Politicians, in order to get elected, are always promising to offer more transparency in government. This is the first big step in bringing about real change in government and to the lives of its citizens.

The Lord, too, has promised to bring about a new administration that will change the way everything gets done. God will usher in a new heaven and a new earth and make all things “anew.”

This promised change in the next administration is called the Second Coming. And it will include a new policy of transparency.

God wishes to be less secretive in His dealings with us.

In this divine policy for new change and transparency, the Lord God seeks to reveal the inner workings of His government (Divine Providence) to all. This will require revealing newer and deeper operations hidden within God’s revealed wisdom contained in the Holy Word.

The Lord wants to remove any obscurity we might have about such doctrinal issues as salvation, the Holy Trinity, life after death, angels, heaven and hell, to name a few.

Why has God not been up-front with us all these years? One big reason is that the human habitual mind and worldly psyche is not ready for these new disclosures, and rejects them. So, the second big reason is to protect these most sacred ideas from being trashed (and put humankind’s eternal welfare in jeopardy).

Although people invite transparency, in theory, if something is revealed to them that challenges their current worldview, it causes a great upheaval to occur within their belief-system. This type of upheaval is what is actually addressed in the biblical account of earthquakes and battle of Armageddon at the time of the Second Coming. Paradigms and worldly institutions will be at stake from these new disclosures.  

In other words, the Second Coming will not be a physical event. God’s new disclosures are meant to bring about inner change – to our hearts and minds.

This is why at the time of the Second Coming, the Lord God will “come with the clouds.” These are the clouds of mental obscurity that keep us from understanding the Lord more deeply and block spiritual light from penetrating our lives.

A simple example of this mental obscurity is the understanding of Scripture only from the literal sense of its words – such as the “Flood” in Genesis portraying a physical event. The Lord wishes to disclose deeper meanings, meanings that have immediate relevance to our lives in today’s world. 

These deeper meanings of the biblical deluge can only become transparent with the Lord’s help. For instance, in Isaiah 54:7-9,11 it states:

For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but in great compassions will I gather thee again. In an inundation of anger I hid my faces from thee for a moment; but in the mercy of eternity will I have compassion upon thee, saith Jehovah thy Redeemer. For this is the waters of Noah unto Me, to whom I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee and rebuke thee, O thou afflicted and tossed with tempests and not comforted.

In Luke 6:47, 48 we read:

Jesus said, Every one that cometh to Me, and heareth My sayings and doeth them is like unto a man building a house, who digged, and went deep, and laid the foundation upon the rock; and when an inundation came, the stream beat upon the house, but could not shake it, because it had been founded upon the rock.

With a careful reading, it is evident, even in the literal interpretation of these passages, that Scripture is using the phrase  “waters of Noah” and “inundation” to represent something psychical not physical. God is addressing an inundation of anger, that is, a stormy mental state, where faithless people are “afflicted and tossed with tempests and not comforted.”

Would you have been astute enough to see something new being disclosed here if it were not pointed out to you? The disclosure is that a “flood” alludes to a deluge of hurtful and negative influences that drown out the spirit and its peacefulness (comfort) if we do not base our life on faith from God.

For kingdoms (and their governments) to change, men and women must change. In God’s new administration, the minds and hearts of its citizens will change – one person at a time.

Are you ready for better government during your lifetime? 

The Bible, especially the Old Testament, sure has many references that seem to portray Jehovah God as angry, even to the point of wanting to destroy humans outright.

But how does this square with a God of infinite love and mercy? How can God ever be angry or think to do any evil to humans? Yet in Zechariah 8:14 we read:

“As I thought to do evil when your fathers provoked me to anger, saith Jehovah Zebaoth”

Since we cannot grasp with our finite minds the true nature of God’s infinite mercy towards each of us, the literal sense of Scripture is accommodated to our worldly conception of wrongdoing and why we should come to fear evil.

This is accomplished in Scripture by making it appear that, throughout history, we have greatly pissed God off. 

When we transgress spiritual laws (which we all do), it would be difficult to convey the idea that these things should not be done if God is depicted as always treating us with boundless mercy and showing us a big wide smile. So instead, we are told in Genesis 6:7 that:

“And Jehovah said, I will destroy man whom I have created out of the faces of the ground”

But Scripture is not just accommodated to the corporeal/sensual mind of humans. It is also accommodated to our highest potential cognitive functions and to the minds of angels in heaven (who understand things abstracted from the ideas of time and space).

So beyond delivering the powerful, visceral message that under God’s governance and watchful eye, evil will lead man to disaster, there can be gleaned an even more powerful hidden message from these same words.

This hidden message is purely spiritual and has nothing to do with physical consequences or physical destruction.

