The book is intended as 1) a challenge to Christians to explore more deeply their Christian walk and 2) an introduction to non-Christians and nominal Christians of the true meaning of Christianity. There are 35 Reflections, each on an important aspect of the Christian life. At the end there are thought and discussion questions for each Reflection. The book is ideal for both individual and group study, prayer and discussion.

REFLECTIONS

THE CHALLENGE AND EXCITEMENT OF THE COMMITTED CHRISTIAN LIFE VOLUME 1By Robert J. Burton

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Burton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4389-8692-0

Contents

INTRODUCTION...............................................................xREFLECTION 1: LOVING TOTALLY - OR NOT?.....................................1REFLECTION 2: THE CONSECRATED CHRISTIAN LIFE...............................5REFLECTION 3: UNQUENCHABLE LOVE............................................9REFLECTION 4: CHRIST IS THE CENTER OF ALL CREATION.........................13REFLECTION 5: JUSTIFIED! SANCTIFIED? GLORIFIED?............................17REFLECTION 6: A FATHER OF THE EARLY CHURCH SPEAKS..........................21REFLECTION 7: JESUS CHRIST: STILL A SACRIFICE..............................25REFLECTION 8: "AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN"..................................29REFLECTION 9: CAN ILLNESS COME FROM GOD?...................................33REFLECTION 10: BLACK AND WHITE - OR GRAY?..................................37REFLECTION 11: IS THERE INTRINSIC EVIL?....................................41REFLECTION 12: THE MESSIAH IS AMONG US!....................................45REFLECTION 13: HEAVEN IS REAL!!............................................49REFLECTION 14: CONQUEROR OF THE WORLD......................................53REFLECTION 15: THE TRINITY.................................................57REFLECTION 16: ARE KINGS OLD-FASHIONED?....................................61REFLECTION 17: IT'S ALL A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE............................65REFLECTION 18: TRULY CHRISTIAN??...........................................69REFLECTION 19: WHAT IS THE SCOOP ON HALLOWEEN?.............................73REFLECTION 20: LOOK AROUND, ATHEISTS!......................................77REFLECTION 21: "GO TO HELL!"...............................................81REFLECTION 22: LUKEWARMNESS? NOT ME!.......................................85REFLECTION 23: THE SECRET..................................................89REFLECTION 24: BASEBALL IN HEAVEN?.........................................93REFLECTION 25: "JESUS OF NAZARETH".........................................97REFLECTION 26: 5 OUT OF 10 - IS THAT SO BAD?...............................101REFLECTION 27: "ABBA, FATHER!".............................................105REFLECTION 28: AM I SUPPOSED TO LOVE - EVERYONE?!..........................109REFLECTION 29: "ANGELOLOGY"................................................113REFLECTION 30: LIFE IS PRECIOUS!...........................................117REFLECTION 31: LIVE BY THE FLESH OR LIVE BY THE SPIRIT.....................121REFLECTION 32: ISRAELITES AT HEART!........................................125REFLECTION 33: MEMORIES OF THE PERSECUTED CHURCH...........................129REFLECTION 34: "VANITY OF VANITIES ... ALL IS VANITY"......................133REFLECTION 35: LAW CENTERED OR CHRIST CENTERED?............................137QUESTIONS/DISCUSSIONReflection 1: LOVING TOTALLY - OR NOT?.....................................141Reflection 2: THE CONSECRATED CHRISTIAN LIFE...............................142Reflection 3: UNQUENCHABLE LOVE............................................143Reflection 4: CHRIST IS THE CENTER OF ALL CREATION.........................144Reflection 5: JUSTIFIED! SANCTIFIED? GLORIFIED?............................145Reflection 6: A FATHER OF THE EARLY CHURCH SPEAKS..........................146Reflection 7: JESUS CHRIST: STILL A SACRIFICE..............................147Reflection 8: "AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN"..................................148Reflection 9: CAN ILLNESS COME FROM GOD?...................................149Reflection 10 BLACK AND WHITE - OR GRAY?...................................150Reflection 11: IS THERE INTRINSIC EVIL?....................................151Reflection 12: THE MESSIAH IS AMONG US.....................................152Reflection 13: HEAVEN IS REAL!!............................................153Reflection 14: CONQUEROR OF THE WORLD......................................154Revelation 15: THE TRINITY.................................................155Reflection 16: ARE KINGS OLD FASHIONED?....................................156Reflection 17: IT'S ALL A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE............................157Reflection 18: TRULY CHRISTIAN?............................................158Reflection 19: WHAT IS THE SCOOP ON HALLOWEEN?.............................159Reflection 20: LOOK AROUND, ATHEISTS!......................................160Reflection 21: "GO TO HELL!"...............................................161Reflection 22: LUKEWARMNESS? NOT ME!.......................................162Reflection 23: THE SECRET..................................................163Reflection 24: BASEBALL IN HEAVEN?.........................................164Reflection 25: "JESUS OF NAZARETH".........................................165Reflection 26: 5 OUT OF 10 - IS THAT SO BAD?...............................166Reflection 27: "ABBA, FATHER!".............................................167Reflection 28: AM I SUPPOSED TO LOVE - EVERYONE?...........................168Reflection 29: ANGELOGY....................................................169Reflection 30: LIFE IS PRECIOUS............................................170Reflection 31: LIVE BY THE FLESH OR LIVE BY THE SPIRIT.....................171Reflection 32: ISRAELITES AT HEART.........................................172Reflection 33: MEMORIES OF THE PERSECUTED CHURCH...........................173Reflection 34: "VANITY OF VANITIES ... ALL IS VANITY"......................174Reflection 35: LAW CENTERED OR CHRIST CENTERED?............................175

