A stranger In His Land - Ann Matthews Moorhead

A stranger In His Land

While traveling in a foreign land,

    Still Bound by apartheid,

I booked a tour upon a bus,

    To see the countryside.

The driver stopped at interest points,

    And let us browse each town --

In one quaint place with cobbled streets,

    I stumbled, slipped down.

A Blackman, passing, helped me up - 

    I thanked him, shook his hand,

And gave him change for aiding me - 

    A stranger in his land.

He smiled a shy, engaging grin,

    They humbly bowed his head - 

"Bless you, my children eat tonight,"

    The grateful Blackman said.

Upon returning to the bus,

    The driver gave a sneer - 

I saw what you just did out there;

    We don't do such things here"

Mid hostile stares, I took my seat,

    And sat there church-mouse quiet,

But my heart held the happy thought - 

    His children ate that night.

Ann Matthews Moorhead

1989 A book of the Year - The poetry Society of Texas

Scripture Purpose - Alan Richardson

God's Word, though addressed to us here and now, was given through the mouths of men who lived centuries before our time. Accordingly, two tasks are imposed upon the commentator. First, he must show, with the aid of every resource of biblical scholarship, how the divine message was received and understood by the original hearers long ago: and therefore we have tried to sum up as concisely as possible just so much of the critical, historical and literary discoveries of modern Old Testament research as is essential for a truly historical understanding of Genesis[Bible] And secondly, he must show how the ancient truth of Genesis is to be received to-day in an age which, not surprisingly, tends to look to modern science for an account of the world and of man, their beginning and their possibilities: and therefore we have tried in the Introduction to describe the nature of religious truth, such as is given to us in the parable of Genesis, and to show how it differs from and does not conflict with scientific truth. In this way, it is hoped that the difficulties and misconceptions which arise for the ordinary reader when he turns to the opening pages of the Bible Will be removed. 

Preface to  Genesis 1-11 The Creations Stores and the Modern World View 

Torch Bible Paperbacks London 1969

- Scripture,

Ethnocentrism - MCH Odessa

Language & Translation

• Those whose English is limited often wish to speak their native language when possible
• They feel that both their explanations & their understandings can be more accurate
• It is more comfortable

Ehnocentrism

Even though we understand that everyone s different, we still tend to subconsciously believe that our culture & religion is the right one. We may view other cultures or religions as bizarre, strange, inferior or unenlightened. This is called ethnocentrism

It can cause misunderstandings and harm patients by: 

• Incorrect Dx[diagnoses]
• Failure to provide adequate pain relief
• Arrest of parent for child abuse due to misunderstood cultural childrearing beliefs and practices

Quoted from Hospital HR training MCH Odessa Texas

Lawyers - The Rainmaker, John Grisham

You might think I became a lawyer just to piss you off, but you would be wrong. I have wanted to be a lawyer ever since I heard about the civil rights lawyers in the fifties and sixties. And the amazing uses they found for the law. They did what a lot of people thought was impossible. They gave lawyers a good name. 

The Rainmaker, Movie

John Grisham

THE LAW

love that person the way you want Jesus to love you .. . Bob Goff

"Find someone you think is wrong, someone you disagree with, someone who isn’t like you at all, and decide to love that person the way you want Jesus to love you. We need to love everybody, always. Jesus never said doing these things would be easy. He just said it would work.”

“Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore. It’s acting like you care to get someone to do what you want or what you think God wants them to do. Do less of that, and people will see a lot less of you and more of Jesus.”

“A few weeks later, we found ourselves in the blast radius of her stunning love and kindness.”

“Talk behind each other’s backs constantly. Just talk about the right stuff. Talk about Jesus. Talk about grace. Talk about love and acceptance. People don’t grow where they are informed; they grow where they’re loved and accepted. Talk about who people are becoming and who you see them turning into. And give people medals, lots of them. The people around us should be walking around looking like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They should jingle when they walk.”

― Bob Goff, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People

World-wide mission is an optional extra - Martin Goldsmith

This highlights a basic weakness throughout our churches and Christian unions. World-wide mission is an optional extra to be indulged in by those who are spiritually keen and who happen to be interested in it. Those who try to stimulate a belief that world mission is an integral part of the life of the church find that such exhortations fail to make much impact. Why?

Is it, perhaps, because we do not see world-wide missions as a basic theme of the whole of the Bible? So often missionary work is made to hing on only a few verses: the Great Commission in Matthew 28; Acts 1:8; John 4:35; Romans 10:14-17. As a speaker, I attend large numbers of missionary meetings and often wish that other passages could sometime be used for the Bible Reading. Does mission really depend only on these few verses? If so, then it is surely right that mission should be minor theme in the church's teaching. Ministers would be right not to mention overseas mission except when they happen to be expounding these particular verses - and if they are systematic in their exposition of the Bible, they would not come upon these passages very often.

But the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation demonstrates God's love for all peoples and nations everywhere; He is the sovereign God over all the world. He has a purpose to for all nations This purpose is quietly worked out throughout the centuries as described in the Bible. God made the world . .  God loved the world . . . God sent His Son into the world to redeem,  and we look forward to the climax - 'a great multitude which no man can number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the lamb'.

Martin Goldsmith 

Don't Just Stand There 1976 

IVP Downers Grove, IL

Eros vs friendship CS Lewis

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.

... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.”

― C.S. Lewis, 

The Four Loves

- Eros, Friends, Love, Interpretation

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

Tom Holland

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

Tom Holland

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity

- Tom Holland, Christianity, Atheism 

The mystery of godliness... Ian thomas

The Mystery of Godliness - W. Ian Thomas

"The moment you come to realize that only God can make a man godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know God, and to let God be God in you and through you, whoever He may be--and this will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing--for there is only one God and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself!

Beware lest even as a Christian, you fall into Satan's trap! You may have found and come to know God in the Lord Jesus Christ, receiving Him sincerely as your Redeemer, yet if you do not enter in the mystery of godliness and allow God to be in you the origin of His own image, you will seek to be godly by submitting yourself to external rules and regulations, and by conformity to behavior patterns imposed upon you by the particular Christian society which you have chosen, and in which you hope to be found 'acceptable.' You will in this way perpetuate the pagan habit of practicing religion in the energy of the 'flesh,' and in the very pursuit of righteousness commit idolatry in honoring 'Christianity' more than Christ!"

The Mystery of Godliness
by W. Ian Thomas

Time to die... Jim Elliot

When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die. —Jim Elliot

Knowledge... Holmes

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

- empiricism, Sherlock Holmes, Truth, knowledge,

The road Ahead...Thomas Merton

http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/p-10-roadahead.html

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following
your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. 

Amen. 
 

Thomas Merton

Pursuit of God preface Tozer

Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this." Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold "right opinions," probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us. Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it, no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way, as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, and taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts. This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its Harne. 

A. W. Tozer Chicago, Ill. June 16, 1948