For those of you who have been reading The Pew over the years about two years ago we started sharing some posts from the porch, a gathering of some of us old guys just to sit around and ponder about things in this world we live in. Well, it’s been a while since we’ve shared anything from the porch with you and there’s a reason for that and we want to talk about that some today and then to bring you some special information. As we grow older age has its rewards as well as its distractions, the biggest for most of us that met on that porch was mobility and independence. Sometimes our health makes demands on us and while the mind and soul are willing the body can’t. Well, we can’t physically meet anymore. We are still able to communicate by other means but that’s not like being together. There are some of us, including myself now that can’t make it to church every Sunday and I can assure you we miss that very very much. I have been writing The Pew for over 15 years now, over 700 posts, not a very large readership, but it does include many friends and readers from foreign countries. It is our hope that we will be able to increase writing and posting here on the Pew. 

Thank you for giving this Laymen a purpose and the opportunity to share the word. I would like to invite you to come back here next Wednesday evening for a special post from The Pew about a subject that all of us in this world today need to consider.

Life is Good

jk

Continuing from last week blog,  we will examine the key themes of the prayer. For your reference information the prayer can be found in the book of Nehemiah chapter 1 verses 5–11. We will break the prayer down in the four different sections by the verses in each of those sections. The very first will be adoration and praise which we can find in verse five.

-the very first thing that Nehemiah does is to acknowledge God’s supreme power. He makes it a point to refer to God as great and awesome. And he remembers God’s faithful covenant.

-the next is the confession of sin we find that in versus 6–7. Jeremiah assumes responsibility for much of what has happened, and he repents on behalf of Israel. He includes himself and his family, and he confesses that both Israel and his family broke God’s commands.

–remembrance of God’s word is addressed in versus eight through 10. Nehemiah quotes God’s promises to Moses, he remembers the warning of exile, and he claims the promise of restoration. We will come back to those promises in just a few paragraphs.

-as we begin reading in verse 11 Nehemiah, begs God to listen now, he asked for success that day, and he requests favor before King Artaxerxes.

I want to go back to the promises between God and Moses. God made several profound promises to Moses primarily centered on deliverance, Devine presence, and inheritance. God assures Moses of his continued presence. “My presence will go with you and I will give you rest.” He speaks of deliverance he vows to rescue the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and redeem them with mighty acts. There’s a promise of the promised land… God promises to bring the Israelites into the land of Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey. It is a unique covenant for God has stated that if Israel keeps his covenant, they would be his treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. And lastly, in response to Moses request, God promised to make all His “goodness pass before” him. 

Using what we have looked at so far I suppose a proper step or direction would be to look at our prayer life and what we need to be doing today. Our prayers today should focus on seeking God’s guidance, peace and strength in our daily lives.  

-the very first thing we should does we pray is to acknowledge God’s goodness, we simply need to remind ourselves that God’s love is better than life itself and we need to praise him for this day.

-we need to thank God for his gifts. Thank Him for the very air we breathe, the roof over our head and the people that surround us that we love.

-we should confess our shortcomings and ask for God’s help to improve the way that we live and serve him. We need to pray for the strength to overcome the anxiety and stress of this life today that we may remain calm and focused on that which God would have us do.

-and while it will not be an easy thing to do because of human nature, we need to put our total trust into God and let him control our daily lives and lead us to the truth that will sustain our efforts to walk in The Good Way.

-and when our day comes to an end, we should express our gratitude. Maybe there was a specific blessing or a moment of peace that we experienced today and we need to thank God for that.

-and then, we should lay down the burdens and unfinished tasks for that day, and pray that God will grant us a restful night of sleep and restore our spirit to continue to do the Lord’s will. 

And I pray and give thanks for each one of you each week, that take some of your time to spend with us here in The Pew. May God bless you and your family, may He strengthen you, giving you peace in these stressful times.

Life is Good…God is Good

jk

What is that other wall?…it is the wall of Faith. Faith is something that stretches or reaches far beyond just mere belief, it’s the core of our Christian life,  a simple acknowledgment that God exists, and there is a definite realm of trust required. Without getting into a whole discussion of exactly what faith is a very simple explanation would be that it involves abandoning all of our human reliance on self efforts and placing total dependence upon God’s character, his actions and promises as revealed in his word. In just these few words, you should have grasped the concept that this wall we’re talking about is bigger than life itself. So at this point, I suppose I will share with you that we’re going to do. We are going to take one of those “holy stretches.”we’re going to draw today’s blog, material or subject from the book of Nehemiah chapters 1-2 and 3, so join me and stretch just a little.

