69 The Universal Relevance of God’s Will

Remember! When I refer to person in the Godhead in any blog, I am referring either to singular person (one-of-three) or to the collective person (three-in-one) of the Triune.

The New Year is coming soon now, dear tour companion. And before the New Year we are going to finish up our tour of the Soul Feature of Will.

Obviously, right attitudes and behaviors such as those evidenced by The Lord Jesus Christ (and considered in earlier blogs) form a Right Model of and are central to the Godhead’s thinking on and will for the Right Practice of relationship within the Godhead and on earth. As the Justice System was conceived, defined and willed by the Godhead, it is a Right System of Community Among Persons, a great oil to the gears of divine and human interaction and a great gift to humankind.

Yet, pop psychology and popular opinion has seriously demeaned many of the tenets of the Godhead’s concept of the justice process; drained it of its energy and potency, by teaching that a person deserves all benefits he receives, but no punishment, and that he should be benefitted, without demand for any corresponding sense of obligation to appreciate and show appreciation for benefits. In this way, the offering of complex demonstrations of appreciation and cooperation in return is short-circuited.

All over the world many people daily practice thinking what they want to think. But many people also are free of that trap. They see and understand that God’s Will has universal relevance.

With God, all things are taken into account by acts of His Will, rightly specified by Right Practices. In the “sin (lawlessness) versus righteousness” cluster, processes for Right Practices abound.

The greatest process is “following after good”—God’s definition of righteousness (1 Peter 3:13-14). Within this process of following after good there are requirements to practice right thinking, right feeling, right will. There is the proper exercise of the power of choice and sweet reasonableness, the requirement to desire a heart of flesh and not of stone (rich mind-emotion ties), there is the caution to consult with God on everything (seek to know His will, what He wants to happen).

And all of this is embodied in and exemplified by Christ Jesus.

He is the ultimate example of the solid citizen of both heaven and earth. His will defers to the Father, His mind is anchored in and led by reasonableness and a rock-solid value system born of His absolute commitment to good. His thinking and will are enriched by carefully edited and appropriate emotions. He is our ultimate model of being.

All God’s Right Practices, attitudes and behaviors network among mind, will and emotion and come with thoughtful and step-wise conduct and management systems, dear reader. For us to be a follower after good means to learn and adopt that step-wise conduct. It means to commit to practice that conduct daily for the rest of one’s life. It means to become a student of the art of honesty, sincerity, compassion, kindness, patience and a bounty of more virtues. These things will always need practice.

God’s Will is a multifaceted jewel with agape love at its center and with cascades of brilliant attitude and behavioral clusters surrounding it, not the least of which are perseverance and self-discipline. And all of which first appeared in the Godhead.

In short, it is valuable to understand always that in God’s testimonies, the Godhead will always be found practicing good Will, a good will that dominates even as the mind of the Godhead activates the Godhead’s consciousness and appropriate emotion enriches everything the Godhead wills. In that way, God’s Will is done.

Happy New Year everyone!

To be continued. . .

68 The Relevance of God’s Will: Accountability through Right Understanding

Remember! When I refer to person in the Godhead in any blog, I am referring either to singular person (one-of-three) or to the collective person (three-in-one) of the Triune.

How wonderful it was, dear tour companion, for me to gain a whole new understanding of Santa and Christmas (from the Polar Express), of symbols and trees and wreaths and more, right here on the verge of Christmas! This week, so many of us will gather around our trees and celebrate the anticipation of Santa and the glory of the Virgin Birth.

For me, the perfection of Christmas is that each year I find that the sights and sounds of Christmas fill me with immediate and then enduring comfort and joy. The atmosphere of God and His Kingdom never seems more real, more tangible than now at the moment of Christmas-Come and that heavenly vision sustains me through the following year until I once again return to the inspiration of Christmas time.

So, I am glad we have spent the time of coming-toward-Christmas this year together. And I hope this night of anticipation and savoring of the good things of God will be enriched by the learning that we have shared about His generous good will and ways. I pray it has meant as much to you as it has to me.

Never have I understood more the massive draw of gift-giving that we also celebrate among ourselves each Christmas. And as we celebrate this culmination of the advent of the Christ Child and participate in all that gift-giving among loved ones that we will do tonight and tomorrow, may we freshly experience the nobility of giving and the joy of our attachments to one another.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas.

To be continued . . . Look for the last blog of the year on the 29^th!

67 The Relevance of God’s Will: Accountability through Right Response

Remember! When I refer to person in the Godhead in any blog, I am referring either to singular person (one-of-three) or to the collective person (three-in-one) of the Triune.

So, my section on Will is winding down.

Over several blogs, I have examined how truth is a facet of God’s Will (James 1:18):

“Of His own will, He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures.”

