Prove What’s Best in the Land of “Anything Goes”

How can we judge what is right when now we live in society where anything goes?

Over the last eighty years the American culture transformed dramatically.

In the 1930′s and 40′s most of the United States lived in rural areas and the number one commerce was agriculture until the war. The war changed things. The men came home with a new perspective of the way things work in other places. The family farm wasn’t the only way to do things anymore. They also wanted more for their families then had ever been known. They knew how to work hard because many of them had seen the Depression yet had, through the sheer guts and muscle of the united military forces, conquered an evil unlike any they’d ever known. Hitler. They were ready for a new life and had the energy to make it happen. The baby boom was underway and in 1951 television was born then in 1954 it transformed again and went to color. Soon the news was coming to the average American’s dinner table and spreading faster than in times past. Other things were coming as well. The sitcoms and family entertainment showed us a perfect world, expectations and constrains on behavior were defined in the way the “Leave it to Beaver” family did things. This produced a generation of men and women who grew up with their televisions and an arranged set of “what is best.” Unfortunately it didn’t include many multi-cultural situations and or women excelling in the workplace. There were holes in this “what is best” arrangement.

Let’s fast forward over the stormy sixties and seventies.

Let’s zoom past all the turbulence and uncertainty of troubling wars and administrations. We know the invention of the internet substantially, like the television, changed our perception of the world. Now, instead of looking up information in encyclopedias, information was a mouse click away. They say that if the internet was a book it would make a few laps around the earth with its thickness and volume. Wow, humans have come a long way! Communication, media and international travel and trade are the big commerce now. You can go anywhere, do anything, and learn what ever you have a passion for and all for a relatively small price; broken down in interest-laden payments of course. If you are in your seventies or eighties now, you deserve a well-earned rest! Our race went from having little or no communication and media to having a glutton of it. And anything goes! But where has all these metamorphoses taken us? Are we in a better place of rightness? Has this leap made us more able to prove “what is best?”

Thankfully, through all the giant transformations we’ve seen, one thing remains the same. God has not changed. Oh, some will debate me because the face of religion looks far different now than ever before, but I’m sticking to my guns. Spiritual guns that is. Nobody is older than God and nobody knows more than He does. God has seen more change, improved more generations of people in a single act and affected a larger number of the human race than all these technologies combined. He’s done it with style, with love and without offense and Philippians, shows us how.

In the last post, I covered agape, and our walk in love. I covered the precise and accurate knowledge of God and how having those two things gives us spiritual insight. That hasn’t changed in all of the eons before us. It is still as poignant today  as it will be three thousand years from now, should the Lord tarry. God has us beat on communication too, but that subject is a whole week’s worth of blogs.

Here’s today’s verse.

“That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ;” Phil 1:10

Here is the literal translation of that verse according to usages.

“So that you will be able to distinguish those things which are spiritually best. Then you will be pure and spotless, without being offensive until the day of Christ.”

Times will remain ever-changing. Until the day Jesus Christ returns and amidst the wind-blown economic and social environment, we children of God, must be able to judge what’s best. How can we do that? Look back a verse with me and read this with meaning.

“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and [in] all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ;” Phil 1:9-10

The walk in love is a timeless rightness. It gives us effortless sincerity. The precise and accurate knowledge of the one true God will forever give us insight, making it easier to distinguish what is spiritually best despite the physical changes around us. Do you see the scope of what God did in us? He made us equipped and able to handle anything! No human invention can duplicate His genius and efficacy. We owe Him a debt of gratitude and all the love we could give.

One truth remains in center stage, though we live in a time of excessive supply of opinions, God has always been able to help us prove what is best for our lives.

God bless you today!

Are You In the Fight for Your Better Life?

Imagine a soldier out on a torrential battlefield. He’s exhausted from fighting, charging, running and shooting. When he finally gets to a place where he can sleep for the night, he takes out his pencil and paper to write a letter to his family. Literally the stench of battle is still rising from his body. He writes in vivid paragraphs of description. Then suddenly a bomb goes off nearby and dirt from the explosion falls into the folds of his finished prose. When his mother opens the letter several weeks later, she sucks in that air. It’s air from the his night, air from his suffering and his joy. The end of the letter says, “I was able to stop the war and get the information we need to a new place for peace. Please know I love you all.” You can imagine the tears that flow as she reads, and the joy!

I imagine that the Philippians felt this way when they opened Paul’s letter. He was captured, laying in a filthy prison. He was accused and slandered like the warfare that was used by the Vietnamese or Germans. But they knew it would be okay because he had fought a good fight.

Even in those moments God hadn’t stopped working in him. Here are his words. (I’m backing up so we can read the whole sentence as one thought.)

“Always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now; being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform [it] until the day of Jesus Christ: even as it is meet (right) for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart; inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel, ye all are partakers of my grace.” Philippians 1:7

When I look at this wonderful sentence, I see heartfelt love and tenderness towards his family. They were fellow laborers along with him and members of the household of God. Paul yearned to encourage them in their work. He didn’t want them to stop just because he wasn’t there, and of course they didn’t.

You and I have to honor this work as well. It’s a work that was started in you the moment you were born again and will continue until the day of Jesus Christ. We don’t have to stay in the dirt, fear, worry or bondage of this life. God gave us a way out. He rescued us that day and he will continue His work in you until the day He sends His son back to gather us up. What will that day be like?

Every single person from the day of Pentecost forward, who believed Romans 10:9-10, will be raised from the dead with a new spiritual body. Those who are alive at that time will be changed instantly and meet us in the air. We don’t have to sit and wonder if this will occur, we know it will occur. God promises it will. He promises to continue working in this gift of Holy Spirit in us completing and perfecting it. Wow! What would I rather focus on? I’d rather focus on my better life and the great things that are coming in the future.

God Bless You Today!