-17. The language of the text is extremely military and it can be easy to get caught up in the narrative and read it as if you were reading WWII history. The war against the idols were not fully triumphant. It was emphatic but not complete. The language can captivate, what is going to happen next in this war? How will this war turn out? And so I got caught up in the narrative, missing out on what the text is trying to tell me. That the incomplete battle against idolatry is taking place right in my heart.  If read in the light of the idolatry I have been struggling against, some for a very very long time, t

Thanks to the previous lecture, I came to know about this sermon, preached by Rev. E. B. Pusey in direct refutation to Darwin's Origin of the Species. Still pouring over it, but lots of wisdom to be learned from reading the sermon. Interesting to note also some of the mentions of the prevalent scientific theories of that time, such as the existence of ether to transfer light (we now that light can travel through vacuum) . http://anglicanhistory.org/pusey/unscience.pdf

This is not anything Christian but I thought it was an interesting lecture, which charts interestingly, Darwin's slowly leaving of the faith.

"For we do not want you to be ignorant brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behald for the blessing granted to us through the prayers of many." (2 Corinthians 1:8-11)

Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made, Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky. "Verse 3 was penciled on the wall of a narrow room in an insane asylum by a man said to have been demented. The profound lines were discovered when they laid him in his coffin." http://library.timelesstruths.org/music/The_Love_of_God/

"It is when we are in the valley, where we prove whether we will be the choice ones, that most of us turn back. We are not quite prepared for the bumps and bruises that must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be, but are we willing to be battered into the shape of the vision to be used by God?" http://utmost.org/the-vision-and-the-reality/