We are weak but he is strong

"As a father has compassion on his children,

so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. 

For he knows what we are made of,

remembering that we are dust."

Psalm 103v13-14

Faith and reason and reasons for faith

Watching Bones, and I found this conversation at the end of an episode (5:14 The Devil in the Details) fascinating. 

Booth is a practising Catholic, with genuine faith (sometimes muddled, but real).

Bones is a logical empiricist and atheist, who frequently says that she doesn't understand how anyone intelligent could believe in God (she's autistic - tact is not her strong point!).

They have just been dealing with a particularly troubling case, in which there has been a lot of discussion about good and evil and religion.

 

BONES: I need to ask you some things.

BOOTH: You gonna ask me about God and the Devil?

BONES: Yes!

BOOTH: You're going to ask me how God can place such a burden on good people.

BONES: No, I'm going to ask you how you can still believe in a kind God after a case like this.

BOOTH: Was my faith shaken? 
Yeah. Mm-hmm. It is.

BONES: It is?

BOOTH: Yeah. I'll go home tonight and I'll lie in bed, and I'll toss, and I'll turn, and I'll beat myself up, and uh...I'll question everything.

BONES: Will you get your faith back?

BOOTH: Always have in the past.

BONES: So you have faith that you will retain your faith. 

(Booth nods) 

BONES: Why?

BOOTH: Because, Bones, it's...the sun'll come up, and tomorrow's a new day.

BONES: I know that feeling.

BOOTH: Really?

BONES: Mm-hmm.

BOOTH: You know what it feels like to get your faith back?

BONES: When I see effects and I am unable to discern the cause, my faith in reason and consequences is shaken.

BOOTH: And then what happens?

BONES: Two plus two equals four. I put sugar in my coffee and it tastes sweet. The sun comes up because the world turns. 

These things are beautiful to me. 

There are mysteries I will never understand, but everywhere I look, I see proof that for every effect there is a corresponding cause. Even if I can't see it. I find that reassuring.

BOOTH: And life is good again.

BONES: Life is very good.

BOOTH: Yes it is. Amen

(Both laugh)

 

 

This made me think of a quote by C.S. Lewis:

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

And then a line from a song came into my head: "the sun came up today" - which after a fair bit of brain-racking I realised was this, by Andrew Peterson:

 

 

And now I'd better get back to work...

Isaiah 40 playlist

I was reading Isaiah 40 and was amazed at how much of it has been turned into songs I was familiar with.

So I made a playlist. (Some of them have a verse/chorus/bridge that is not from Isaiah 40, but the main body of all of them is) 

Quite a variety of styles! 

List of songs:

• Comfort Ye / Every Valley - Handel's Messiah
• The Word of the Lord - Seeds Family Worship
• O Thou that Tellest Good Tidings to Zion - Handel's Messiah
• Like a Shepherd He Feeds His Flock - Robert J Dufford (No idea why I know this - school choir, maybe?)
• Behold Our God - Sovereign Grace (Although I've used the Accapella Company's version)
• Do You Not Know - Slugs & Bugs
• Soar Like Eagles - Seeds Family Worship

A new year(ish) song

I like to choose a song for each new year, but I couldn't decide - none seemed quite right. Then we sang this last Sunday, and I think it's a good choice:

Happy New Year!

 I always like to post a song for the New Year - but this year I've got two.

They're both about how, as Christians, God uses the ups and downs of life to make us who he wants us to be.

First a sad one:

 And then a cheerier one!

A loooooooooong time ago

I was explaining to the children how God has always existed. 

He was there 100 years ago... A thousand years ago... A million... A billion... A trillion...

5 year old: an octillion

7 year old: a googolplex,*

Wasn't expecting that 😆

---

*Fortunately I did know this was a real number! Didn't know how big, so I've just looked it up. It's 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, which means that the mass of the books needed to write the number down would be many times the mass of the visible universe. Fairly large, then.

Analogies are not (necessarily) heresy

Wrote this aaaages ago - finally got round to finishing and posting.

From time to time, people claim that this analogy or that analogy of the Trinity gives the wrong idea of God, or is even heretical. I'm sure that's sometimes true. But sometimes I think it's just that the people criticising it are trying to make an analogy do more than it's meant to.

For example, take the triangle. People say it's a bad way to explain the Trinity because each member of the Trinity is fully God, whereas each side of a triangle is not a triangle. But, I don't think it's bad, just - like all analogies - incomplete. It would only be a bad analogy if you were saying that a triangle says everything that's to be said about how the Trinity relates - and that's not how analogies work.

Craft we made, based on these instructions.

 

I have used the triangle analogy in Sunday school. I'm teaching people who may not yet even know that Jesus is God. So all the analogy is meant to say is that:

• The trinity is a thing.
• There is one God, made of three people, (who are all God).
• They are the Father, the Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit.

It's true in what it intends to teach - it's not the last word on the subject.

Actually, it's the same with the analogies of Jesus which are used in the Bible. He is variously described as our father, future husband, brother, master, shepherd, a lamb, a vine, a gate, bread, water, light... If you took any of those to extremes you could easily make a heresy. And some of them are mutually contradictory.

 

But the point is that Jesus - who is far more than we could ever understand - is a little bit like all those things (and the context usually makes it clear in what way).

Here's a quote:

We have to think about Christ using ideas and images, but if we put our trust in these symbols, rather than in the One they symbolize, we will be making a big mistake. [...] By using more than one image for God, we remind ourselves that any image we use is only temporary; it must be corrected and relieved by other images. These images serve our minds; they do not save our souls. A fork is not food.