Chapters 1–3 of Nehemiah detail how Nehemiah, a Jewish cup bearer to the Persian King, learns of Jerusalem’s ruined walls. He responds with a deep prayer, receives royal permission to travel and rebuild, and organizes the local community to successfully begin the reconstruction.

The key verse from Nehemiah is Nehemiah 1:11:

“Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.”

What brought Nehemiah to his knees was a devastating report from his brother that the walls of Jerusalem are broken down and the gates destroyed by fire, leaving the returning Jewish remnant vulnerable, and in disgrace. As we go through this today, I will take a few opportunities to do a little parallel stretching. Our wall of faith today is broken down and in some places destroyed completely and we are vulnerable to the many sins and calamities of this world we live in today, and unfortunately, in some instances, it has destroyed many believers faith and I would remind you that we’re speaking of not only our personal faith, but we’re speaking of our country’s faith, One Nation Under God, I doubt very seriously if we can say that anymore with any assurance. You can find Nehemiah’s prayer in its entirety in the book of Nehemiah chapter 1:5–11 and it follows a very structured model of faith, humility, and urgency. Next week, the Pew will follow Nehemiah’s prayer and examine it in more detail looking at how it is structured and model of faith, humility, and urgency, and we’ll look at that next week.

OK, for now let’s get back to kind of an overview of chapters 1–3 the book of Nehemiah. As we’ve written, he was in service to the Persian King and he learns of Jerusalem walls. He responds with deep prayer, receives royal permission to travel and rebuild and organize the community to successfully begin reconstruction. We find the account of that in chapter 1 when we moved to chapter 2 after we have observed a more detailed account of the deep sadness of Nehemiah’s concerning the wall. The King asked what he wants and Nehemiah, after praying to God silently, he asks the king for permission to return to Judah to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls and the king grants his request and provides safe conduct letters. This occurs in chapter 2. When Nehemiah arrives in Jerusalem, he secretly inspects the ruin walls at night and afterwards he reveals his mission to the Jewish people and urges them to rebuild despite the early mockery and some opposition from local adversaries. The people resolved to start the work. And then we get to chapter 3, and we discover a community effort,  this chapter provides a detailed organized roster of who built which sections of the wall. Unity and teamwork and a diverse group of people working side-by-side. The list includes priest and goldsmiths, perfumers, merchants, rulers, and everyday citizens working on the segments closest to their own homes and professions. Stay with me now as we proceed to wrap this week’s blog up. As you remember at the very beginning, I wrote about doing some “holy stretches.” And now I’m going to make a little bit of a U-turn and we’re going to look at something called an allegory. We have so far in the summaries of the first three chapters of Jeremiah, shared the the literal story, the actual plot, characters, and setting of the story and what we’re gonna do now is we’re going to look at the symbolic level, the hidden deeper meaning, the real world concept that the literal story represents in my mind.

I guess I would ask the question… where is our Nehemiah? Our country is so divided by so many social justice groups, and people with special agendas that we can’t come together really for most anything. But the thing that bothers me the most is what I had written earlier, this is no longer One Nation Under God, that just doesn’t apply to us now. We’ve lost our wall of faith and we need to restore it. So I close out I simply re-asking that question…Where is our Nehemiah? Ponder that.

Life is. Good

jk

As you know the past few months, the Pew has been looking at the Good Way, today we continue that journey by taking just a few moments to look at this quest for knowledge and wisdom that sometimes can compromise the road to the Good Way.

We’re going to go out on the limb today so to speak and simply say that in our opinion, there are three components to the subject we’re looking at today. There is a new phenomenon known as AI, add to that just plain knowledge and round that out with God’s wisdom. Artificial intelligence is a computer technology that is designed to simulate human intelligence. It enables machines to learn from data, recognize patterns, solve problems, and to literally make decisions. What’s unusual about this particular system is that it allows itself to adapt, analyze the information, and perform tasks that typically require human input. But it becomes even more amazing once you consider the fact that the traditional computer software that we use nowadays follow strict rules, and is programed by humans. But the new AI on the other hand operates by analyzing vast amounts of information, examples and data rather than explicit instructions. It looks at trends and data to make educated predictions, and it understands spoken language and if that’s not enough, it identifies objects in images.

