All About the Order

2 Timothy 1:6-7  |  That is why I remind you to fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you when I laid hands on you. For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

I was meditating on this verse while I was washing the dishes tonight. Kay is gone doing laundry and I turned the radio on, but God told me to “practice what you preach and turn it off.” So I did. And as I was thinking about the verse and going over it in my mind, I found myself praying that God would give me a spirit of self-discipline that I have been seeking so much in the last few days and weeks and months. And I got to thinking about the order they are listed: power, love, and self-discipline.

Now certainly this is not speaking of our own power, because we have no power apart from the power of Christ in us. Which makes me wonder if the reason that it is so hard to get up early in the morning, for instance, is because I have been going about the whole thing backwards. I have been trying to have a spirit of self-discipline, which I thought would lead to a spirit of love as the Word of God transforms me, and then that would give me a great sense of God’s power in my life.

But as I washed the dishes tonight, I realized that I am going about it all backwards. What I need is to beg for God’s power to read and study and memorize and meditate on God’s word. And as I feel him giving me a spirit of [His] power, it will cause in me a spirit of love for Him, that will naturally lead me to spend consistent time with Him – what most people would call self-discipline, or what other translations would call a “sound mind.” 

So my prayer now is that God would give me that same spirit of power, love, and self-discipline. And in that order.

Meditations & Musings

Hi there! Just wanted to let you know that I am going to start doing something a little bit different on my blog here. While there still may be a topical thing that I want to spout off about now and then, at least for a while my posts are going to be exegetical [finding the truths in Scripture]. OK, maybe that’s stretching it a little. They’ll at least not be eisegetical [reading truths into Scripture]. Hopefully none will be heretical.

I’m gonna call this Meditations & Musings:

Meditations

Dallas Willard: “If I had to choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life, I would choose Bible memorization.” I wholeheartedly agree. Never is my mind and heart so full of God as when I am memorizing his word. And in trying to memorize, I repeat it over and over and over again. And it gets ingrained in my mind, and I begin to think about it differently and more clearly than ever before. That’s meditation.

After a summer long hiatus, I am back on track memorizing Scripture, two verses a day, every day. Romans was bogging me down before… it’s a heavy book. So now I am in 2 Timothy. I thought it was a good practical book that is short, so I’ll have the encouragement of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!

Musings

Muse: To be absorbed in thought. An interesting thing that most people don’t realize about the English language is that if you put the letter ‘a’ in front of word, it negates the word. (i.e. a theist is someone who believes in God, therefore an atheist is someone who does not believe in God).

I want you to muse on the fact that an a before the word negates it. Muse means to think deeply.

God has convicted me that much of my existence consists of purposely not thinking deeply – being AMUSED. So this blog is an exercise in getting me to muse. Hopefully it will you as well. And I pray that even if you find it humorous at times, you won’t find it the least bit amusing.

This series probably won’t be very fancy. It probably won’t always be coherent. Probably not as grammatically correct and well spoken as my other posts. It’ll probably be more questions than answers. These posts will be a public record of my musings on the Scriptures I’m meditating on… pure and simple.

2 Timothy here we come!

Children and Chocolate

I As followers of Christ, living the Alternative Lifestyle, we must be concerned when people who are created in the image of God with value and worth are used and abused.

 got an email today from Stop the Traffik. Apparently the chocolate industry has missed a BIG deadline, and the Stop the Traffik press release can explain it better than I can anyway. So here it is. Read it and weep (I hope). And then ask yourself whether the extra couple of bucks for that fair-trade candy bar might be worth the clear conscience. 

Luke

 

On July 1st, people all across our town will be going out of their way to buy more chocolate—a chocoholic’s dream, but it will be fairly-traded chocolate. This is the best way and the only way to eat your chocolate slave free.

July 1st is a very important day around the world.

It’s the day when the chocolate industry promised to make sure that no children were being used as slaves on cocoa farms.

It’s the day when we could eat a bar of our favourite chocolate such as a Mars, Kit Kat or Dairy Milk knowing that no child has been used in the harvesting of the cocoa beans that went to make the chocolate we love to eat.

Sadly there will be no celebrations on July 1st.

Industry has failed to keep its original promises.

Today, children as young as 12 are still being used as slaves on cocoa plantations.

Here are the words of one child after being rescued from a farm. “I will tell you how I lost my arm. I tried to escape, but I could not. They caught me and tied me to a papaya tree and they beat me and broke my arm. I used to dream horrible dreams that they were beating me and about many other things: the hard work, my family … I still have these dreams today”.

Although the majority of farmers would not treat children in this way, there are some who do, and there are an estimated 12,000 children trafficked onto cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast into a life of slavery.

In our community, thousands of people are buying chocolate without knowing that these children are suffering for our sweet tooth to make fat profits for an industry that hasn’t delivered on its promises.In 2001 they said they would certify that farms were slave free. Now they are saying that they are gathering data on some of the areas where cocoa is harvested.

This is not what they promised.

This is not good enough after 7 years of waiting for the freedom, safety and protection of these children.

We have to choose which chocolate bar to buy, at little cost to us when our chocolate is costing some children their lives.

STOP THE TRAFFIK