The Prayer of St. Francis

My oldest granddaughter gave me a bookmark as a gift on Christmas morning and it touched my heart as a prayer to be prayed and lived out as a Normal Christian.

The Prayer of St. Francis
Lord, make us instruments of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let us sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, union;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that we may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

This simple prayer is attributed to St. Francis of Assissi.

The Incarnation

During this time of the year when most Christians are thinking about the birth of Jesus, it is important to contemplate the meaning of the Jesus coming as a baby, as a man. The mystery of the Incarnation is Jesus, all God and all man. The Lord Jesus came as man to serve, to provide a way of salvation, to give His life to us.

Mark 10:45 (NIV) – "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

I picked up a new book about spiritual life and a quote from the author ‘jumped off the page’ at me.
The Divine Embrace, Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life by Robert E. Webber
“In the incarnation God and man are united. In the incarnation God lifted humanity into union with himself in Jesus. The union humanity once had with God, lost in Adam, is now restored. God has restored union with humanity through his own two hands. God, the incarnate Word, united with our humanity by the Spirit, reverses the human condition through his death and resurrection.”
(P. 40)

The Body Human (Part 1)

For a while I have looked for a book written by a medical doctor which would describe the human body and how intricately it is created. During the Thanksgiving holiday I borrowed a book entitled “What Darwin Didn’t Know” by Geoffrey Simmons, M.D. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I have found such a book.

I may get into the thesis of the book later, but for this post, I would like to provide a suggestion for the reader. I suggest we do not have to go out into nature (however this is a good thing to do) to be able to see the beauty of His creation. We have only to contemplate our bodies and how He created us to be able to breathe, walk, love, and do all the things which make us human. We can see His wonderful design. We can see His love for us.

The author provides an understanding of the intricacies of the human body when he writes, “The interior of the human body is a much busier place than New York City, London, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Bombay combined. Ten to seventy-five trillion cells participate in more than a quadrillion purposeful chemical interactions each day that help us walk, breathe, think, sleep, procreate, see, hear, smell, feel, digest food, eliminate waste, write, read, talk, make red cells, remove dead cells, fight infections, behave, misbehave, absorb nutrients, transport oxygen, eliminate carbon dioxide, maintain balance, carry on dialogue, understand instructions, argue, and make complex decisions, just to name a few common activities. In addition, each of these processes has dozens – and sometimes hundreds – of smaller, interacting steps, checks, counterchecks, balances, and regulatory mechanisms. And further, all of these steps have smaller chemical substeps. In many ways the human body functions like an extremely well-organized blizzard of invisible chemical responses and rapidly-changing electrical impulses. The human brain is a convoluted continent swept by microscopic electrical hurricanes and chemical tidal waves that somehow make sense out of reality on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis.” (P. 16)

Future posts will provide a deeper look into the creation of the senses and various systems of our body.

Who God Is? Tozer

There are two Tozer quotes which have touched my heart for many years. This morning I was able to locate them in his books so I can feel good quoting them on this blog. They are delightful in reference to what the Lord means to me and you.

The Knowledge of the Holy, The Wisdom of God
“With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack?”

The Pursuit of God, Removing the Veil
God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can without anything other than Himself meet and overflow the deepest demands and longings of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.”

My prayer is that everyone reading this blog will allow these words to penetrate their mind and their heart, bring them into their spirit where the Lord lives in them, and to continually practice His Presence and exercise their spirit. Amen!!!!

The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing (Part 2)

A.W. Tozer The Pursuit of God
Chapter 2, The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing (Part 2)
Tozer writes, “I have said that Abraham possessed nothing. Yet was not this poor man rich? Everything he had owned before was his still to enjoy: sheep, camels, herds, and goods of every sort. He had also his wife and his friends, and best of all he had his son Isaac safe by his side. He had everything, but he possessed nothing. . . . After that bitter and blessed experience I think the words “my” and “mine” never had again the same meaning for Abraham. The sense of possession which they connote was gone from his heart. Things had been cast out forever. His inner heart was from from them. The world said, “Abraham is rich,” but the aged patriarch only smiled. He could not explain it to them, but he knew that he owned nothing, that his real treasures were inward and external."
Amen.

The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing (Part 1)

If you read this blog very long, you will figure out quickly, I appreciate the writings of A.W. Tozer. I would like to spend a few blogs sharing one of my favorite chapters from Tozer.

A.W. Tozer - The Pursuit of God
Chapter 2, The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing (Part 1)
. . . it would seem that there is within each of us an enemy which we tolerate at our peril. Jesus called it “life” and “self,” or as we would say, the self-life. Its chief characteristic is its possessiveness: the words “gain” and “profit” suggest this. To allow this enemy to live is in the end to lose everything. To repudiate it and give up all for Christ’s sake is to lose nothing at last, but to preserve everything unto life eternal.
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the “poor in spirit.”

Later in the chapter Tozer states, “As is frequently true, this principle of spiritual life finds its best illustration in the Old Testament. In the story of Abraham and Isaac we have a dramatic picture of the surrendered life as well as an excellent commentary on the first Beatitude.”

Tozer goes on to describe in how Abraham became a ‘love slave of his son.’ He writes, “As he watched him grow from babyhood to young manhood the heart of the old man was knit closer and bordered upon the perilous. It was then that God stepped in to save both father and son from the consequences of an uncleansed love.

Tozer continues by describing the story in Genesis 22 of Abraham and Isaac going to the mountain to offer a sacrifice with the idea that Isaac was going to be the one sacrificed, however after Abraham was obedient enough to perform the sacrifice, the Lord provided a different sacrifice. During this time, Abraham surrendered his love for Isaac to obey the Lord. Tozer writes, “Now he was a man wholly surrendered, a man utterly obedient, a man who possessed nothing. He had concentrated his all in the person of his dear son, and God had taken it from him.”
Stay tuned

How much do we Love the Lord? Part 3

Spurgeon Morning and Evening 9/3/07 – AM
Song of Solomon 1:7 “Thou whom my soul loveth”

Why do we love Jesus? Because he first loved us.
Why do we love Jesus? Because he “gave himself for us.”
We have life through his death; we have peace through his blood.
Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor.
Why do we love Jesus? Because of the excellency of his person.
We are filled with a sense of his beauty! an admiration of his charms!
a consciousness of his infinite perfection!
His greatness, goodness, and loveliness, in one resplendent ray, combine to enchant the soul till it is so ravished that it exclaims,
“Yea, he is altogether lovely.”
Blessed love this—a love which binds the heart with chains more soft than silk, and yet more firm than adamant!