7443	Forums / Main Forum / Try To Kill Yourself With Positive Action.	on: May 14, 2007, 04:03:37 PM
Good post everyone. Its important to know who we serve and be refreshed daily in His word. We spend most of our time thinking about our jobs, the kids, the house and cars. Then we have our daily routine that we go through and we learn to relax and enjoy ourselves since we work we deserve to rest. As we get older we begin to wind down sooner every day. We struggle with pain and we do not have the energy to accomplish the task we used to do. Its not as easy for us to get excited about doing these things. Then we read about someone who is really successful. The information usually comes from the tv, computer, news paper or some other impersonal source. We learn to gain information through impersonal sources so that our thinking is formed by our sources. In that paradigm we form our community unity. In a sense we live in the community that thinks in terms of bits of information being pleased in that learning process. Our minds are formed in being pleased with learning this way. In this thinking shallow driven society , we develop icons. These are the super people , who are self motivated and driven. They have an ability to communicate and focus . Their lives are paraded before us in an impersonal way also. We learn to idolize these people because of their success, and we develop our thinking in terms of the information we get about them through these sources. Thinking with this cultural bias is what gets us into all kinds of relational trouble. In this paradigm we are usually driven by our feelings about information that we get, either it is in a good circumstantial context which gives us a sense of comfort or it is information is about a disaster in someones life or in our world. We learn the art of pleasure in receiving information. We always like to see the gory stuff also. So we learn to process information through our senses and in that process we learn the pleasure we get through each new story. We learn from a very young age that pleasure comes easily and it comes as comfortable as it possibly can through these impersonal stories. We learn to enjoy the pleasure of pleasure. We become feeling oriented with the 5 senses always under that the spell of the information highways. I speak from experience here. This is what i consider the evil influence of the 20 th century. This is the mammoth idol we erect of ourselves. We learn to measure our worth by our ability to be pleased when we are most comfortable. We are sort of lull to sleep in the pleasure of our own world in receiving impersonal information. Our conversations revolve around the latest gossip, the latest icon. There are so many of these paradigms coming at us that we seldom think deeply. So where is the fight? It begins with who we think God is and what He is most pleased with. Once we buck the cultural course we begin to enter a battle that gets harder as the culture becomes engrossed in these pleasures. We are facing a huge giant, in which there is a tendency to wax us to statues just by being in the world. Our hearts are so easily led astray by our past experience and the accelerated pace of the world system. This idol is not silver or gold, but it is in our own heart loves. The spiritual course is difficult and extremely dangerous. When we do it Gods way we may lose houses , family, friends, and things. The Lord is king and He must have every thing, He must rule every area of our lives or He is not King. He demands absolute obedience to all of His commands. His word is to be obeyed , all of it. The way of faith is not a wide path , but a very narrow path. So narrow that it is pushing in on the believer.  We wage an all out war on the world, the flesh ,and the devil. We are to cast down every imagination that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and fill our minds with His will and desire. In that process we experience, rejection, isolation, turmoil, depression, as if we were in an all out physical war. When the days are evil , there are not a lot of friends of God - So that mens hearts fail them.  In the evil days the cities are full of threats, there are cries in the streets, theft , and men are violent from a constant practice of evil. When the cities are full of evil men are easily led astray. The righteous are the ones who receive the full threat of that evil. It is important for fathers to have so much time in the presence of our Heavenly Father that they know when the elements of hardness enter their own homes. Our experience in His revelation will cause us to confront the course of the world that invades our homes. We must in prayer learn the petitions of warriors in order to save our own family from being under the spell of secularism. We are no longer dealing with a large abundance of common grace, we are dealing with a society that is full of debauchery. It is time of us to till the fallow ground of our hearts. A constant meditation in the scriptures will be the flint that ignites our cold hearts. In low times, spiritual depression is like a bug that hits all at once. Our struggle sometimes is for our own hearts not to fail us. By faith we are to take hold of the promises of God. We take hold by meditation and prayer. These are the days when the deep things are only grasped by deep prayer, they will not come out like in normal circumstances.