Anyone who gives freedom to another assumes great risks, whether it be a parent to a child or a Creator to a creature. In a certain sense, even God took a great risk when He made man free, for the very freedom to become a child of God implied the possibility of becoming a rebel.
Since God made us to choose what is right, we are also free to choose the wrong. We too often interpret freedom as the right to break God's commandments. When you buy an automobile, the manufacture will give you a set of instructions. He will tell you the pressure to which you ought to inflate your tires, the kind of oil you ought to use in the crankcase, and the proper fuel to put in the gas tank. Really, he has nothing against you because he gives you these instructions, as God had nothing against you in giving you His commandments. The manufacturer wants to be helpful: he is anxious that you get the maximum utility out of the car. And God is more anxious that you get the maximum happiness out of life. That is why He gives you commandments.
But of course you are free. You can do as you please. You ought to use gasoline in the tank, but you can put in Chanel 5. Now there is no doubt that it is nicer for your nostrils if you fill the tank with perfume rather than with gasoline. But the car simply will not run on Smell / Chanel 5. In like manner we were made to run on the fuel of God's love and commandments, and we simply will not run on anything else. We just bog down. And that is what happened to human nature in the Fall.
God did not give man the frightening responsibilities of freedom without at the same time offering him incentives to choose right rather than wrong. God would not force His happiness on anyone. In almost so many words, God said to Adam and Eve at the very beginning of history: As an inducement to choose what is best, I shall give you certain gifts. If you use your freedom in the direction of what is best for you, that is, for your perfection, I shall give you permanently the supernatural gift of sharing in my Divine Nature, that is, of being a child of God and an heir of heaven. To this I add permanently some lesser gifts: You will never die, your passions will never rebel against your reason, and your mind will be free from error.
But to preserve these gifts for themselves and posterity, one condition was imposed on Adam and Eve by God, and it was very easy. They merely had to love God who is their perfection. We must not think that this condition was equivalent to saying to a child: "If you eat a woolly worm, I will give you a dollar" because a woolly worm is not the perfection of a child. Rather, it was like saying to the child: "If you drink milk and eat good food you will be healthy." As obeying the laws of health is the perfection of the child, so too obeying the will of God is our perfection.
We said that the one condition imposed was that they love God. But how could man prove his love of God? How do you know anyone loves you? Because he tells you? Most certainly not! Love is proved only one way: by an act of choice, by choosing the one we love over something or somebody else. Love is not love unless it is free; it is only because of the possibility of saying "No" that there is so much harm in the "Yes."
Hence the choice presented to our first parents was between a fruit and a garden, the part and the whole. God said they could eat of all fruits in the garden of Paradise, save the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Was there anything unreasonable about the trail? Is not life filled with abundant instances of receiving rewards on the condition of love? Imagine a wealthy man going away for the summer and telling the chauffeur and his wife that they may live in his house, eat his food, drink his wine, use his cars, and ride his horses, but on one condition: That they must not eat the artificial apple he has on the dinning room table. The owner well knows the artificial apple will give them indigestion. He does not tell them that. They ought to trust him in the light of all he has done for them. Now if the wife persuades her husband to eat the apple, she would not be a lady; and if he eats it, he would not be a gentleman. By doing the one thing forbidden they would lose all the good things provided and have indigestion besides - and they even lose the opportunity of passing these things on to their children.
To make light of the fruit in the story of the Fall is to miss the point that it was the test of love. Not to shake hands with a passerby on the street is of no importance, but not to shake hands as a sign of contempt is very serious. eating of the forbidden fruit was a sign of contempt; the symbol of rebellion. Like Pandora, man opened the forbidden box and lost all his treasures.
