To Truly Love Nature, You Must See its Creator!
ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE
“Your attitude of gratitude should be commensurate with the value of the gift!”
For my high school graduation my parents paid for my school ring. Since many other parents did that in ADDITION to a graduate present, my “attitude of gratitude” was rather minimal. Now, if I had been given my DREAM car – yellow and white two-toned ’57 Chevy Impala – that “attitude of gratitude” would have made me a candidate for a heart attack!
That attitude of gratitude all depends upon how much value you place upon the nature of what has been bestowed upon you, no?
One of the signs that we humans are INHERENTLY contaminated – “DEAD in trespasses and sin” – is that our level of gratitude always depends upon being MORE blessed than others. Even the contemporary preachers seem to be determined to prove that it is what makes us UNIQUE that we ought to appreciate! No wonder the attitude is so common that infers, “If what I have been given is identical to what ALL humans have been given, then, what is there to be so thankful about?” The fact that we share in the attitude of that quoted sentiment is actually a sign of a decadence that is SO decadent that we do not even recognize it as “decadence.” If, for example, we were experiencing guilty pleasure with pornography, we would likely recognize THAT as “decadence,” no?
From the knowledge of biology that I had acquired in high school, I did have SOME ability to appreciate that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” But I will never forget that morning after I had received His Holy Spirit in December of 1972. They had laid hands upon me after the 6:30 Holy Communion and He finally DID literally “fill” me – spirit, soul, AND body! His promises were indeed true, for ALL ages and for ME!
I left the chapel and started walking up the path to breakfast, as I had done for the past four days of that Cursillo retreat, where I had been one of the four leaders. Nothing in nature had changed, but for SOME wonderful reason, I now felt like I was a newly created Adam in a magical Garden of Eden! The greens were SO much greener; what had been lovely before was SO much more lovely, even “magical.” I was so much more a PART of that lovely nature – because the One who had created that nature was the very same person who had just come inside of ME! It is one thing to “believe” that is true, because of your Biblical reading – but it is another thing altogether to “see” and “feel” and “enjoy” that it true through the presence of that Presence that created that “nature.” GOD’s version of “Christianity” is SO much more experiential than what the many forms of Christendom have turned it into! The Book of Acts is the description of HIS idea of “normative Christianity.” And it is the EXPERIENCED presence of His Holy Spirit that makes the difference.
Don’t you realize what a MIRACLE of engineering God has created within you?!?! Without you even giving any orders, your body can actually suck in a mixture of gases and then in the tiny sacs of your lungs, only the oxygen is separated and infiltrated into your arteries, where it is distributed through an intricately designed bloody highway into every single one of the roughly three TRILLION cells of your body! Do you realize how much brilliant design and engineering went into making that possible for YOU? Multiply that one miracle of design by several thousands of other such miracles and you have a reason for why YOU ought to have an “attitude of gratitude” that is greater than a whole fleet of those ’57 Chevy Impalas!
And then there is that “YOU” I mentioned: You did not bring YOUR self into being, did you? You can take no credit for your existence. But neither can your mother and father. At the physical level, all they did was respond to perhaps the most powerful form of physical pleasure that God ever invented, which caused her egg to be penetrated by only one of his many millions of sperm cells. At that physical level they were merely passing down a divinely-created “conception technology” that had been designed and engineered into the first man and woman, by One whose creative brilliance and genius we cannot even fathom!
If you will take the time to study the same body you have inhabited and gotten SO used to since you were conceived, you have the GROUNDS for that “attitude of gratitude commensurate with the value of the gift!” So what’s wrong?
Without the combination of a converted HEART (as well as a converted mind) PLUS the experience of you own Pentecostally-promised Holy Spirit of God (as in Acts 2, 8, 10, & 19) – without that combination you will inevitably – at the EXPERIENTIAL level – be captured by that, “what is there to be so thankful about?”
In His Son Jesus, God never invented a Christianity that is merely a DEFERRED hope of a heavenly wonderland where there is no pain, or death, or famine, or arctic cold and desert heat. That future promise is INDEED real, but Christianity has become so infiltrated by the worldly flesh and the worldly “god” (you know who) that the plans God has for our “now” – our time BEFORE leaving these bodies – are not being experienced. And, sadly, WHEN they occasionally are being experienced by individuals – they are being experienced in SPITE of those churches, rather than BECAUSE of them. The churches should be both teaching and MINISTERING that Pentecostal promise as it was promised and experienced in Acts 1, 2, 8, 10, and 19! EVERYTHING in the New Testament is for OUR day – whether command, doctrine, promise or experience!
“Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7; regarding both body AND spirit)
“… but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the DAY that you eat from it you will surely die” [(Genesis 2:17; on the day that he ate, his body clearly did not die – so what DID?) : (“… even when we were DEAD in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” Ephesians 2:5; 2:1) : So, if our BODIES were not what was dead, it is our SPIRIT that is dead and needing to be made alive, no?)]
“5 Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and THAT WHICH IS BORN of the Spirit is SPIRIT. 7 Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ (John 3).
“So Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.’ And when He had said this, He BREATHED on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:21-23).
His Pentecostal Promise is more than some vague form of “adding fuel to your ‘born-again’ gas tank”!
You are breathing HIM into you!
Don’t let those deviant forms of Christendom’s versions of “Christianity” cheat you out of His intended inheritance for you!
“11 And which father among you, if your SON asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if a fish, will he give him a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will he give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to YOUR children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ASK Him!” [“ask”; Greek: “aiteo” – ask, beg, call for, crave, desire, require – (in other words, ask with PASSION!)]
*****************************************************
