Thursday, December 19, 2013

A bitter spiritual feast

Spiritual Feasting.

Let's have a spiritual feast, by the grace of our Lord.  May the Holy Spirit guide us to all truth...

Heb 12:14  Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord

The spiritual feast before us is meant to nourish us spiritually. We need to be able to discern between good and evil and all our spiritual feasting is geared towards that end.

We are told here to follow peace with all men. Something that sounds simple enough but when we get right down to it, we have to realize that all the contentions we call NORMAL are really NOT NORMAL at all. We've learned to call evil good, remember? So now we need to be reminded by our Lord and Savior what evil is truly evil and what good is truly good.  As I mentioned, we call all our petty little spats good- we call them healthy and tell ourselves it's better than holding all the anger inside. We bicker and pick at each other as a way of life and call it love because in truth no one would ever have this warped thing we call love if we believed that contention and all the annoyances were detrimental and something to avoid. 

ALL those nitpicking nasty nuisances, all those tiny snide remarks, each one is WRONG! They aren't cute, they aren't sweet, they are NOT terms of endearment that we've come to pretend that they are.  We lie to ourselves and call them good but the truth is out there for us to realize. The truth is that all contention from the tiniest bit to the biggest is not peaceful.  We are not following peace with someone we are belittling. We are not following peace with someone we are answering cockily. The tone of our voice revealing our feelings at the moment can show more than our words.  Saying the words 'I love you' with a nasty tone doesn't reveal love at all.

Peace.

We need to recognize that our lives are filled with things that are not PEACEFUL and in recognizing that- we need to beg for forgiveness and repent of that behavior, asking the Holy Spirit to guide us into peace, true peace with all men.  We can't simply accept our inherent nastiness and label it good and acceptable. We must be allowed to see all our evil so that we may cling to Christ's goodness.

More tomorrow by the grace of our LORD and SAVIOR, more feasting spiritually.  What we might taste is bitter and hard to swallow, but if it nourishes our spirit that's all that really matters.

All by the grace, the love of Jesus Christ, always!  All praise, all honor, all glory, all thanksgiving to God!

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