God’s Plan for Your Life

“I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.” (Psalm 32:8).

I’m afraid that most people have been told a lie. God’s plan is not to make you happy and healthy. God’s plan is to test you and form you into the image of Christ.

God’s plan is to give you the tools and then let you learn to apply them yourself. These tools include a Divine purpose, Divine principles, and a Divine prototype.

I might stop to emphasize this again. God’s plan is not a ready-made path. God wants you to make your own path. God wants you to walk your own way. God wants you to live your life according to his principles.

Many people mistakenly think God has a ready-made plan for them. And all they need to do is discover that plan, and walk that path. That is false.

God wants you to take his Divine purpose, his Divine principles and his Divine prototype and apply those to your life. He wants you to learn to live godly. He wants you to learn for yourself how to be Christ-like in difficult circumstances. There are no cookie cutter plans.

God’s purpose is love. He wants you to choose what is the highest good of God and humankind. He wants that to be your ultimate purpose. Love should be the motivation behind all our thoughts, words, and deeds

Ponder for a moment the last part of the above verse, “I will guide you with my eye” (Psalm 32:8 NKJV).  Do you understand what it means? It means pay attention to what God is paying attention to. See God’s purpose, and you’ll know yours.

The Divine principles are laid out in the scriptures. These are the general principles of how to live a life that is good, holy, and loving towards all. It is the how of love.

And the vine prototype is Jesus Christ. He lived the perfect life. It is his example, his model, that we follow. We aim to live a Christ like life. We continually ask the question, “What would Jesus do?”

The spiritual path is made by walking it. We don’t download a Divine plan and follow it, we struggle every step of the way to live our utmost for His highest.

The Bible’s True Purpose

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4: 4).

Many people act as if after the Bible was completed, God stopped speaking. This is because a lot of people misunderstand the Bible’s true purpose. And this, in turn, has led many people to lose faith in the Bible.

The Bible was never meant to be a substitute for a personal relationship with God. The Bible is to point you to a relationship with God. But most evangelicals have a relationship with the Bible and know nothing of God.

The Bible is not God’s word to you. God can speak through the Bible, but the Bible is not God’s word to you. Yes, it’s for you, but not to you.

God is not telling you to sacrifice your son Isaac. Be careful about applying specific directions to your own life, not everyone should quote, go and sell all you have and give to the poor.

The Bible is not a message from God, it’s a message about God. It records people’s experience of God speaking and working in their lives.

The Bible is never supposed to be a substitute for your own relationship with God. God wants to speak to you and work in your life. Not second hand knowledge, but first hand personal encounter with him.

God has not become mute or lame. God still speaks and works in people’s lives. The true purpose of the Bible is to help you learn to listen to God for yourself. It helps you discern whether it is God, cell, or the devil talking. But the Bible was never meant to be a substitute for hearing from God for yourself.

The Bible is not God’s answer book. It is not an operator’s manual. It is an account of other people’s relationship with God, and primarily from their perspective, not God’s perspective.

Jesus Christ is the real word of God. He is God’s message to the whole humanity. By knowing Jesus as revealed in the Gospels, we can ask ourselves, “what would Jesus do” in our situation.

And the Bible is not one book by one author. Rather, it is a library of books by over 40 different authors. Each author has their own perspective, their own point of view. They have their own flaws, biases, and blind spots.

Let me conclude with the words of Paul Enns:

“Rather than providing us with information to be downloaded, the Bible holds out for us an invitation to join an ancient, well-traveled, and sacred quest to know God, the world we live in, and our place in it. Not arbitrarily, but intimately and experientially.”

Prayer is More Than Petition

“Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him” ( 1 John 5:14-15 NKJV).

Prayer is usually thought of as a petition addressed to God asking for his help and intervention. Oxford English Dictionary defines a petition as “an appeal or request, especially a solemn or humble one to a deity or a superior.” Yet, how many Christians will tell you that they pray and pray and yet nothing happens. Why is that?

In the above passage, we see that the key to answered prayer is to ask according to God’s will. Usually our problem is not knowing God’s will in the matter. In that case, our first step is for wisdom into God’s will (James 1:5). And even when we receive that answers to our prayers, they usually don’t get answered they way we expected. Pray for patience, and you will quickly learn what I mean.

But prayer is not just asking God for things. In fact, it is a small part of what prayer is. When I think of prayer, I usually don’t think of it asking. Rather, prayer is more like a sharing together. Yes, a dialog, but more than that. It is more of a listening, a silence, a flow. It is an openness. I do not pray to God to bend his will to mine. As C. S. Lewis wisely noted, “Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes me.” I don’t believe prayer changes God, rather I believe it changes us. Or it should, anyway.

