Showing posts with label shame. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shame. Show all posts

Thursday, March 5, 2020

God views you believer as totally pure today, yes clean and fully washed. Take a moment and let that sink in.

“I have formed thee; thou art my servant: O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me. I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee.”  Isaiah 44:22-23 
Why live with all the shame, sin, guilt, torment and condemnation? 

Are you alive? All can be washed even today. 

God having forgiven us of sin, He will call it no more into His remembrance. See Jer 31:34. 
The Lord will make an act of indemnity, he will not upbraid us with former unkindnesses, or sue us with a cancelled bond. 
We’ve fought against conviction of sins. We all know what it is to kick against the pricks if ya will (remember Saul turned Paul). 
We all have sinned, but freely Jesus.. "He will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." Mic 7:19
“Sin shall not be cast in as a cork which riseth up again, but as lead which sinks to the bottom. How should we all labour for this covenant blessing! 
‘Out of the depths.’ Depths! oh! into what ‘depths’ men can sink! How far from happiness, glory, and goodness men can fall. There is the depth of poverty. A man can become utterly stripped of all earthly possessions and worldly friends! Sometimes we come upon a man, still living, but in such abject circumstances, that it strikes us as a marvel that a human being can sink lower than the beasts of the field.
Then there is the depth of sorrow. Billow after billow breaks over the man, friend after friend departs, lover and friend are put into darkness. All the fountains of his nature are broken up. He is like a water logged ship, from the top waves plunging down as if into the bottom of the sea. So often in such depths, sometimes like Jonah in the whale's belly, the monster carrying him down, down, down, into darkness.
There are depths after depths of mental darkness, when the soul becomes more and more sorrowful, down to that very depth which is just this side of despair. Earth hollow, heaven empty, the air heavy, every form a deformity, all sounds discord, the past a gloom, the present a puzzle, the future a horror. One more step down, and the man will stand in the chamber of despair, the floor of which is blistering hot, while the air is biting cold as the polar atmosphere. To what depths the spirit of a man may fall!
But the most horrible depth into which a man's soul can descend is sin. Sometimes we begin on gradual slopes, and slide so swiftly that we soon reach great depths; depths in which there are horrors that are neither in poverty, nor sorrow, nor mental depression. It is sin, it is an outrage against God and ourselves. We feel that there is no bottom. Each opening depth reveals a greater deep. This is really the bottomless pit, with everlasting accumulations of speed, and perpetual lacerations as we descend. Oh, depths below depths! Oh, falls from light to gloom, from gloom to darkness! Oh, the hell of sin!” ~ C.H. Spurgeon
What can we do? We can simply CRY out to the Lord! Let us now cry to God.

“Once again you will have compassion on us. You will trample our sins under your feet and throw them into the depths of the ocean!” Micah 7:19

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Ernest Hemingway, perhaps the most celebrated author in America, could have chosen a different path despite his upbringing and the insensitivity of his parents.