But you ask: Well! Granted that Adam sinned! What have I to do with Adam? Why should I be punished because of him? When President Roosevelt declared war on December 8, 1941, you declared war without any explicit declaration on your part. What the Chief of the Nation did, we did. Now Adam is the head of the human race. What he did, we did. "Through one man, sin entered the world." - Rom. 5:12 -
But you say: "It was very unjust of God to deprive me of friendship with Him, and these other gifts, simply because Adam sinned." There would have been injustice if God deprived you of your due. But you are no more entitled to be a child of God than a razor has a right to bloom, or a rose has the right to bark, or a dog has the right to quote Dante. What Adam lost was gifts, not a right.
On Christmas Day when you distribute gifts to your friends, would I have a right to say to you: "Why do you not give me a gift?" You would answer: "I am not doing you an injustice, because I owe you nothing. I am not even obliged to give these gifts to my friends. And if I had not given them gifts, I would not have deprived them of anything I owed them." So neither did God owe us anything beyond our nature as a creature of His handiwork.
But the loss of the supernatural gift of being a child of God weakened our will and darkened our intellect without corrupting our nature. The Fall disorganized our normal human faculties, making us just as we are now, with a bias toward evil, with a will reluctant to do good, with a tendency to rationalize evil. But each of us is still human - not a depraved human, totally corrupt, as those who ridicule the doctrine of the Fall say, but still a person capable of becoming what each once was. The disorder in us is like getting dirt in our eye: we still have the eye as an organ of sight, but it sees through tears. It is right here that Christianity begins. In all other religions you have to be good to come to God. In Christianity you do not. Because there is evil in the world, we need God. Christianity begins with the recognition that there is something in your life and in the world that ought not to be, that need not be, and that could be otherwise were it not for evil choices. If you are ever to be good, you must first believe you are bad.
If you know that you could be better than you are; if you feel like the master painting of a great artist that has become somewhat defaced and stained; if you know that though you are too good for the rubbish heap, you are nevertheless too spoiled to hang in the Metropolitan Gallery; if you know that you cannot restore yourself to your pristine beauty; if you know that no one could restore you better than the Divine Artist who made you - then you have already taken the first step toward peace. The Divine Artist did come to restore the original and He came on Christmas Day.
Such is the meaning of Christmas. The Son of God became man that man might become the adopted son of God.
This is Christmas Eve. Kind of sad, isn't it?
Fathers! are not your sons away because there is something wrong with the world? Then maybe God is out of His Heaven because there is something wrong with man. That star blazing in Bethlehem's sky is the Heavenly Father's service flag. His Son too has gone to war.
Mothers! You shrink in terror and fear from what might happen to your boy amidst whistling steel and whining shell. Then understand how another Mother drew a Babe to her breast in fear of the thundering hoofs and drawn swords of those who would take away His life before He had scarcely begun to live.
Sons and daughters in the service: To conquer, you must first make a landing in enemy territory. That was Bethlehem - God's beachhead in a land of sin. And how we must fight to keep it!
You dead on the far-thrown battlefields of the war! You died that others might live. You were the human expendables. This Babe is the Divine Expendable who came not to live but to die, that we might die to sin and live to love!
But you ask: how find Christmas peace in a world at war? You cannot find peace on the outside but you can find peace on the inside, by letting God do to your soul what Mary let Him do to her body, namely, let Christ be formed in you. As she cooked the meals in her Nazarene home, as she nursed her aged cousin, as she drew water at the well, as she prepared the meals of the village carpenter, as she knitted the seamless garment, as she kneaded the dough and swept the floor, she was conscious that Christ was in her; that she was a living ciborium, a monstrance of the Divine Eucharist, a Gate of Heaven through which a Creator would peer upon creation. a Tower of Ivory up whose chaste body He was to climb "to kiss upon her lips a mystic rose."
As He was physically formed in her, so He wills to be spiritually formed in you. If you knew He was seeing through your eyes, you would see in every fellow man a child of God. If you knew that He worked through your hands, they would bless all the day through. If you knew He spoke through your lips, then your speech, like Peter's would betray that you had been with the Galilean. If you knew that He wants to use your mind, your will, your fingers, and your heart, how different you would be. If half the world did this there would be no war!
