Faith Paradox

I’ve been researching this topic for several months and praying for God to grace me with a deeper understanding of His will for those of us who are saints in our Lord Jesus Christ. My first intentions were to write inspired words about the Fear of The Lord and the beginning of wisdom. God took me on a short journey and baked some things into my soul that as usual I did not expect. My notes and biblical references for this mind expanding exploration have reached a point where they need to be put into action. I used absolutely no AI assistance in this piece. These words are divinely inspired directly from His Word and as an outgrowth of my own longing for eternity.

As I have stated before, I am writing this blog anonymously out of respect for my personal relationship with my Creator, His Son, and His spirit. I am not writing for clicks, views, and follows. Those are pride and vanity sins that have no place here. God must be praised before all else, including my own personal aspirations. Scripturally speaking, I am doing this in hopes I can reach the hearts of those around the world God has destined these messages for since the beginning of time, whether it’s five hungry hearts or five thousand.

I learn more and more every day that God exists in such a way the human mind simply does not have the capability to even slightly understand or comprehend his timeless universal sovereignty. This fills me with an awe and reverence that is not possible to translate into human language. One of my goals for this writing is for every person it reaches to hopefully gain a better understanding of what the fear of The Lord actually means from an eternal perspective.

When we think of the word fear, we think of being scared or terrified. I think of my career days having to do a presentation or give a speech in front of a group of people, or teeing off on the first tee of a highly competitive golf tournament. I think of nerves and anxiety and an overall dreadful fear of completely losing my faculties and possibly going into shock. I think of being stuck inside an MRI machine during a power failure and not being able to get out. I think of people chasing me with guns and knives and shooting or stabbing me to death. I think of being beheaded for my Christian faith or being crucified for several days on a wooden cross stuck in the ground until I die a slow and agonizing tortured death. We all have those things that we are totally mortified by.

During my most recent journey through The Old Testament, I came across this well known verse:

Proverbs 1:7 – “The fear of The Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction”.

Throughout The Psalms and Proverbs alone there are over forty verses about “the fear” of The Lord. I am not going to list all of them here because they’re quite easy to find with modern computer search tools, but obviously this is a theme within scripture that captured my heart and mind in a profound way.

I began to question my own understanding of the concept of Godly fear. My prayer before most of my Bible study is to ask for life changing wisdom from His Word. God most certainly does not disappoint and my gratefulness and thanksgiving have no limits.

My prayer for everyone finding this blog post is for you to feel an inspired curiosity to share it with someone in your life. The goal here is not to debate scripture and give you “my opinion” on what word definitions mean in the context of God’s expectations for those He loves.

In modern society we are surrounded by sin and evil coming at us from every direction. One of the over arcing themes of The Bible is the ever increasing evil in the world as we move toward the end times, and please don’t misunderstand, I am not one of the date setters and trackers. I am commanded not to do it.

We are bombarded on a daily basis with every kind of thing you can possibly imagine that God despises. Things that were considered unacceptable in modern society just ten years ago have now become normalized. The behavior of people online and in public has become nearly intolerable, even among our children. Pornography has found it’s way into the cell phones of small children around the world. Young boys and girls less than ten years old are being treated in therapy for pornography addictions. I could write on for hours about the exponential rise of sin and evil in modern society, and the most horrifying part is it’s becoming acceptable behavior by elected leaders around the globe. Even politics here in the United States has become a daily parade of sin, and the networks proudly report it and discuss it with glee. Internet “influencers” out there who were once decent people have become slaves to clicks and views, and have sacrificed their eternal integrity for a few brief years of popularity in the eye of other flawed human beings. I am seeing it right now with people I used to admire. It’s unfortunate and saddening to watch people being deceived.

Here is what we can do. Develop a deep reverence of awe and gratefulness for the sovereign power of God and ask for a form of enlightenment that becomes a protective shield around you. The fear of The Lord is not what you think. It’s not what I thought. It has taken me several months of prayer, Bible study, conversations with God in the middle of he night, and asking Him to teach me, as I am willing to be a good student. Sometimes these things can take years to percolate supernaturally.

The main thing I had to change in my life to align myself with God to elevate that sense of awe and reverence was learn to develop an absolute hatred and disdain for sin of any kind. This took a fearlessness of being honest with myself about my very own sin problems. Pride, vanity, profanity, idolatry to earthly activities like golf and video games, lies, adulterous thoughts, and on and on. I’m not talking about asking for forgiveness and repenting, that’s a requirement too, I’m talking about hating sin with every fiber of your being, just as God does. This is not something that’s going to happen overnight. This is going to be a process that will take until God takes you home. Our hatred and disdain for sin and evil in this world must increase in proportion to beyond the ever increasing evil. If we are to maintain our awe and reverence of our Creator we cannot sit still in our Faith waiting for Jesus to return. You are all soldiers in God’s army and this is all out spiritual warfare. Please don’t allow yourself to get comfortable in your Faith. I have already made that mistake and God’s discipline for those he loves is right, true, and just. I am grateful for that discipline.

