Gloria Copeland and "my house"; first world problems.

Things I'd neither confirm nor deny; hear me out.  Gloria Copeland is a bit of a giant in the Word Of Faith denomination, and is particular large in the Kenneth Copeland ecosystem of believers.  Her works such as "God's Will Is Prosperity" are fundamental to making the case, not only for "prosperity" as they use the word, but also God's love.

In the first world, so many people are concerned with the day-to-day financial obligations and somewhere in there is the great dream of a "dream house".  The Copelands and their comrades preach God's love often in the lens of indulging those wishes for dream houses and paid bills, and maybe the odd new car here and there.  

I don't defend this lensing of the Gospel, and indeed, I tend to think less in terms of dream houses or new airplanes, and more in terms of generic happiness and having needs met, but that's such as what gets attention in the first world, that sort of brief focus on financial prosperity, and in that vain, the Copelands and their friends get a lot of people listening to Bible teaching that would ordinarily ignore it altogether.

"God's Will Is Prosperity" by Gloria Copeland is not only a tour-de-force manifesto of prosperity, but again, a giant glorification of God Himself, telling us, page after page, about how God loves us.

In my own walk, I aim not for a dream house, though its not completely an ignored possibility, because the truth of the matter is that I have difficulty keeping a more modest house running.  It keeps me busy; it costs money.  There are time and attention demands that could drive a person crazy without faith in his maker's will.

My house was once a neighborhood bar some many decades ago, before my Grandparent's bought it and had it moved some few miles away.  There were bullet holes and bloodstains here and there from its days as a bar.  However, soon enough the house was filled with a faithful family's love, and to some extent, we'd like to think decades of family use erase some of that stain of the checkered past, just as God forgives people, God repurposed a bar as something of a family's center of love and mercy.

As for Gloria Copeland, there have been recent health complications, a year or so back, and one might say, "maybe her faith isn't strong enough", and yet, we see she's already given us her own testimonials in the form of the written works "God's Will Is Prosperity" and "Blessed Beyond Measure".  Satan is always working against us, looking for weak spots, and need we also remember that the Apostle Paul had a malady which effected his preaching.  He mentions in the book of Galatians that his health effected the way he preached, physically; we need not question another believer's strength of faith, when Satan is out there working against us.

Just a thought.

And of course, its always good to amplify a message of love, "Dio te ama."

heart for the gospel, update of the week

Its a shame to have a heart for the Good News and not accept it.

Its also a shame to have a heart for the Good News and not share it.

I felt the love of my Creator many times this past week, and I relented from sharing it with my friends.  That said, I shared some Gospel messages on Facebook.

God loves you; Christ is an adequate proof friends, and should remove all doubt.

I shared on the book of Acts where the local leaders were upset, telling the magistrate about Paul and Silas:  "these are the men that have shook the world, and now they are come here!".

We are come here.

We love you and ask pretty much nothing of you but to love another, as Christ has loved you.

the balding, the roadside. a somewhat coy ministry update.

It was Joyce Meyer that was saying, "if you're bald before you get saved, you're gonna be bald after you're saved."

I rather entertain the idea that my hair went home to be with the Lord, a number of years back; leaving a particularly picturesque scalp shining.

----

I had came up with a roadside ministry thing this morning, spreading a blurb of the Gospel around and then the potential pitfalls, only dimly imagined.  So marked with enthusiasm for the notion, giving an hour or two a day to God and His son, that I could hardly dampen that enthusiasm by imagining what wiles the enemy might send my way.

Basically, its a volunteer thing, out in public, in the public eye, and God gave me the enthusiasm, so that hopefully is His seal of approval on the thing--my spirit wouldn't be too dampened awfully if I got a public reproach for my efforts.

----

Safe from a Delilah, and pestering strangers on the street about the wonders of the Lord.

But for the mercies of God.

 

Where is God?

Where is God, some may ask, varying on time and circumstance, a snowcone on the beach sand, or a pet squashed in the roadway: where was God when that was happening?

Remember, we have the Devil roaming about, picking-off people, working diligently at the ruin of even the strongest among us, and the Devil seems to know when we are at our weakest.

So, where is God?

God

is 

everywhere.

Without exception.  Even though God is said to be Light and Truth, the Bread of Life, and various other things, God is even there in the opposite conditions, because try as he may, the Devil has not conquered the earth, and it still belongs to God.

The earth still belongs to God, no matter what the Devil may pull, no matter the ruse or trick.

Ask for God, and there He is.

Pray, and there He is.

 

the vines and the rain. a rumination on Biblical vineyard husbandry

The blessing has two parts; the soul seemingly has two parts: light and dark.  Christs mentions the believers as vines.  Unproductive vines are lifted up(cast away, is said in the King James), while producing vines are pruned to be even more productive.(Matthew chapter 7)

We all struggle, but there are the "productive", and those that are farther behind in the struggle:  God has comfort for either condition, and all have a function in the natursl world.