Chapter One

REFLECTION 1: LOVING TOTALLY - OR NOT?

Do you love God? Do I? I mean really, really love Him? Our eternal destiny and the meaning of our life on earth depend on the answer. Please do not glibly respond, "Sure I love God!" True love is other-centered, and so true love of God is Other-centered. Love is not love when it is proclaimed through fear or duty or because of a desire for personal gain (even Heaven!) Let's go to the Bible: When a Scripture verse is so important, so basic - indeed, so essential - that it was ordered to be displayed prominently at home and even on one's physical person, well, then it should make us sit up and pay attention. Thus we have this pivotal verse in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates." (Deuteronomy 6: 4-9) Moses was God's instrument in bringing this key and critical message to the people of Israel - a message that laid the very foundation of their religion and their spirituality.

Sadly, over the centuries, the passage remained for many, especially the religious leaders, the foundation of their religion but not their spirituality. The religious leaders were very good at following the letter of that command, but at the time of Jesus many of them had lost the spirit of it. Nevertheless, Jesus reinforced the importance of this message from God when He responded to the question from a Pharisee as to which was the greatest commandment in the Law: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 22: 37-39)

Later, the Apostle John, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, told us that the very nature, the very essence, of God is Love. God does not love; God is Love. So, both in the Old Testament and in the New, the key message of divine revelation revolves around love: God loves us and we, if we are genuine Christians, love God. Further, Jesus completes the revelation by telling us that it is just as important to love other people. John later emphasizes that teaching as well, when he wrote that it is impossible to love God whom we do not see if we do not love our brother (and sister) whom we do see.

Now, I want to make us squirm a bit. Go back with me to Deuteronomy 6: Moses proclaimed the importance of God's call to love Him by stating that God's people should demonstrate their total love of God - heart and soul and strength (or, as Jesus paraphrased, heart and soul and mind) - by not just mentioning it but impressing it upon their children, by focusing on it and talking about it in the homes and on the road, when they got up and when they went to bed. What many of the religious leaders in Jesus' time took literally and missed the real meaning of was the admonition to take the words and tie them on their hands and foreheads and place them on their gates and doorframes. What the Holy Spirit was, and is, teaching is that love for God (and other people) must be of absolute paramount importance in our lives, and it must be from absolutely pure motives! Is it? Does love for God, talking about God, living for God, loving other people - whether we like them or not - consume our daily lives? "Whoah," you might say, "that sounds pretty fanatical!" Well, yes it does, and yes it is. As Christians we miss the whole point of Christianity is we are not fanatical about God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and about loving and serving other people. If people do not get uncomfortable around us because of our passion for God and for our absolute commitment to service, then we are living the letter of God's message rather than the spirit of it.