There are four kinds of prayer, beyond petition, that are useful. They are affirmations, thanksgiving, adoration, and confession. Each one of these changes us, but in different ways. Let’s look at each briefly.

First, prayer is affirmation. Affirmations are short phrases that are repeated in order to change the way we think and feel about ourselves. It is about replacing prideful self-talk with humble self-talk. It is not about positive thinking, but realistic thinking.

Second, prayer is thanksgiving. Gratitude is an important quality for any spiritual seeker. We can express this gratitude towards God, and towards beings that brought us benefit. “Bless us, O Lord, and these, Your gifts, which we are about to receive from Your bountiful goodness, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

Third, prayer is adoration. Worshiping God is about dying to self. The key to union with God is to empty yourself of I, me, and mine. God must increase, but I must decrease. There can be no selfish desire once there is no self left.

Fourth, prayer is confession. Confession is good for the soul. Confessing our selfish thoughts, words, and deeds helps break the habit of lying to ourselves. We are sinners. We fail and fall short of perfection. We need to own up to our mistakes, and confession is one way to do this. We don’t just need God’s forgiveness, we need to forgive ourselves and stop holding it against ourselves.

In all four cases, prayer does not change God, it changes us. God does not need our prayers, we need our prayers. Prayer opens us to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is a means for spiritual transformation.

Carl Sagan is Unscientific

“Avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Tim 6:20 KJV).

Carl Sagan once claimed that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.” This is not a statement of fact but a statement of faith

First, he never tried to prove the statement. Which makes it a mere assertion. And just because a scientist says it doesn’t make it true. It is asserted without evidence, and it can be ignored without evidence.

Second, how did he know that “the Cosmos is all that is?” You would first have to know “all that is” before you could know that the Cosmos is it. The fact that physicists populated a multiverse means that many cosmos’.

Third, if Carl didn’t exist from the beginning of time, how could he know that the “Cosmos is all that… was.” This is very unscientific. He has no evidence to support it, no experiments to prove it, and no testimony to verify it. It is a mere assertion.

Fourth, unless he can predict the future, there is no way to be sure that the “Cosmos is all that… ever will be.” Again, this is pure guess work. Who knows what the future holds? Clearly this is “science falsely so called.”

The truth is that Carl Sagan bought into a belief system called materialism or naturalism. It is not science, it is philosophy. Technically, it is called a worldview. It is a set of beliefs that frame how you look at the world.

Naturalism is the belief that the natural world is all that exists. It is a statement of belief, not a statement of fact. As a belief, it is a claim that is accepted as true, which then becomes a rule of action.

It is important to make a clear distinction between a worldview and scientific theories. All scientific theories are individual hypotheses that are tested by experiments.

What experiment could you possibly run in order to prove that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be”? None. Because the statement is not a scientific hypothesis but a personal belief. It is a worldview, or more accurately, a doctoral tenant in a philosophy of life.

What is Truth?

“and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).

A claim is a statement that is either true or false. If the statement is neither true nor false, it is not a claim. Truth is the description of the quality of a claim. A claim is true when the statement being made matches the way things actually are.

Truth refers to a claim or group of claims in which the statements of the claim correspond to reality. In other words, the statement really does express the reality of the matter. If someone makes the claim that I am a man, and I really am a man, then the claim is true. It is true because it matches or corresponds to the way things really are. Truth is the name of a claim that matches reality.

Truth is the correspondence between a claim and reality. All other attempted definitions must assume this one. All other definitions claim that their definition corresponds to reality, and therefore is true. Which means that all other definitions are false. You can’t assume the truth of one definition to prove another.

The essence of truth is the correspondence between a claim and reality. But the evidence that there is this correspondence includes the coherence of the system of claims and whether they are pragmatically verifiable. In other words, other definitions of truth are evidence of truth and not truth itself.

We must also note that truth can be incomplete, partial, and limited. A simple statement can only point to a very limited aspect of reality. You need a group of claims to fill things out. That is why, when I use the term truth, I am usually referring to a group of claims. This group of claims represents my view of Christianity.

A belief is a claim that is accepted as true, which then becomes a rule of action. A belief system is the acceptance of a group of these claims. Religions are beliefs system. We find belief systems in every culture, every group, and every individual. It is these belief systems, whether conscious or not, that direct our thoughts, feelings, and actions. They control our businesses, our churches, our governments, our families, and our lives.

Truth, in this context, is the correspondence between a belief system and reality. The belief system that best corresponds to reality is Christianity. And the best version of Christianity is the one I will share with you here. It is not the only version. It may not ultimately be the correct one. I only claim it is the best version I have found.