~Michael Ward, The Narnia Code

Pillars

I liked this quote about pillars in the Bible - both literal stone monuments, and the pillar of fire & cloud that the Israelites followed in the desert.

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” 1 Samuel 7:12

"In your own life, there are, no doubt, “pillars” that point you backward, reminding you of what God has done before and what he can do again. You need that. Those are reassuring and give us the confidence to keep walking. 

By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light  Exodus 13:21

"The pillar of fire, though, is scary. It points you onward, and, like your ancestors in their journey, it gives you only enough light to see just ahead. You will see that the light goes out into the wilderness with you, but often these times will feel to you confusing and disorienting. You will feel lost. Only in retrospect, if at all, will you see what God was doing. The temptation at the moment, though, will be to pitch the tent in place and look to the pillar of memory rather than to follow the pillar of glory. The light is there, though; the cloud is overhead. Moreover, this pillar of glory is not really a “thing,” but a person. Where it is pointing you to is the final New Jerusalem, which has “no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:23). The Lamb is the Light. The pillar of fire and cloud still leads on."

~Russell Moore  

All-day sun

Doesn't seem quite the right weather for Good Friday:

 

"Well might the sun in darkness hide

and shut his glories in

when God, the incarnate maker, died

for man, his creature's, sin"

~Isaac Watts

Lord, help me to love

Help me to be patient,
Help me to be kind.

Don't let me envy,
Don't let me be boastful,
Don't let me be arrogant,
Don't let me be rude,
Don't let me be self-seeking,
Don't let me be irritable,
Don't let me keep a record of wrongs.

Don't let me find joy in unrighteousness
Help me to rejoice in the truth.

Help me to bear all things
Help me to believe all things
Help me to hope all things,
Help me to endure all things.

Help my love to never fail

Amen

(With apologies to the apostle Paul - 1 Corinthians 13v4-8)

Wow these things are hard!

Truth

Just sorting through Sunday School photos for our virtual prizegiving. These two crafts, done earlier in the year, seem particularly relevant now...

Disorder

This was an extraordinarily appropriate week for an EP called Disorder to be released! Completely coincidental - except of course that God knew.

(This is the first song)

Establish the work of our hands

Another one from my Morning Songs playlist

Politics

"Let the believer rejoice that the government under which he dwells has an immortal ruler at its head, has existed from all eternity and will flourish when all created things shall have for ever passed away."

~ Charles Spurgeon

Maker of Mornings

Here's another in my 'morning songs' playlist.

Even before I heard it, I liked the title. And you can hear the sunrise in the intro.

It's interesting - many of the ideas are similar to his older song Good to be Alive. But the second verse of this one adds something that was missing in the earlier song.

You are all I need

Woke early this morning, my mind whirling with many things. Getting ready for church I was tired, and getting more and more uptight.

In church, the first song we sung was given out by an elderly widower who probably has more difficulties in his life than I can imagine. The song was We bow down and confess, and one line simply says, "You are all I need."

It got me thinking:

When everything seems terrible,  

  you are all I need.
When I'm aware of my sinfulness, 

  you are all I need.
When I think I'm actually good enough, 

  you are all I need.
When I think I can do it on my own, 

  you are all I need.
When I feel inadequate, 

  you are all I need.
When things don't go my way, 

  you are all I need.
When it's hard to believe, 

  you are all I need.
When I'm full of good ideas for things I want to do,

  you are all I need.
When I worry about the future, 

  you are all I need.
When I feel like a loser, 

  you are all I need.
When my to-do list is growing, 

  you are all I need.
When the world is confusing, 

  you are all I need.
When it's hard to live your way, 

  you are all I need.

Every Moment Belongs

Just happened to listen to this on Saturday night. Doesn't it fit well with what I wrote in the previous post?

The outward appearance

A game I've been working on as part of my next PowerPoint (David is chosen). Took waaaaaay longer than I anticipated!

I was originally just going to have two pictures in the PowerPoint: 1) the outward appearance, and 2) the outlines - some with red hearts (Christians) and some with grey hearts (not).

But judging by appearance is so ingrained that I was worried that it might backfire.

If the children were already prejudiced against a certain kind of person being a Christian, and that person was drawn with a grey heart, that might actually confirm their assumption that 'that kind of person definitely isn't a Christian' - even in conjunction with a verse that said the opposite.

Of course, I could make sure that all the 'less likely' people were marked as Christians and all the 'more likely' were not. But a) that would be silly and b) different people have different prejudices. Even in this country, never mind internationally.

So, in the PowerPoint itself, they all have red hearts. BUT there is also the game, and in that, random people are/are not Christians each time you play.


I suppose this could be classed as another example of Kirsty overthinking...
But I don't think so. As a Sunday School teacher, I am very aware of the unhelpful assumptions children make about these things. And the last thing I want to do is exacerbate them

A song for control freaks

Tbh I find the video a bit distracting (though fun). But the song's good.



Sometimes the things that worry us are huge things (for example, the singer's son is currently undergoing chemo). But sometimes the stress and anxiety and the 'need to control things' applies to much smaller things.

But "He already holds it all".

Outrageous grace

Justice

We do good, and we get rewarded.

Or, we do wrong, and we get punished.

Mercy

(other hand behind back)

We do wrong, but we don’t get punished.

Grace

We do wrong, but we get a good gift.


My class of 6-8 year olds: WHAT?!?! No! That makes no sense!


Although I've taught the word 'grace' before, I think putting it in the context of justice and mercy - and using the actions - really makes it clear how startling it actually is.