Why not resolve this year to spend an hour a day in His presence? Do not stay away because you are wicked. Remember that Babe did not come to earth because you are good, but because you are not. He did not come because there was Peace, but because there was none.
Children are so unsuspecting. Taking candy away from a baby is easy - but not as easy as taking happiness from that Child!
Let not your unworthiness keep you back. Remember, love is blind, and no love is as blind as this Child's; otherwise, how could He love you and me? He does love us and that is enough to make us very happy.
That is what I mean when from a devoted heart I say, "Merry Christmas, Friends!"
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
But non attachment from the world, as ideal worth seeking for itself, is not the answer. We cannot say, with Aldous Huxley, "The ideal man is the non attached man. Non attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non attached to his cravings for power and possessions. Non attached even to science and speculation and philanthropy. The non attachment of Buddhism or Taoism is not the Christian ideal; though it sounds very noble to say that they who possess are possessed, are slaves to the illusions of life. Non attachment and unworldliness are vain unless they are regarded as secondary, as a mere means to attain to the primary goal, which is love of God and neighbor.
But this is not an age in which asceticism, as an end, offers so great a temptation to most people that they need this warning. Self-indulgence is an error many times commoner today. It is more fatal, too. There is nothing so dangerous for a civilization as softness, as there is nothing so destructive of personality as a want of discipline. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, tell us that, out of twenty-one civilizations which have vanished, sixteen collapsed because of decay within. Nations are not often murdered; they more often commit suicide. That is the sinister meaning of our present mood of selfishness and love of pleasure, our affirmation of our egotism, our widespread refusal to discipline the self. Although two world wars have imposed upon us many sacrifices that we have accepted willingly, even these have not been sufficient to make us perform the greatest sacrifice of all - to give up the illusion that a person is most self-expressive when he allows the animal to gain mastery over the spirit.
We are scandalized at seeing what the release of the sub-human has done to the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists. Yet we have not learned that the same deleterious effects can be present in the individual who, starting with the philosophy that he is only a beast, immediately proceeds to act like one. To just the extent that a person is unmortified in his selfish passions, it becomes the necessary for some external authority to control and subdue those passions. That is why the passing of morality and religion and asceticism from political life is inevitably followed by a police state, which attempts to organize the chaos produced by that selfishness. Law gives way to force; ethics is replaced by the secret police. "There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of civilization. On the contrary, absorption in case is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay."
The totalitarian regimes are symptomatic of a disease that has also attacked the men and women in countries that are free. It is the disease of disorder within humanity. Few realize the terrible dimensions of the present catastrophe; they are blinded by the fact that man has made great material progress. The truth of the matter is, however, that humanity has lost control over itself at the very moment when it has gained control over nature. Because humans have lost self-control and denied the spiritual purpose in life, they utilize for destructive ends the forces of nature that they have harnessed. Every gain in mastery of the forces of nature becomes a potential danger unless it is matched by an equal gain in man's mastery over his animal impulses.
To just the degree that a materialist psychologist interprets self-expression as the release of the animal instincts, he contributes to the world's present woe and disorder. Animal guided humans cannot conduct a civilization. They are more at home in war than in peace. We of today can be united against a common enemy through hate; it takes spirit and a common purpose to bind us together when peace comes. It used to be that wars were hard to wage, that peace came naturally with victory. Today the situation is reversed; the power of destruction are greater than the powers of construction in the modern world.
Peace is a fruit of love, and love flowers in the person oriented toward God. The greatest privilege that can come to a person is to have his life God-directed; this follows when he has remotely paved the way by disciplined self-direction. God cares enough for us to regulate our lives - and this is the strongest proof of love that He could give to us. For it is a fact of human experience that we do not care very much about the details of other people's lives unless we love them.