Knowledge, on other hand is the confident understanding, awareness, or familiarity of a subject, concept, or skill. It’s acquired, you get there through study, observation, or experience, the bridge between raw information and actionable insight. Gaining knowledge can really be broken down into some procedural steps, so to speak the core types of knowledge. One of course, is procedural, knowing how to perform a task, then there’s conceptional the understanding of theories and mental models. And then the next is pretty common for most of us and that’s factual familiarity with the specific objective data, and any information that is provided for that. Then there is the  knowledge that is gained from experience that is often difficult to transfer to others. Here is interesting fact about knowledge which is pretty well understood to be defined as justified true belief. To know something you must believe it and it must be true and you must have valid reasons or just reasons for that belief and that brings us to the last topic of these concepts. That of course, being God’s wisdom.

I’ve done quite a bit of research trying to find ways to write about this topic and the best I could find, the one that I feel comfortable with would be found on gotquestions.org . The information that I shared with you in this blog, a large part of it came from the website I just listed. I chose that because there are a number of biblical verses that were used in the explanation about God’s wisdom. And there is no better place to learn about that wisdom than the Bible itself. According to the Bible, God’s wisdom is the perfect divine insight, of moral purity, and understanding that governs the universe. Unlike worldly knowledge which relies heavily on self promotion, God, the wisdom is rooted in reference for the Lord and is characterized by a lifestyle of righteousness, humility, and peace. It’s interesting to note that one of the first points made in this article is the fact that the starting point would be the book of proverbs which states that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Simply said it means that we’re acknowledging God’s sovereignty, obeying his commands, and relying on His truth rather than human intellect. Consider 

James 3:17…But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Next we find in 1 Corinthians 1:24-25…but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. Paul wrote this to symbolically state that the power of God and the wisdom of God could be found in Jesus Christ among us. The Bible is very plain about Godly versus earthly wisdom. The Bible simply describes earthly wisdom as being foolish. Earthly wisdom relies on pride and self interest, and shortsightedness, whereas Gods is the wisdom to live from an eternal perspective and prioritize God’s will. I could continue on and overwhelm you with scripture, but it’s true in my opinion that the things we learn and retain are the things that we have in our heart. Godly wisdom is from God and it honors God, the wisdom starts with fear of God and results in a holy life, but if we see the wisdom of this world, and we’re not concerned with honoring God, but with pleasing our self, we’re gonna get in big trouble. With worldly wisdom we may become educated, smart, and have common sense that enables us to play the world’s game successfully. But when we look at the difference and look at Godly wisdom, we see that it will prepare us for eternity. With Godly wisdom, we trade earthly values for biblical values, and we recognize that we are truly citizens of another kingdom and the choices we make will reflect that allegiance. I’ll wrap this up by simply asking you to go to this website which I’ve included. Read this and think heavily about the direction you are traveling. Is it a Good Way…God’s Way?

https://www.gotquestions.org/godly-wisdom.html 

Life is Good

jk

“Spiritual parallels involve using everyday events, ancient stories, or natural laws to understand deeper spiritual truths. These metaphors help translate complex, unseen concepts into relatable word pictures, allowing individuals to connect with their faith or personal philosophy in a more practical way.”

As a simple layman I have often found myself wondering about spiritual parallels and if the truth be known, that is not an accurate statement. First of all, let’s take a look at the I guess you would say theological rendering of exactly what is it that I’m trying to do here. Well here is the textbook explanation.

The church terminology for relating ancient biblical texts to modern situations is called biblical application or contextualization. This process is deeply rooted in hermeneutics, which is the study of interpreting and bridging the gap between the original biblical world and our lives today.  

