(resonance of reforming)

Current Tunage: Hillsong United – The Stand
Wow. Just wow. How did I never give Hillsong a chance? I’ve heard this song a couple times in the last few weeks at Harvest and couldn’t wring it out of my head. It’s not often that a “worship” worship song really really connects with me but my goodness this one does. Apparently it’s a few years old, but yeah… I’m digging. Big time.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to continue my segue through all of my thoughts about church and what we can do better in the West. A lot of it will be observation (both positive and negative), and a lot of it will be personal. So, in advance, I say… take it for what it’s worth. It’s been a long struggle to figure out what we were looking for, hoping for, and needing to really tear into our souls and rejuvenate what’s often been cold and stony. I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

That said, I wanted to share some things I’ve shared with some important friends today. One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much since our wedding is that I spend so much of my very little typing-time either working on stuff for school or staying in touch with friends that I can no longer spend facetime with. Tonight I’m going to start attempting to rectify my glaring lack of typing-time by sharing what I think is public-able… publicly. They’re slightly edited for this format. Enjoy:

MESSAGE ONE:

[Friend],
Glad you’ve been enjoying them. We’ve been following [Peasant Princess] too (as time allows, which it often… doesn’t). I’m glad the messages are burning into your heart. If it’s anything like mine it can be really cold and stone-like most of the time. It’s so refreshing to hear God’s Word proclaimed boldly and without apology… refreshing and heart-rending.

We’ve had a very busy week this past week, but much more importantly, a very spiritually important week. Much time in prayer, much time seeking God’s face and his hand in guidance and blessing. It’s been very difficult and also very excellent and full of paradigm shifts of the heart-changing sort.

Married life is excellent, praiseworthy, and most highly recommended. I often randomly say to Steph “Being single SUCKED!” and it’s not because it really did, but more because the contrast is SO massive. Marriage is so wonderful I really haven’t yet found my voice to describe the constant blessing that it is to me as God uses it to wring out my selfishness and unmask my sin and tear into my self-righteousness in His love. He is truly a great Father and takes wonderful, wise care of us, and his gift of marriage is definitely a massive boost to the old Sanctification.

Nothing in life has my higher recommendation – Find a godly woman and cut a covenant, you’ll never be the same again.

Much love,
Jer

MESSAGE 2:

Although I loved [Francis Collins' The Language of God], I did take issue with his limited understanding of recent applications of the literal reading of Genesis that do much to account for the apparent inconsistencies between “science” and the story of creation.

Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that it has a lot to do with the way that the things by which we measure time (the Sun and Moon and Stars) aren’t created until day 4. An oversimplification of the more recent literal explanations involves taking what some will perceive as liberty with the supposed “stability” of time. Time is anything but stable, and many have recently speculated that it’s “slowing down”. Regardless, if God is who he claims to be in Scripture (in this case, the most relevant aspect being his omnipotence), then it’s entirely feasable to assert that in the pre-sun/moon/stars days, time operated differently, perhaps (for example) in the form of a rapidly decaying speed of time’s passage. From human perspective, it amounted to 3 24-hour days, but since the point of measurement did not yet exist – time itself possessed a different set of effects – I suggest a extremely rapid (yet extremely declining) rate of aging and cosmic decay until a point of stability was reached – this is the point when God introduced the elements by which we now measure time – time which we now may have reason to believe is also gradually passing with less expedience as our orbit slows both around the sun, as well as our solar system’s orbit through the galaxy.

I loved Collins’ book, hold him in utmost respect for speaking up, and enjoyed his thoughts… but I found his treatment of decent theological consideration to be rather lacking. He’s a scientist, not a theologian, and some of his views simply do not synthesize with a reasonable and consistent hermeneutic. There’s so much to be said for giving God’s word superiority over everything – after all, all things are subject to it ultimately regardless.