church and loving Jesus

now playing: she must and shall go free(album) // derek webb

A rather appropriate album to be listening to, given the direction of my thoughts throughout today. This morning I was at church for the first time in a while (due to work schedule, not apostasy). My church is far from perfect, however I realized today that the church is the way that God has chosen to organize His people, and to work. It's an honour to be a part of that, and an honour to serve Jesus with other people. To quote a line from Derek, from the perspective of Jesus if you love Me you must love the Church.

I also realized something about theology and philosophy. I can kind of see where Solomon was coming from when he said "excessive devotion {to books} is wearying." It is easy to slip into a state of mind where God is not an active, moving being who is changing His people, but rather a guiding principle to the world. See, here's how it seems to work. We realize a problem: in this case, a low view of God. So, we strive to change it, not realizing that aspects we relate (correctly or incorrectly) to that low view of God (His personal involvement in our lives, the fact that as well as King and Creator and Master and Saviour, He can be our friend) are true. And then, in correcting the low view of God, there's a tendency to throw these good things to the side. And then one becomes enbroiled in the same problem: an inaccurate view of God. Trouble one way, or trouble the other. I hate the word balance, but I will argue that we too often throw out the baby with the bathwater, and when we are correcting problems in our view of / relationship with God, we need to be careful not to become unbalanced to the opposite extreme of where we were when we began. And that was a run on sentence.

So, that's about it for me now. More on the reading break car challenge later. We're fighting the empire (used car dealers) to find freedom (a car), using no weapons but our wits and the force (autotrader.ca). Wish us luck.
Who's darth vader? Ah, yes, the e-test.