My explanation and what I’m trying to do is simple, I’m just trying to bring the scripture verses that are today’s subject into a context that we can understand relates to our daily living today. Now both of these explanations are kind of long winded and worthy, but I hope you can kinda get the gist of where we’re going. One of the study groups that I am involved with are in the midst of a biblical study of the book of Exodus. Just a couple of days ago, we begin looking at chapter 13 in the book of Exodus. I read a statement that simply said. “the wilderness journey is ultimate biblical blueprint for the modern Christian life, representing the crucial transition phase between initial salvation and the ultimate spiritual maturity.” As we read and study the Bible I think the goal for most of us is to gain some spiritual maturity. There are some who believe that in chapter 13 of Exodus we find a transitional period. A a road map of the wilderness journey shows us how it can be compared to a transitional state. Egypt represents a past life of sin and Canaan presents the promised land of spiritual abundance. The wilderness is in between and that’s where God transformed slaves into citizens of his kingdom. Now you can always find folks that are going to say this journey through the wilderness was the result of quite a few mistakes, but it was not a mistake. It was kind of a divine classroom. And Deuteronomy 8:2 we know that God led Israel into the wilderness to humble them and test what was in their hearts mirroring how modern trials expose believers true belief. Have you felt your belief tested from some of the trials we face in this world today? It’s interesting to know that God did not take the Israelites the short coastal route because they were not ready for war. What we get from this is that God often delays a believers’s blessings and ultimate calling to protect them from the battles they cannot yet handle. God didn’t forget his people, not at all. The first thing he did was provide them with provisions. He gave them Manna as a daily bread which Israel could not hoard. It rotted when kept overnight, so this forced a total reliance on God for their daily bread, parallel to Jesus, instructions to pray for our daily bread and learn to trust God one day at a time. In one of the key events while they were there in the desert when thirst threatened, God brought water from rock, now the apostle Paul explicitly states in first Corinthians 10:4 that this rock was Christ representing the spiritual refreshment available to believers in this dry environment. We find ourselves today in an environment where people thirst for the truth they thirst for peace and the place we seem to turn last is to Jesus Christ, where we will be refreshed and protected.

There is a lot of attention focused on Moses and Aaron as they led the people through the wilderness. But God didn’t leave them wandering without some direction. They followed the cloud and they only moved when the cloud moved and stayed when it stayed. From this, we can draw the parallel of having the discipline of waiting on the Holy Spirit’s timing rather than forcing our personal agendas. An interesting note is that the Tabernacle was placed at the center the of the 12 tribes which faced the tabernacle, this was a visual anchor which taught Israel that worship in the presence of God must remain a literal centerpiece of daily life. What is the center piece of our daily life without getting into a lot of details can we just simply ask, what would Jesus do, then we can ask ourselves did we do that? One question that everybody that has studied exodus always asked themselves how in the world could an 11 day journey take 40 years? It’s not really a very difficult question to answer and parallels a lot of what’s going on in our world today. It took that long simply because a generation refused to trust God’s promises. This should be a warning to us today. Those of the Christian faith, we must consider this… that a lack faith can stall spiritual growth and will delay our ultimate destiny.

Thank you for being in “the Pew” this week. Remember, that to wander aimlessly in this world today does not have to be your lot in life. Come out of that desert of sin and go to the rock where the water not only will quench your thirst, but will make you new again.

Life is Good

jk

“They stormed the beaches and saved the world. The roughly 160,000 Allied troops who landed in Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944, not only successfully executed the largest air, land and sea invasion in history, they did so amid daunting obstacles, terrible bloodshed and stakes that couldn’t have been higher.

“We will accept nothing less than full Victory!” their commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, told them. And victory, in this battle, was far from certain in the first hours of that first day.”

Continuing that quote from military records…

“1:30-2:30 a.m.

The British 6th Airborne Division and the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division and 101st Airborne Division begin the airborne assault behind enemy lines to secure objectives on the east and west flanks of the invasion area. Thick cloud cover hindered the air insertion, and some of the airborne troops were badly scattered.

More than 23,000 Allied airborne troops total landed in Normandy on D-Day, by parachute or glider.”

On this day, June 6, 1944, 2,501 American soldiers were killed across five landing beaches in Normandy the casualties, the most fatalities were at Omaha Beach, where American forces suffered roughly 2,400 total casualties killed wounded and missing with actual US battle death on this beach estimated between 600 and 900. As best as we know from figures from that era 183,600 American service members were killed in action in the European theater of operations during World War II with overall military deaths, including combat, accidents and disease reaching approximately 250,000 which by comparison with the pacific Theatre were 108,500 died. 

So to all of those people in the United States today, who find fault with our country, who hate it, disparage it, and make light of the sacrifice made in years past. I share with you this one reminder. All we as a nation ever asked, was for enough ground to bury our dead.

My God bless those who gave their life for a cause such as this. Their generation, their likes as it has been said before “will never be seen again.”

May God bless and have mercy on the USA…

jk