When our life comes to an end and we stand before God, what will He say, and what will we recognize? I know one thing we will clearly see: That God indeed is Love, that God has loved us infinitely, immeasurably and personally. We will see the glorified Jesus, with His healed wounds that He suffered because of us and because He loves us so much. We will see the Holy Spirit, the living Love between the Father and the Son and the Love poured out to and into us. We will see God the Father, and we will grasp just what the total love of a Father is. And we will also see ourselves; God will not have to say a word. We will see if we went through the motions of religion while living primarily for ourselves, or if we lived a life of love for God and for every single person who crossed our path. Why wait until then? The call is for now - to love God and others with every fiber of our being.

Try a test of true love of God: Do I express my love for Him because He is alive, because He loves me so much, because it is a horrifying thought to hurt Him - or because I know that if I somehow love Him, I will get something good out of it? True love never bases itself on self-gain, but purely because the beloved, and the Beloved, is so very lovable!

REFLECTION 2: THE CONSECRATED CHRISTIAN LIFE

Now, what in the world does that mean? Oh, I know, it refers to those Christians who are dedicated to full-time ministry. Not! To be sure, the term "consecrated Christian life" includes these folks. But it goes way beyond that. Are you ready for this? It may prompt you to take a close, hard look at your spiritual walk (and me to look at mine!) Take a deep breath with me, and let's plunge in: The "consecrated Christian life" is a description of every real/true/genuine Christian's walk. The flip side of that is that a person who does not lead a consecrated life does not really understand Christianity and may well not be a true Christian but one in name only. One of the definitions of "consecrate" is to make someone or something sacred, holy. When we accepted Jesus as Savior, when we were baptized and when we dedicated our life to the Lord, we were "consecrated" by God. Our innermost self, our spirit, became a living temple of the Holy Spirit and therefore of the Father and the Word as well. When we think about the sacredness of the Temple in the Old Testament, this gives us at least a glimmering of how awesome it is for each of us to be temples wherein God dwells. But, and here is where it gets a little sticky, that consecration of us by God must have a response or it simply will not endure. I know some Christians will have a problem with this statement, but I passionately believe that it is very possible to lose our relationship with God and to become empty and desecrated temples. We do that by sin, by choosing to serve ourselves instead of God. So, after God consecrates us, we are called to, by His grace, consecrate ourselves. If I am not willing as a Christian to give everything I have and am to God, to surrender myself totally to Him, to seek daily to make sacred every thought and word and deed and breath, then I may believe in God (Satan does, too!) but I have not chosen to be a true and living disciple of Jesus.

Let's go to Scripture. Paul has an intriguing message in Chapter 7 of his first Letter to the Corinthians: "I tell you, brothers (and sisters, of course!), the time is short. From now on those with wives should live as though they had none; those who weep should live as though they were not weeping, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing; buyers should conduct themselves as though they owned nothing, and those who make use of the world as though they were not using it, for the world as we know it is passing away. I should like you to be free of all worries. The unmarried man is busy with the Lord's affairs, concerned with pleasing the Lord; but the married man is busy with this world's demands and occupied with pleasing his wife. This means he is divided. The virgin - indeed, any unmarried woman - is concerned with things of the Lord, in pursuit of holiness in body and spirit. The married woman, on the other hand, has the cares of this world to absorb her and is concerned with pleasing her husband. I am going into this for your own good. I have no desire to place restrictions on you, but I do want to promote what is good, what will help you devote yourselves entirely to the Lord." Wow! Some reading between the lines is essential here: Paul was not encouraging everyone who was married to leave their spouses and enter monasteries or convents (which, by the way, did not exist until a couple hundred of years after Paul), nor is he encouraging us to do the same. So, what is the Holy Spirit saying through Paul? The message, when read with spiritual eyes and listened to with spiritual ears, is that because time is short (whether that shortness refers to our own individual lives or to the return of the Lord in glory), it is imperative for committed Christians to see everything in this world as quickly passing. A Christian becomes consecrated by committing himself and herself to turning every thing in life - work, family, retirement, pleasure, etc. - into a living prayer of praise for God and intercession for others. There is a long history of commitment to consecration, whether in married life or unmarried life. That history is as long as the existence of the Church. One example is Cecilia, an early Church martyr. She was a convert from paganism; she had been betrothed to another pagan by her parents - as was the custom in those days - but she chose to consecrate her life as a virgin. I can only imagine the consternation among her family members and her fianc! But the end result was that he became a Christian, too. Cecilia is often pictured as lying on her side, with cuts in her neck and with three fingers extended on one hand and one on the other hand. She proclaimed her faith in one God and in three Persons in one God to the very end. At her martyrdom, because she would not recant, her executioners tried to behead her - but they could not! She lingered for three days with massive neck wounds, praying for her executioners and praising God. Many years ago I had the privilege of visiting the Church of St. Cecilia in Rome, not far from the Colosseum. It is quite a history lesson; the medieval church is built upon a much earlier church, the ruins of which one can observe by going down some stairs. Then further down there is a very early basilica dedicated to her name. And below that is a pagan altar, with a trench in it for draining blood! The conclusion is this: Regardless of our state in life, if we are truly serious about being Christians, we daily renew our consecration to God - and then seek with all our hearts by His grace to live it. Do we? Are we consecrated Christians?