Hemmingway! Perhaps the most diligent and flexible in regards to writing spaces.  The man could write standing up, with bombs detonating around him.  That's commitment! ~ LMB
martha gellhorn , journalist, third wife of Hemingway, born in St.Louis 
He liked listening, he liked observing, he liked honesty and simply describing inner feelings. Was good at describing things, situations and feelings. His dad was a perfectionist, his mom made some really bad choices too. Sad. Saying you are against evil doesn't make you good. No Christian dad is perfect. What's your home-life like? Shame-based and mean or grace-based and filled with God's kind of love? 
His parents would have done well to tell Ernest, Hey son, no matter the choices you make in life, even if we don’t agree with those choices because they go against Scripture or degenerate the Christian faith has some have them thus far have, we too are sinners and we love you deeply, Ernest. So sorry if we somehow hurt you, son. Tell us. Nothing you do or don't do, that you write, say or not say.. will change that. We love you and never want to be far away from you. Ernest didn't have to commit suicide just because his dad did that.. just because his mom included that gun into the middle of his birthday cake to Ernest as a hint to go and do the same stupid thing. What kind of warp thinking is this from so-called (alleged) Christian parents. And you and I don't have to go and repeat the bad choices of our parents or of other alleged Christians. Overcome evil with good, don't be overcome by evil and sin.
“The idealized life of Ernest Hemingway, the one the writer himself wanted the world to buy, was simple: he was the perfect man, the perfect synthesis of brain and brawn. Driven by a thirst for adventure, he was a swashbuckling, hard-drinking pugilist who loved being in the thick of the action, whether in the front line of battle or within charging distance of a water buffalo. He also happened to be the finest writer around, disdaining the grandiose wordiness of Victorian prose for a clean, stripped-back simplicity, conveying emotion by what was not said as much as by what was. 
I love this. Too many people are just waiting for their turn to talk, no one ever actually listens and embraces whats been said. Psh smdhWounded on the Italian front in the First World War, he was a handsome convalescent who fell in love with a pretty nurse and wrote A Farewell to Arms as a result. In the 1920s, he was at the forefront of American writers and artists who hung out in Paris, "being geniuses together". In the 1930s Ernest went to Spain to fight for the republic against Franco and wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which a brave American hero falls in love with a peasant guerrilla called Maria. In the Second World War, he was at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. After the war he retired with his fourth wife to Cuba, where he fished for marlins and wrote The Old Man and the Sea, won the Nobel Prize, and "was lionised" wherever he went. ~ John Walsh
Everyone struggles with problems that seem too big to handle, or with those that come from flawed parents who expect so SO much. But conflicts in our out of the home, are really opportunities for each of us to learn how to rely more faithfully on a good Father-God who really cares about us.. who loves each of us far more than any human parent ever could.
What are the reasons why this so called literary giant, this adventure-loving personality, this rumbustious man of exciting action, this bullfighter, this deep-sea fisherman, this great white hunter, this warrior from old battlefields, this gunslinger, this four-times-married dude, this all-round lonely but tough American..would do himself in. How could he? Why would he? It was his selfish choice, but what was his pain like? God knows.
What are the lies that people believe, dwell on and then go destroy themselves with? Only one knows them all. What lies have you repeatedly heard and now somehow believe? I can’t think of them all.  
Are you from a shame-based home life, or from a grace-based home life? Have you rejected everything your parents believed? Why? Are you wondering how to clear your conscience, get right with God and reestablish broken relationships ehile here? Worthy or not, you can know real, and lasting peace inside regardless of the mistakes others make. Are you wanting an inner assurance that you are forgiven and that God still has a good plan for your life? Jesus is the God of second chances and more even.
After You've Blown It; Just Reconnect with God (Turn and Trust Jesus -- He Forgives Any Who Sincerely Ask Him To) and Reconnect with Others too If You’ve Been by Them... or Hurt Them.

Take some time if you can to go read the story of Mr. Hemingway that’s been so well-summarized by Daniel Pawley, “Ernest Hemingway: Tragedy of an Evangelical Family.” More importantly, read the stories, and even fairly similar stories willful stuborn.people sort of like Earnest in the Bible.  
Do you walk according to the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eyes, the pride of life, or according to unbelief and what this world system wants you to do? Why? Musing over this...
“And it came about at that time, that Judah departed from his brothers and visited a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; and he took her and went in to her. So she conceived and bore a son and he named him Er.” Read Genesis 38:1-3. 
After high school, he moved to Kansas City to become a reporter. He stopped going to church and began drifting from his upbringing. He enlisted in World War I, was wounded, and took to drinking to ease the pain. He married a worldly woman and moved to Paris to further his writing career. Totally alienated from his parents, eventually he would go through four wives. He was notorious for his drunkenness. In his late years, “he grew distant from everyone. He would not stand up straight and, he stopped communicating verbally.” A friend said that his “every hour was filled with the pain of being truly lost and alone.” Hemingway’s own description was, “I live in a vacuum that is as lonely as a radio tube when the batteries are dead and there is no current to plug into.” Finally, on a sunny Sunday morning in Idaho, at age 61, Ernest Hemingway put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. (Culled from, “Ernest Hemingway: Tragedy of an Evangelical Family,” by Daniel Pawley)