Let us put on our thinking caps and try to look at these same words of Genesis 6:7 from a more elevated frame of reference.

The physical ground supports man’s life on earth in the same way spiritual love supports, and is the ground of, religious faith. This is our psychological turf.

Therefore, to destroy man whom God created out of the faces of the ground would be interpreted by angels that man’s understanding of faith had changed from what God had first intended – that human understanding and faith had become grounded not in the principles of spiritual love but in some debased and ego-centered love.

Therefore, on a higher, spiritual level, Genesis 6:7, refers to God wanting to destroy a false belief and faith-system. If this divine action does not take place within the hearts and minds of men and women, repentance and salvation cannot commence.

All the narratives of the Lord’s Word, the battles and miracles, the escape from bondage in Egypt, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, the land of Canaan, the descent of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, are all the things that God foresees playing out on our psychological turf.

We are told to live our lives with cool reason. We learn at school thathe world was created as a cosmic accident. We are told that life is a conglomeration of atoms and matter, and there is nothing beyond that. Yet our hearts act betray our rhetoric, just listen to how people speak at a funeral.  We feel that life should not end at death, we grieve and hope to meet again loved ones who have passed on from this life. When a tragedy like the Asian tsunami, the Chinese earthquake or September 11th happens we react with indignation, we feel that things should not be like this. Read More

Probably the most misunderstood and intellectually challenging image of motherhood (besides the virgin birth) is described in Revelation 12:1-6. At face value, the biblical narrative presents us with farfetched scenario. First of all, the unfolding drama does not fit any known standard of measurement or law of physics. We have a pregnant woman standing on the moon (without a spacesuit), agonizing over a painful delivery and, if that’s not enough, she is being threatened by a huge red dragon (with seven heads) wanting to eat her child.

This cosmic birthing event ushers in the great battle between Michael and his angels with the dragon and his evil minions. The first key to understanding this spectacular story is that it is taking place not in the physical world but in a pre-temporal and pre-spatial realm – heaven.

The second key is that these fantastic events concerning the Lord’s Second Coming are to happen within each of us. We are told by the Lord in Luke 17:21 that “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” So we are not to view the kingdom of heaven as simply some “other” place but a deeper reality that must be formed within us.

Therefore, the coming kingdom of God represents a new creation within us – a new spiritual rebirth. This rebirth will require a change to take place in our hearts and minds (will and understanding), whereby we will be perfected in love and wisdom.

The mother-to-be depicted in Revelation as clothed like the sun and standing on the moon represents a new love and intelligence, which will bring forth new spiritual life from a more elevated understanding of the Holy Word (signified by wearing a crown of twelve stars). Her standing on the moon represents an elevated relationship with God because she is put “above” the moon - whose reflected light represents the reflection of a worldly and corporeal mind. So we are challenged to transcend our habitual minds in order to receive more profound teachings from the Lord. These deeper teachings are what the Lord wants us to understand as to what is actually gestating in this great cosmic drama of motherhood.

In her womb is growing a new faith-paradigm. Her crying and painful ordeal to give birth represents the difficulty that these new ideas will have being accepted into the world. The great dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, represents a powerful persuasion in the world to resist these changes, even to destroy (devour) them. But these new ideas will eventually succeed and replace antiquated notions concerning the Lord God and Holy Scripture. The “end of days” refers to the replacement of old thinking.

So, on this Mother’s Day, send your mom warm love and deserving gratitude for bringing you into the world. And perhaps, you can also begin to celebrate Mother’s Day on an entirely new level and order - the birth of a new spiritual life in the womb of your own heart and mind.

Are you open-minded enough to receive new ideas from the Lord and begin the process of a new conception within your spirit?

But Brenda was different from all the other bookworms. She was not just interested in gathering all kinds of knowledge. Her true passion was to discover the most important information in the world.

She just didn’t want to be smart, filling her head with endless data and factoids. She wanted to be wise.

When Brenda was very young, her mom used to read a book of very special stories to her before going to bed. Her mom called it God’s Great Book. It was the Holy Bible.

As Brenda grew up, she kept these stories safe in her heart. However, she did not continue to read these stories on her own.

She also had lots of other things deep inside her heart that were important to her. These were her invisible friends.

When you are surrounded by as many books as she was, it was easy to create a rich imagination. You see Brenda had an animal friend for every kind of thought and feeling that lived inside her heart and mind.

When she felt kindness in her heart she always imagined lambs. Courage would bring lions into her thoughts. And when she was feeling very smart, her thoughts would turn into birds that soar high above everything else. But since she had not yet found the most important information in the world, all these wonderful animal friends were turning her imagination into a wild zoo. All her animal friends were fighting for her attention at the same time. She knew that she needed to organize her thoughts and feelings.