REFLECTION 3: UNQUENCHABLE LOVE

There are many references in the Old Testament to God as the Creator of the universe. I really scratch my head, and then I shake it, when I listen to the atheistic scientists (or is it scientific atheists?) who proclaim that planet earth and, indeed, the entire universe, are products of chance and of natural selection. I will drive some fundamentalist Christians right up the wall with the following statement, but I can very easily believe in the Big Bang Theory! The universe beginning this way, unless one insists on a very literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, does not in any way detract from God; and this is where I ask the atheistic scientists and the scientific atheists the most critical of questions: If the universe and our galaxy and planet earth all began with a humongous blast, that sent the building blocks of stars and moons and planets and life, where did that original stuff that blew up come from?? Matter by its very nature is finite, it does not come into existence by itself. Sorry, atheists: It all comes back to a Creator. If God created the world directly and specifically as described in Genesis, I say "Wow!" And if the Genesis account is a figurative description of God as Creator of the world (all of Scripture is true, even if the truth is contained in figurative speech), I again say "Wow!" People who do not believe in the inerrancy of the Old and New Testaments are not real Christians, just as people who do not believe in the inerrancy of the Old Testament by itself are not true Jews). So, if the scientists are right in teaching that everything was shaped by a gigantic explosion billions of years ago, I again say "Wow!" Maybe I even say "Double Wow!" I bow in adoration and submission before the God of the universe, who, however He chose to do so, created all things, including my own eternal spirit at the moment of my conception. I look at the stars and the moon and the beauty of our planet and I say "Blessed be God!", just as my mother used to say when we were driving along and she saw a beautiful tree.

OK, now that I have managed to perhaps off end some (I promise, I believe in God, with all my heart!) and, hopefully, to cause others to want to think about the mystery and immensity of creation, what does all of this have to do with the title of this Reflection, "Unquenchable Love?" I began by pointing out that there are many Scriptures referring to God as the Creator. There are, in the same context, quite a few Scriptures using the mighty oceans of this planet as an example of His creation, how He placed the seas and also set boundaries beyond which they may not pass. Every time I read one of those references to the oceans, my mind goes to one of the most terrible natural tragedies of our generation: The tsunami that roared totally unexpectedly from the depths of the sea and snuffed out lives from southeast Asia to as far away as Africa. It was December 26, 2005, and 250,000 people died. It is really important to understand that the boundaries of the oceans were still in place, so God as Creator is still sovereign. For a relatively brief - but seemingly unending - period of time, an earthquake under the ocean created a massive movement of water, traveling around five hundred miles an hour, until it reached shallow water. Then the water began piling up upon itself, creating monster waves. The shoreline receded and then the tsunami hit with brutal force. Our planet is fragile, and God does not ensure that everything here will be perfect - that is reserved for Heaven. Natural catastrophes happen.

(Continues...)

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