You don’t have to be “afraid” of The Lord. I would be remiss if I did not remind everyone of this verse:

1 John 4:18 – “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love”.

God loves you more than you can ever hope to even begin to comprehend with your human brain. God wants you to align yourself with Him and His Son and His spirit, through love, awe, and reverence. You don’t need to be afraid of anything. The only thing I am afraid of is my own flaws, but God had to make me flawed, otherwise I might actually be like Him.

So what then? Even though we all be believe in one God, one Jesus, and one Holy Spirit, our own individual and personal relationships with Him are all very different and unique. God imparts different kinds of wisdom to different kinds of people that we share with each other. Along with love, this is the basis and foundation of fellowship, and part of the formula of living by and gaining God’s wisdom.

So the fear of the Lord is an awe and reverence for Him obtained through his universal love and aligning ourselves with God’s hatred for sin and evil. It’s pretty simple really. I don’t think God would want living by wisdom to be complicated. I have found the more I immerse myself in God’s word the more generous He is with sharing His wisdom. I used to think I was a reasonably intelligent guy, but lately God is blowing my mind with new insight on old concepts and I give all credit to Him only. I’m only the messenger.

My prayer for all of you is please share these ideas with someone you love. There are a lot of people out there in the world struggling today with the ever increasing evil I mentioned. Have a conversation with someone that could change their life. Have no fear..

I think we all have that one very personal thing about are our relationship with The Creator of the universe, His Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit infused into the DNA of our hearts, that we don’t talk too much about with others. It’s almost like no one would really believe us anyway, so why make fools of ourselves discussing it. I think God solidifies His personal relationship with us by divine inspiration and by showing His presence in our lives through what would be called pure coincidence in the secular world. I don’t believe anything about my Faith is coincidence. It’s happened more times than I can count and I get overwhelmed spiritually when it does. I am going to share one example of many with you in hopes you can share some of your own experiences with others as a form of “pay it forward” impulse, then you’ll see how I arrived on today’s topic, “Children of Light”.

I completed a different blogpost yesterday under a different title, but I still felt the presence of God pushing me a little bit to keep going. So I stepped out on my back porch and had a little prayer humbly asking for guidance and direction. I’m standing there gazing out over my backyard with my eyes fixated off in the distance as I contemplated options when I noticed the string of decorative lights my next door neighbor had hung across the top of his fence line a few days ago. They look really cool at night and I was thinking of doing the same thing myself when God dropped a seed in my heart related to the word “light”. I thought yes indeed that’s exactly it! So I queried a search engine and found the word “light” is in the Bible over four hundred times throughout the different translations. I knew I now had my inspiration, directly from God, for my next topic.

I got distracted and made a trip to the corner store for a few things and when I returned I went to the back porch again and checked my verse of the day on my phone. I kid you not here is what it said:

John 8:12 – Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

I was immediately overwhelmed with the Spirit of God for a few minutes before I could settle down and think straight. These spiritual coincidences are commonplace in my walk of Faith and I absolutely love when God chooses to communicate with me in this manner. I’ve never really felt compelled to discuss them because I feel like it’s a personal touch God chooses to add to our relationship, but since I am on here anonymously, I felt like sharing at least one experience that may help impact and transform other peoples lives in some way. These direct messages from God spur these Divine impulses I have in my life and I get completely and totally laser focused on the service required to move the related task forward. There is nothing in my earthly life of the flesh that brings me as much pure joy. I can always feel the presence of God’s love too and it’s awesome!

What shall we say then? Ephesians 5:8, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in The Lord, live as children of light.” In my research of this topic, I found it to be extremely popular and thus easy to plagiarize the thoughts of others to pass along, which is OK, but I feel it necessary to write exactly what God has put on my heart for you to contemplate and share with people in the place where God has you stationed for service. This is something God has directly asked me to do and I take zero credit nor do I have any need for prideful recognition. There are no words in the English language to express my immense gratitude and thankfulness to Him for placing his hand on me.

God’s chosen people have a distinct childlike aura about them that’s unmistakable and truly recognizable, both saved and unsaved. I have been talking to a young woman who works in the restaurant at my golf club. Her name is Hope, which is fitting for this conversation. Some of the ladies and myself have been having conversations with her about Jesus and praying with her. I recognized her aura immediately when we first met on a Sunday afternoon when I dropped in for lunch. This was many months ago. I’ve helped her with a Bible study plan starting in Mathew and I’m confident she’s on the right path.

Children of light have an innate quality that comes directly from union with God. There’s an innocence and purity about us that is indeed very childlike, even though most of us are grown human adults, but in the scope of eternity we are most definitely like bright eyed, giggling, and joyful infants. It makes me smile just thinking about it. This is the kind of love God pours out on us by His good will and grace.

Our service task out of God’s playbook is to mentor and council each other and build up the body of Christ. One of the very best things about our aura of light is we organically set a quality example for others. 1 Peter 5:2-3, “² Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; ³ not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. “

The goal of this post is to plant seeds in your heart where you feel divinely inspired to have conversations with people who not only have God’s aura of light about them, but more importantly those who are in a fertile place in life to be uplifted by God’s spirit and redeemed by Jesus Christ. My prayer for everyone who reads this is for you to gain Divine confidence in an unprideful way to overcome any timidness in your being about discussing this with as many people as God puts on your heart.

