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Learning to listen

learning to listen

I sometimes tell myself I am becoming spiritually deaf, but I suspect that my ears work perfectly and my trouble hearing God is due to the spiritual equivalent of ear wax. All the noise and demands of the world around me seem to produce a kind of sludge that clogs my mind and dulls my ability to hear God’s will. For that, there is only one solution: I need to get clean, and it starts with allowing Jesus to wash the dirt from my soul. Ephesians 5:25 tells us that Christ loves the church (his apprentices) and gave himself to make us holy, cleansing us with God’s Word.

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Double-minded?

double-minded-henry-h-harris-com

James, the half-brother of Jesus, wrote a letter that identified the source of humankind’s challenges and how to overcome them. “If any of you lacks wisdom,” James says, “he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does” (1:5-8).

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God and magick

What do God's word and magick mean in the lives of Christians?

One of humankind’s most treasured beliefs is that the universe runs according to basic mechanical principles that we can learn to use to our advantage. The ancient name for this belief is magick. These days it is known as either black magic or white magic, and Christians are especially susceptible to the latter. Many of us have been persuaded that the Bible contains formulas that we can use to improve our lives. That if we mix certain ingredients in certain proportions, we will get to do what we want, how we want, when we want.

If you believe that, you believe in magick.

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Do you believe in magick? 

Henry Harris dispels magick

We live in a world that is convinced that everything in the universe runs according to basic mechanical principles, such as the laws of thermodynamics or the law of gravity.  We are taught by our experiences that these laws are, for the most part, non-negotiable. If we jump off a roof, we will fall to the ground (unless we hit another object on the way down, then other laws of physics will influence how and where we land). So from a very young age we try to operate within these boundaries. As we grow older, we become convinced that the better we learn these basic principles of the universe, the better off we will be.

There is much to commend learning these laws, but a negative byproduct is that we come to believe we live in a universe that is ruled by a set of blind forces (like gravity) that constantly push and pull us around. We call it names like “cause and effect,” and most Christians think this way as well, except that we add that it was God who put these forces in motion and who put in place the law of reciprocity (the whole “sowing and reaping” thing) to make everything work fairly. You get out what you put in. No more, no less.