As with the rain early, which was good time for reflection, God gave the natural world something it needed to live, and now, mild temperatures and diffuse sunshine, dilluted by some thin cloud cover.

I could see the burgundy leaves of our plum tree, in the sunshine.  The leaves with their deep hue, and the obverse shade, but the trick, the miraculous is the mirror of light on the leaves that were touching the sunshine: call them productive vines, as Christ said of the better believers.  Sure he loved them all, but he also knew some needed yet more assistance in their spiritual walk.

Sirach and James scriptures.

Nothing else but seeing God in everything will make us loving and patient with those who annoy and trouble us. They will be to us then only instruments for accomplishing His tender and wise purposes toward us, and we shall even find ourselves at last inwardly thanking them for the blessings they bring us.  -H W Smith

"If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God, who gives to us liberally, and upbraids not."  James 1:5

Remember your last days, set enmity aside;
remember death and decay, and cease from sin!
Think of the commandments, hate not your neighbor;
remember the Most High's covenant...
- Sirach 28:7

We experience Gods today in the Southeast as a whisper of rainfall on a mild day temperature-wise.  Let us never shirk from hearing his voice, nor let us not refuse the master's call, either.

Cashapp cashtag $origen1979 

Samson: an interpretive reading, or "Delilah, my desiyah."

I was reading about Samson.

His legendary strength.

He had a kind of appetite for women, one could I infer, with two distinct instances of his sexual appetite being a weakness before his enemies.

First, he was with a harlot.  He had heard about her, and traveled to see her, to be with her for some hours or an evening or what-not, and that was used to unravel him as an attempt was made on his life, them thinking(his enemies) that in his physical passion, he would be an easy kill.

Second.  Delilah.  My desiyah, Delilah.

Three times she set him up for destruction.

He was seemingly unafraid or either convinced of her sincerity; perhaps even, in the height of love, he wasn't thinking clearly.  He mislead her, though, several times, and she says he brought a rebuke on her by telling her that.

Three times she set him up.

Was it apathy or appetite?

Consider too, he may have been physically passed-out drunk after his love-making(a horrid thing to say, I know, but consider on...), for he was deeply sleeping enough not to notice someone cutting his hair.

Come seven of the clock, the evening watch, New York time, when he's laying down--the dirty Philistines.

What is the lesson?  Is it more of the evil that men do?  Is it a rebuke against physical love?

Why, all that and more, my chads and chets.

Consider that Samson had enemies to start with.  To have enemies, one needs to be somehow in opposition to someone, in some form or fashion.  And consider his ill judge of character and sexual appetites, implied.

He was not perfect, but he was our imperfect chudburger.  This is a Christ motif, not that Samson was Christ, but that he was as the Gentiles later forgiven by Christ--his sins, its not a morality play, but reminds us that we can find God's favor after the pillage, we need not embarrass the Gospel here--God was with Samson, but as Ecclesiastes says, "men had their schemes".

The next chapter adds context as the book of Judges builds, and it becomes clear that city-states are not behaving well towards one another, with pockets of Levitical priests here and there, and people trying to take over other towns, and marauding invaders, towns unable to defend themselves alone, without help.

Samson was a "Nazirite" the thing says, and this is emblematic of Christ, if only by geography, a foreshadow of the Scribes and Pharisees coming after the Messiah.  And consider it was the same sort of sinless chosen people supposedly that came after Samson.

I have to a mystic reading as well, a Neville Goddard reading in which personal psychology comes into play.  Its such that Samson was ceding his own power to those other people, that in his wants, he essentially gave the woman not only his strength, but any invulnerability he might had: his strength and his toughness.

Here we can lens addiction in this story, that his compulsions caused him to draw near, closer and closer to destruction, regardless of who else was right and wrong in the story; it was that he willingly, under compulsion, went for what was most destructive for him, like William Faulkner's mention of characters who's "heart works against its own interests".

Such as is the way, in the modern American parlance, that we have to come to some kind of reasonable, rational terms with all the things we love, from the addictive to the hobbies and leisure.  All that.  Some even say love for one's own spouse and children must be moderated, that if one holds a relative too dear, God becomes jealous.  Its what I've been told by some people, that the God said to be jealous, wants to be number one in your heart and mind, and he will dismiss with dispatch anything else that you may hold dear.

Those were the dismal words of people that had lost prior a spouse or child, and struggled to make sense of it, to put that loss in reasonable, rational terms, in a world in which they knew that the devil was trying to worm in any way possible, and with story of the Old Testament Yahweh simply striking people dead.

My rebuttal is that we don't know the plan; we each only have our own little sliver of God's plan.  And oft times we don't know from one minute to the next and we never ever will know the entirety of our role in the God's plan.

God is wondrous, and his plan is sort of the modern mystery, in the sense that Paul used the word mystery.  The working of the Gospel, as Paul and the Apostles revealed the Gospel around the Near East was the mystery of their time that they were at odds to explain and expound.

I think of Paul at Mars Hill, when so many of the philosophers told him that they wanted to hear more about the Gospel.