Have a Blessed day, we’ll talk again soon.

Our Father in Heaven willed our universe into existence, along with this version of time he engineered for it. God decided everything where we exist should have a beginning and an end. This blueprint allows for the human brain to exist perfectly within it. The infinite and eternal nature of God is something that humans have contemplated ever since He gave Adam and Eve a fully developed conscience and divinely influenced human authors to publish The Holy Bible, which is filled with thought provoking wisdom about time and eternity.

I know that God transcends time. If this were not true you would not have human history filled with Bible prophecy that played itself out exactly as it was predicted by the Old Testament Prophets. The fact that God has a plan already in place with His Believers along for the ride is a mind blowing thing to contemplate, and cements the vivid Hope we have in our hearts for a future that’s stunning to think about. Can you imagine existing in time with a Creator who’s given us no knowledge of his future plans and just expects us believe in Him just because he says so? I can see now why God created time the way he did, and I’m grateful for it. As limited as my human intelligence is compared to God, I love the sense of wonder He’s placed inside of us to have these kinds of conversations.

My goal for this blogpost is for you the reader to hopefully feel inspired to have a conversation with someone in your area of influence about our eternal and omniscient God Almighty, His Son Jesus Christ, and His Holy Spirit. In fact the overarching theme of this entire blog is to encourage the sharing of Biblical wisdom with others and do what we can along the way to change the hearts of humanity. My goal is not to discuss the “what ifs” of academia science about time and space, but to share Scripture with you about said topics from God’s Word, and invoke a sense of excitement about how we can impact and transform people’s lives, and make it easier for us to us have conversations.

The Holy Bible is a book of prophecy in it’s essence. The huge volume of verses related to time, eternity, and prophecy is staggering, but completely necessary. The modern era secular narrative defines these as fairy tales, ancient lore, fictional writing, you name it. The fact it’s written this way is testament to it’s authenticity. In another post I wrote about how people will devote their entire lives dedicated to denying a God they believe does not exist.

Before we delve off into the relevant scripture, it’s important that we reach for an eternal view about the reality of time. In the scope of an infinite eternity, we should understand our brief existence of a human lifetime in the flesh is a mere speck on the cosmic timeline. James 4:14, “You are a mist that appears for a little while, then vanishes.” A critically important verse to help put things in perspective.

God gives us some amazing clues about the significance of time and how it relates to human behavior here on Earth. Peter places emphasis on this fact in 2 Peter 3: 8-9, “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With The Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day..”, and again in verse 12, “as you look forward to the day of God and speed it’s coming”, which is an interesting view on the passage of time based on living a holy and godly life. I find this absolutely fascinating. This is something I think any Believer would be excited to contemplate and share with others. We’ve all experienced the ups and downs of life. When things are not going well time seems to slow down and you feel stuck. When we are spiritually well there’s not enough hours in the day to do all we want to do. This is a very real phenomenon, and God’s word applies perfectly to it.

Time is such an essential part of our being, eternity is literally hard coded into our DNA according to His Word in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has also set eternity in the human heart”. This makes me very concerned for people of this Earth who are not Believers and those worshipping false gods. I can’t imagine going through life believing everything just goes dark at death and that’s the end. That is so contrary to what God has infused into our very being. It probably also explains why true happiness can never be achieved by pursuing wealth and material items.

The Apostle Paul’s writings throughout the New Testament are rich in exploring the underpinnings of God’s Word relative to time and eternity, and reflect a strong temporal awareness on his behalf, directly inspired by The Creator of the universe himself. Paul emphasizes the urgency of the present cast in a vivid hope of the future. The fiery zeal with which Paul communicates is perhaps some of the most inspirational writing in human history. There is absolutely no doubt where it comes from. Paul expresses this urgency perfectly with 2 Corinthians 6:2, “I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation”. Not next week or next year but NOW! Paul’s exhortation is extremely passionate. Interestingly, Paul viewed time as an era or age, and not a chronological ecosystem. This is a wonderful gift in God’s word to share with people in your own personal ministry. This is just one example of how we can be students of Paul’s ministry and use the topic of time and eternity as a foundation to help put things in perspective for people with a new or hesitant interest in The Living Word.

The Old Testament is a massive treasure chest of Bible prophecy, literally predicting the future, and it always unfolds exactly as described. This confirmation cements the hope we have in our hearts about the future thousand year millennial reign of Jesus here on this Earth. It’s going to be such a mind blowing and exciting era of history to actually be taught by Jesus himself. Just imagine the wisdom, knowledge, and insight to be gained as His students. This is probably the most exciting part of the time and eternity concept you can share with others.

My goal going forward, as always, is to share topics with you that are easily relatable to the masses, both Believers and unbelievers alike. The key is to enable people with our Faith, not disable them. I think in many cases the way modern Christianity comes across sometimes through the various media conduits is not something that makes the average secular person feel good about themselves. Let’s all work together in love to make a difference and change that.