Life Here and There

I have taken lessons in piano, guitar, trumpet, and karate. Does this make me a master of all of these abilities? No! Because I stopped each one after only a few months. I’m a master of starting things! God, however, is the Master of finishing.

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We have, sometimes, the mistaken notion that when we get to heaven, we’ll be as God, knowing everything. Not only is this a duplication of Adam and Eve’s mistaken theology, it’s also quite unbiblical. What will be different there is that the hindrances to learning will have been removed. Listen to the way J. Sidlow Baxter puts it in Going Deeper:

Let us try to grasp it: the quintessence of heaven’s pure bliss for us will be just this, that with sinless minds, and raptured hearts, and perfected powers, through evolving aeons we shall be adoringly exploring an exhaustless Christ in whom are hid ‘all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,’ and who ever-unfoldingly expresses to us ‘the loving-kindness’ which lives in the infinite heart of God.

No, we won’t be all-powerful and all-knowing, but we will be ever-growing with only forward progress. As the old songwriter said, “what a day that will be, when my Jesus I shall see.”

I’ve been getting a lot of email invitations to join FaithOut.com, which claims to be the first “Christian alternative to Facebook.” If you want to join FaithOut, go right ahead. I’m sticking with Facebook, and I ‘m a Christian. My spirit is stirred at what some believers are doing in the online realm of things. Instead of engaging and impacting the online culture for the Kingdom, we’re attempting to create an online Christian subculture into which we can retreat. GodTube is another very popular example. (I actually use GodTube simply because of a lot of videos that are offered there that you can’t find on mainstream alternatives, but nonetheless…) This, in my estimation, is quite similar to the popularity in the brick-and-mortar world of Christian bookstores, Christian coffee shops, and other forms of Christian alternatives to secular offerings. Here are my concerns…

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