And I have examined how God is the Great Gift Giver (James 1:17):

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

And I have overviewed a few of God’s conditions for right appreciation of gift-giving. Now let me elaborate a bit more on those points.

Principally, what God wants from us (me and you) for His generous gift-giving is right response.

That means, He wants us to make symbolic thank offerings. There’s that word symbolic, again.

So much of the Judeo-Christian ethic is tied to legitimate symbols, symbolism and symbolic behavior. Symbolic gift-giving is a great example. Charitable donations, or acts of love and service to Him (such as helping to build homes for the homeless, or giving food to a food bank because God has given you food for your table) are great symbolic traditions undertaken by the people of God in remembrance of His benefits and goodness.

Further, right response means He wants us to worship Him, let our hearts overflow with admiration for Him because He is greater and more worthy in every regard than all others (worship: showing the great or excessive love, admiration, and respect felt for somebody or something, for a deity, in an act of worship [Encarta] such as prayer, singing, dancing, celebrating in public worship, (Ephesians 5:18-19).

“And do not be drunk with wine in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”

Spiritual songs are what I call these blogs. The title seems to fit.

Worship means He wants me and you to routinely think about Him and remember Him, keeping Him at the forefront of the mind, speaking well of Him, wanting to be like Him, recommending Him to others, doing what He wants done, even when without understanding why. He wants some enthusiasm for the idea, too, guys!

It also means that He wants me and you to see and acknowledge that we are subordinate to Him.

He wants for us to defer to Him regularly, readily cooperating with Him and always, but always showing tender affection for Him.

Right response is a thorough-going process, gentle tour companion. There is never an end to our need to be thinking about and remembering God. God wants us constantly awash in the understanding of His Truth in the Word, Who He is and what He wants to happen (His Will).

We must know that profitable appreciation and right response require acceptance of God’s virtues as a superior person. Right appreciation and response involve recognition and enjoyment of, and the embrace of, the person of the Father and the benefits of His deserving virtues. Remember, it’s Merry Christmas time, gentle tour participant. And like Santa says, it matters if we are naughty or nice.

And just as God says, it matters if we are appreciative and respond rightly, or not. Right behavior matters and wrong behavior—thumbing one’s nose at God’s goodness— is never a good idea, much less a good practice (as I’m sure you agree, gentle reader).

To be continued . . . Remember to look for a Christmas Eve Blog!

66 The Jesse Tree: A Precious Symbol of Christmas

A final remark on symbols, dear tour companion: From our study of Santa Clause, it is obvious that anyone can make-up a symbol for anything if it is suggestive of something else to them.

But to my way of thinking (and that of many more qualified than I), only symbols made with a commitment to truth are precious enough to rightly endure; precious enough to rightly occupy center place in our hearts and minds. Quality matters. And eternally important symbols must always but always (and only) be tied to truth.

So, for the sake of enlarging understanding, let’s start by defining the word symbol

Definition: symbol (Encarta) something that represents something else; something that stands for or represents something else, especially an object representing an abstraction.

Now let me introduce you to a holy scripture authorized symbol—The Jesse Tree. I have included a precious drawing of the Jesse Tree Kathleen created in middle school. This tree is named for the Old Testament Patriarch, Jesse. King David was the son of Jesse and centuries later Jesus would be born of this royal family line begun with Jesse (Isaiah 11:1).

“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

Thus, in the Christian world, a grown tree became a reasonable symbol for the ‘family tree’ from Jesse to Jesus. And in many homes this tree became a ‘must’ Christmas tree. By decorating a tree for the home each year at Christmas, families found a way to regularly share in remembering the life-altering entrance of the Son of God into the field of history.

When Kathleen drew this Jesse Tree, she was following after so many who celebrate the family of Jesse, and the Prophets, and the culmination of Christmas in the Christ-child.

By using an evergreen tree, the Christian community symbolized eternity.

And finally, through the symbols chosen for ornaments, the decorators found they could beautifully display images of important elements of Christmas. Thinking about the people who helped prepare the world for the coming of Jesus, family members would choose one thing that made him or her think about that person—for King David, that could have been his harp. The harp would recall to the mind how David, son of Jesse, played for King Saul. And so, one by one, the ornaments were hung and the tree got decorated.

For many (me included), this is the ‘true’ origin of the Christmas Tree—a tree of remembrance.

On Kathleen’s Jesse Tree, the birth of the Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus Christ is the great and concluding symbol.

What a distinctive and lovely tree she put together. I have asked her what all her symbols relate to and she seems to remember frankincense and myrrh and the Lion of Judah, and maybe olive shoots—20 some-odd years later she is not too sure. But it is her tree and I thank her for sharing it with me and you.

To be continued . . . Tomorrow.