Friday, July 31-Mere 3.10-12

Chapter 10 Hope
-I like his quote: Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in, aim at earth and you will get neither. It's a good reminder that when we look for the wrong thing we end up with nothing. People are so intent on finding meaning in the earthly where meaning is really found in doing the heavenly.
-Esther and I were sort of talking about these three ways of dealing with stuff yesterday when we were talking about Job satisfaction. Some people just go from job to job looking for real meaning in it. Some people just deal with it and sort of get used to the lack of meaning in it. And some people find real meaning in their work when they do it all for the glory of God. This is where I found meaning in my work. When I looked it as ministry opportunity.
-The hope of heaven is a wonderful thing. It's not the place that's so important as the God that we will be in relationship with. The garden of eden was nothing once the relationship with God was broken. That was the real glory of the garden. When we look forward to heaven it is looking forward to a relationship with God. All the gold, houses, and glassy seas are just extra.

Chapter 11 Faith
-The faith battle is between reason and emotion/imagination. This does seem to happen a lot. I know I can trust in God, but when circumstances arise I begin to doubt based on what could happen or what might happen.
-Faith must be trained. I think I once said in a message that as our faith grows so will our faithfulness and we grow our faith by being faithful. Its kind of a wired cyclical thing, but I think it makes sense.
-Lewis says we never find out how strong we are till we fight it. This seems to make a lot of sense to me as well. Many times we're content being untested with just our belief. This doesn't mean we should go looking for trouble: looking for strip clubs and alcohol. But we should be practising our faith in applicable areas of life as they come. Failing is ok as long as we're growing.

Chapter 12 Faith
-I like Lewis directions for dealing with a crossroads. Sometimes it is better for things to be left alone for awhile if we don't understand it. To destroy our faith because we don't understand it would leave many things shattered. Cause we don't understand higher math or higher sciences we don't discard it, we just leave it for the time being until we have more foundation to understand it.
-His discussion on the tension between man doing stuff and God doing stuff is important to realize. If we put to much stock in one or the other we kind of mess things up. It's really both doing work that is important, but hard to understand.