Brenda felt that if she could find wisdom, her animal friends could live in a better home and more easily find peace and order among themselves.

One day, after she had spent many exhaustive hours seeking out new information from all kinds of books and surfing the Internet, she heard a loud crash on the library roof. Alarmed by the loud noise, she went outside to see what was going on.

To Brenda’s surprise a television suddenly fell out of the sky and landed near her. Then came a radio. Next, a cellular phone fell. Soon books, magazines, newspapers, computers, and even more televisions, radios, and phones began to fall all around her.

Brenda found herself caught in a torrential rain of information resources. This scared all her animal friends as well. She knew that if she did not escape, she and her animal friends would drown in this deluge of data.

Back inside the Library she looked for the safest place where she and all her animal friends could go. She spotted God’s Great Book and headed towards it.

The world was being inundated by information and causing total sensory saturation everywhere. The whole world was being flooded by facts and even the library was quickly becoming overwhelmed.

Quickly, Brenda opened God’s Book and hopped inside for protection, taking all her invisible friends with her. Amazingly, God’s book gave her and her animal friends buoyancy to ride out wave after wave of information.

The world was completely covered in a mess of messages and uncategorized information. So the little bookworm’s problems were not over yet. She was still adrift and did not know how to navigate through this flood of facts and knowledge.

All this cognitive confusion rocked Brenda’s world along with her animal friends. She began to be bounced around by larger and larger waves of conflicting information and discrepant, disconnected data. She not only held on tight to God’s Big Book, but for additional stability, she began reading its stories intensely. Now she was holding on to every word with her dear life.

Brenda suddenly realized that she had found the most important information in the world. God was watching all this and decided it was time to perform a great miracle. As Brenda continued to read the Bible, the great flooding of facts that was threatening to suffocate her began to subside.

God was now creating a new place for Brenda and her animal friends to live. God began to transform all the televisions, radios, computers, cell phones, journals, newspapers and magazines that had covered the earth to a great depth into a mountain of ideas, according to their importance. God’s Great Book then took Brenda and her friends to the top of this wonderful mountain.

Brenda now realized that it was God, who from her earliest childhood, was acting in her heart to help her discover the most valuable information. The big lesson to be learned is that when you discover what the most important information in the world is, all the other knowledge and ideas in the world can then be arranged, higher and higher, into more logical order and majesty. This mountain was the perfect place for all the things of Brenda’s heart and mind to find safety, peace, and joy.

This was the place for Brenda and all her animal friends to start a new world. This world would develop into a Land of Wisdom.

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"To seek beauty then, in the midst of the fallenness, is to have faith in a reality beyond what I can see. Despite the brokenness around me, my heart still percieves glimmers of what was meant to be, echoes from the shattered gladness of new creation. I see the remnants of paradise, slivered shards of ideal beauty glittering in the corners of the earth, gleaming out from art and music and story."

"Being an idealist isn’t about living a perfect life, it’s about hope in a perfect God. Hope is the essence of idealism."

AMEN!

I wrote this in the comments section of that post:

Sara,

"I completely agree. I find it sad that so many evangelicals are interested in the “end times” and “tribulation”, but don’t respect art, which points to the ultimate regeneration and resurrection. One of the reasons I love art is that, as a Christian, the contemplation that arises from encountering art leads me to wonder at the complete otherness of God in contrast to our broken states.

It is one of my prayers that in the coming years Christians will begin to rediscover the arts. If you look at the whole of Christian history, of which our present age is but a small blip, art, instead of being feared and mocked, was revered and encouraged by the church.

Perhaps one of the reasons this “New Iconoclasm” has taken place is the mindset of modernity that “all can be reasoned away”, “logic will prevail”, “there is no mystery”… Well, that is great if you are trying to quantify how many orange stones are in a mosaic, but it doesn’t apply very well to the pursuit of understanding the deeper meaning. Sadly, I believe the church has given into this mindset (religiously). But Christianity isn’t a religion, it isn’t a bullet point theology , it is a way of life, and life is messy.

I think that wonder is an excellent form of worship. Praising God by saying “I have no clue. You are too mysterious to understand, completely other.” This is the realm of art, of the unquantifiable, of the mysterious, the subtle shades of meaning that has the power to expand the way we think and change the way we view the ordinary. As I said, sadly we evangelicals are slow to jump to mystery and afraid of what we cannot prove. But if we could prove it, it really wouldn’t be worth noticing would it? God can’t be “proved” or “understood”, and if He could He wouldn’t be God.

Complete understanding is not a requirement for appreciation."

Part 2- In which I question the validity of my statements.

