God is as alive and active in your life as you want Him to be.
August 10, 2007 (Friday) – Superstitious people probably don’t kill spiders because it has been unlucky since a spider spun a web over baby Jesus to hide him from Herod. A verse says, ‘If you wish to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.’
(Incidentally, there are good reasons not to kill spiders that have nothing to do with superstitions Like all of God’s creatures, they serve a useful purpose and most are harmless to humans. Some are deadly, and we have to kill them in self-defense. Here ends the parenthesis).
My grandmother often quoted proverbs and sayings, and some of them were superstitions. Wanda’s mother passed along many old sayings she learned from her parents, and they in turn from theirs. Too bad we didn’t write them down. They were colorful and interesting. Some of them were based in fact; most were not.
Some people today think that faith in God belongs to the category of superstitions. According to them, mankind has left religion in the dust and moved on to better things. They love to point to failures of the church in history, and even gross sin and cruelty perpetrated in the name religious faith. Problem was, and is, the church is made up of people. And people sin, make mistakes, and do bad things. So there are blots on the church’s record.
But what about the good stuff? Where did the hospitals come from? And the colleges? And the children’s homes (we used to call them, “orphanages”)? For many years, these institutions were founded and staffed by churches and denominations that saw a human need and met it with action. Many of our best colleges and hospitals were started by the church.
Listen, who knows how many of us were on the road to being a liability to the world, but have become productive citizens because Christ came into our hearts, introduced to us by Christians. Besides, saying there is no God because there is sin in this world is like saying there are no churches in town because there is a jail here. It is nonsense.
A few years ago, the cover of Time Magazine featured, in bold letters, the question, “Is God Dead?” They did that because a prominent theologian had said so. He was saying that the whole idea of God is no longer needed in our “enlightened” world. So, he said, for all practical purposes, God is dead. His name was Altizer. The joke was told that, when he arrived in Heaven, he was immediately sent to the back wall and told to write, “I was wrong,” a billion times.
Here is the truth: God is as alive and active in your life as you want Him to be. You can live your life with Christ as king in your heart, or you can live it without believing in Him. It’s your choice: with God or without Him. Just make sure you choose the right path, because it will never end.
—————————————————————————————————————————————-
Read Dale Pogue’s blog: “The Muse is Loose”