To Find Meaning and Purpose

I used to believe that I was a product of mere chance. Anyone could have taken my place at birth, but I happened to be the autonomous one conceived by my parents. This is the view I had on life. One based in a universe that happened by time plus chance. Christianity rejects this. It insists that each individual person exists as a being created in the image of God, and that therefore each person is an ongoing entity with dignity. With Christianity there is purpose and meaning in life. Without God there is no purpose or stature on which an individual can find meaning.

Fredrich Nietzsche, German philosopher who said ‘God is Dead’, said “But all pleasure seeks eternity – a deep and profound eternity.”

Francis A. Schaeffer replied to this by saying, “With no personal God, all is dead. Yet man, being truly man (no matter what he says he is), cries out for a meaning that can only be found in the existence of the infinite-personal God.”

Aldous Huxley’s “drug soma” suggests that we should give healthy people drugs and they can then find truth inside their own heads; for that final experience that would give one meaning to life, in the next trip trying to find truth in one’s own head but left in despair with no way to be sure, trying to find meaning without reason through a blind leap of faith in non-reason.

American journalist Lee Strobel said, “You don’t have to commit intellectual suicide to come to the conclusion that there is an intelligent designer because today science is pointing more directly and more powerfully toward a Creator than any other time in the history of the world.”  

Science Doesn’t Say Anything—Scientists Do

-By Frank Turek

You can’t put honesty in a test tube.
 “Science” doesn’t say anything—scientists do.

 Those are a couple of the illuminating conclusions we can draw from the global warming e-mail scandal.

“You mean science is not objective?” No, unless the scientists are, and too often they are not. I don’t want to impugn all scientists, but it is true that some of them are less than honest. Sometimes they lie to get or keep their jobs. Sometimes they lie to get grant money. Sometimes they lie to further their political beliefs. Sometimes they don’t intentionally lie, but they draw bad scientific conclusions because they only look for what they hope to find.

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Empiricism

Scientific knowledge is based on sensation. For as we are bound to sense, the truths we are capable of knowing are all contingent or 'positive' : strictly speaking, we can neither see nor hope to see why they are what they are. And that is to say that science cannot explain the world but only describe it. To put it very simply: Science cannot explain why things happen but only how. To the mathematical mind the problems of perception and of the external world leads most of them to study closely the physical sciences, and they tend to regard these as being the only reliable source of knowledge and throwing out other main fields of human achievement, the arts, history, religion, and morality. Interest in God is far from these people. It is a reach out of the natural realm to the metaphysical: the pretended science of what lies beyond sensible appearance. To them it is the denial of reality, just imagination.

Anxiety, Stress and Depression

There is so much stress, anxiety and depression in the world today. And our solution to the problem is to escape into fantasies, or to fill ourselves up with stuff, or chase after money, food, pleasure, power, and even wisdom to satisfy our cravings. Another more common solution to more prolonged and severe problems is to seek help from a doctor and take pills or drink or smoke or do drugs to dull the pain. And we know this only covers the problem. And no psychiatrist claims to have cured their patients. The real problem in this is that we have not put God in the right position in our life. Even I, as a Christian, have not always put God in the right position in my life. Many of our illnesses don't come from the food we eat or how much we exercise, and we all know it, it's all in our brain, it's from our heart and where we put our trust. Too many of us put our trust in other people or even ourselves. Put your faith in God. Put God in the right position and live according to His will and let Him take down all your obstacles. Don't worry about the things of tomorrow, there is enough trouble in today and you don't know what will happen tomorrow. As difficult it can be in the most challenging times, put your faith in God. He knows the future and in the good and the bad times He will always be there. Put your faith in Him. I honestly believe you will be healed!


There is more to it:
Drunkenness leaves you not in control of your thoughts.
And Drugs make you dependent on them, your doctor and yourself instead of God.
Marijuana tricks your mind and body to the sensation of happiness, but it's only a substitution for real joy and peace given by God's Spirit.


Note:
I know in some serious cases drugs are needed to help. But God is beside you and will help you through rehabilitating your life. God Bless

He Died to Self

How was Jesus the son of God and still God?
We need to give strictest attention to what God has spoken in His son to us. You have heard of the suffering Saviour in Isaiah 53. Upon that cross Christ became sin for us and died to self that he might live for us. He gave up his life to The Father so that we have the chance to live eternally with God. And it is only through Jesus Christ, the mediator between us and The Father, that we might have eternal life.

Community

Mark E. Dever (Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns)

The Christian life is to be lived, in part, by folding yourself into a series of committed relationships, not just with your friends (with whom you may have all kinds of other things in common) but with a local church, open to all, united around faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you try to live your Christian life without such relationships in such a community, then you must beware, because there are many places in the New Testament that warn you that you could be fooling yourself.

Many biblical passages describe attempts at the rejection of responsibility. Of course, there is Genesis 3, the story of the first couple in the Garden. And 2 Samuel 12 is the incredible story of Nathan confronting David, who comes to see his own fault, though before that time he had completely justified his own actions in his mind. Again, in James 1 Christians are warned not to look at the Word of God and then turn away from it and so deceive ourselves. See too 1 John 4:19-20 and 1 Corinthians 5.

Was Jesus Always "Nice"?

Thursday, September 12, 2013

by John MacArthur

I never could believe in the Jesus Christ of some people, for the Christ in whom they believe is simply full of affectionateness and gentleness, whereas I believe there never was a more splendid specimen of manhood, even its sternness, than the Savior; and the very lips which declared that He would not break a bruised reed uttered the most terrible anathemas upon the Pharisees. –Charles Spurgeon

Modern writers, agnostic academics, and liberal theologians always stress the kindness and gentleness of Christ. Their Jesus—not the One found in Scripture, but the one concocted from their own imaginations and preferences—is effectively an ideological and theological pacifist. He preached only love and self-sacrifice, never judged or discriminated, and wasn’t dogmatic about the truth. In effect, the Jesus they’ve manufactured pleads “Can’t we all just get along?” with people of all faiths.

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