"Gee this is great!" I think to myself. "Beauty is fun and wonder is a great form of worship." But then the pesky little man in the back of my brain picks up his megaphone and begins to yell "Yes, that is wonderful. But what about the whole theme of this blog? What about turning thought into deed?"

And even now as I quietly curse the little man who never lets me rest in my self admiration sessions, I understand that his question is a valid one. How do you engage the mysterious and trans-rational? How can we incorporate that which we do not understand into the way we think about and interact with God?

This is the problem that I always have. Transforming something from an abstraction into an actualization. But that is aside from the point.

I still hold by my assertion that propisitionalist "bullet point theology" (by the way, as far as I can tell I have coined that phrase. Yes! Now I must use it as often as possible to propagate it's popularity and perhaps get a book deal out of it) is not the way to reach a postmodern, postcritical audience. As to what will take place instead "modern mindset ministry", I am not sure.

We live in a culture that has given up. People are beginning to realize, or their parents realized and they are now a by product of, the fact that reason does not bring or end in meaning. We are intellectually and morally bankrupt, searching for the meaning we didn't find in books in other people and carnal desires. So, back to the question. How does Christianity work in the 21st century?

Perhaps by not cloaking it in the failed and flawed human logic that we want to box it up in, the same logic that leads no one to meaning apart from The Spirit. Perhaps by shedding the superiority complex of claiming to understand God and instead proclaiming our thankfulness of His choice to reveal himself to us. Perhaps relying less on our ability to interpret Scripture and relying more on the hermeneutic of the Spirit by having more Scripture readings. Perhaps more physical and spiritual reminders of the sacrifice and triumph of Jesus by celebrating Communion more often. Perhaps spending less time trying to understand God by examining logical, rational, assertions in books and more time on our knees in prayer, thanksgiving and wonder (I especially need to understand this).

I am not in any way against preaching, and teaching the Word. I am for preaching and teaching. But perhaps not every service is called to be a service of pure exegetical preaching. Maybe there are times when there just needs to be a cross, a huge, rugged cross standing at the front of the meeting place. Someone reads from scripture bits of Jesus' life ending at the death and resurrection; but they wouldn't be reading as if they were reading an instruction manual on how to stain a wood floor, they would be reading this story, this passionate, dramatic story, as if they were there. There would be music, and maybe a speaker would discuss what had been read or a testimony shared. Then there would be communion, and they would be in a state to truly remember and think upon what communion means. And of course, not every service is like this, or should be like this. But not every service should be an A+B+A formula of music, preaching, music, either.

Here are a few things that should maybe be incorporated into worship more often.

• More scripture reading- letting the metanarrative that God provided speak within the original context of a story.
• More silence- More time to speak and listen and wonder at God.
• More Iconography- Physical things to remind us of the spiritual things.
• Communion celebrated more often.

Anyways these are just a few of my thoughts on what a Christian meeting will look like when we engage the part of us that searches for meaning as well as the part that searches for reason.

As to the use of art, I realize that not every church can have an art gallery. I realize that with art comes the risk of bad artists, lol. So I am not entirely sure in what capacity the Church should relate to the arts, but I know that we should at least be supportive.

The one thing more that I want to communicate here is that maybe we need to stop being so afraid of the more mysterious aspects of faith. Faith isn't being sure, Faith is trust. As I already admitted I am not sure how to incorporate the ideals I spoke of (of God's otherness, his sovereignty), but I do think they should be incorporated. Ah, but this is enough for one night!

Soli Deo Gloria!

r

Ternyata kelamaan libur juga nggak enak ya!!!!!!!!Hiiih,,,apalagi di rumah disuruh bersihin rumah,nungguin adek + keponakan,,,,pfiuuuhh...bikin males....

Some passions have gone, and some more came unpredictably.
I felt like I already have everything that I wanted, and I felt grateful enough about my life. Nothing could be better than the life I already had.

Then I was thinking about how to share what I feel. How to create a form of my life. At the same time, I was playing with my beads, and I know I have always been in love with beads and accessories.

Suddenly I realized, this is what I can do. This is what I have always done and I am mastered about. So I decided, this is the right thing to do.

Pieces of Heart.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These Pieces of Heart are not Limited Edition (unless stated "Limited Edition"), cause I'm planning to share these feelings to everyone. Those are designed, created, and done handmade personally by me.

I require you to click the pictures, so that you could read my note and understand the feelings when I create these Pieces of Heart, before you decide to purchase any of these pieces.

And please, whenever you saw someone pass you by, wearing the same pieces as yours, give her your sweetest smile. She might feel the same way as you do. And you might have a new great friend to have a high tea or coffee by the evening.

If you would like to give these to someone, and you need a special packaging, just let me know.

Hoping these Pieces of Heart will be something meaningful in everyone's life path.