We are not deeply interested in hearing more of those individuals whom we meet in the subway and in the street and on the highway. But as soon as we begin to know and love any of them, then we become more and more interested in their lives; we have a greater care for them. As we bring them into the area of our love, both our interest and their happiness increases. It is like this when we bring ourselves into the area of God's love: there is an increasing Divine guidance of the details of our life, and we are ever being made more sure of the depth and reality of His Love. To the extent that we abandon our personality to Him, He will take possession of our will and work in us. We are no longer ruled by commands coming from the outside, as from a cruel master, but by almost imperceptible suggestions that rise up from within. We feel as if we had wanted all along to do those things He suggests to us; we are never conscious of being under command. Thus our service to Him becomes the highest form of liberty, for it is always easy to do something for the one we love.
And God, of course, wishes us to seek the happiness. He can give if we will let Him. A mother who has a wayward daughter desires nothing more than to penetrate into her mind to inspire her will; her greatest sorrow is her inability to do this. The happiness of both is conditioned upon the daughter's allowing the mother's love to operate, for no parent can ever guide a child who wars against the parent's will. Neither can God guide us if we allow the animal in us to direct our will, demanding the satisfaction of each of its rebellious claims. As the whole order of the universe rests on the surrender of the chemicals to the plants, of the plants to the animals, of the animals to man, so the peace of man comes only in the surrender of self to God. Psychologists teaching that the needs of the id are more important than the ideals of the superego, that a discipline of sex ends in a tension and neurosis that can be released only by carnal abandonment - these individuals have increased the world's selfishness, egotism, and cruelty.
The principal cause of all unhappiness is unregulated desire - wanting more than is needed or wanting what is harmful to the spirit. The modern world is geared to increase our desires and our wants by its advertising, but it can never satisfy them. Our desires are infinite; the supply of any good on earth is finite. Hence our unhappiness and anxieties, our disappointments and our sadness. The only exist from this state is by control of the sense through mortification. This is what Our Lord Jesus meant when He said, "And if your hand or your foot scandalize you, cut it off, and cast it from you. And if your eye scandalizes you, pluck it out, and cast it from you." - Matt. 18:8-9 - Because, in our modern civilization, the biological is divorced from the spiritual, because freedom is isolated from dependence on God like a pendulum cut off from a clock, because liberty is interpreted only as freedom from something and not as freedom for something, it is especially necessary to revive the Christian practice of self-discipline.
As Rom Landau, rightly observes; Nothing short of religion will inspire self-detachment. A person will refuse for the sake of himself or herself as a finite human animal to undergo the discipline to which he will gladly submit, once he is brought into conscious relation with God. This is the crux of the entire problem. Separate a man from his spiritual nature, let him talk of himself merely as a physical organism, and his respect for himself will not be such as to induce him to make a sacrifice for anything that he considers essential to his material well-being or enjoyment. Once he faces God and becomes aware of the divine nature of his personality, he will recognize that more is involved than what constitutes his physical being. He will do for himself as related to God what he would not dream of doing otherwise.
Christian self-discipline is really self-expression - expression of all that is highest and best in self; the farmer plows under the weeds for the completest expression of the corn's desire to grow. Self-control, through mortification or asceticism, is not the rejection of our instincts, passions, and emotions, nor is it thrusting these God-given impulses into unconsciousness, as the materialists accuse the Christians of doing. Our passions, instincts, and emotions are good, not evil; self-control means only curbing their inordinate excesses. To take a little wine for the sake of one's stomach, as Saint Paul told Timothy, is to obey an instinct; but to take so much of it as to forget that one has either a head or a stomach is to abuse wine as a creature of God.
Once the instincts and passions are subject to the will, they can be controlled and guided. The Church does not repress passions when it restrains their unlawful expression. It does not deny emotions, anymore than it denies hunger; the Church only asks that, when a person sits at table, he shall not eat like a pig. Our Lord Jesus did not repress the intense emotional zeal of Paul; He merely redirected it from hate to love. Our Lord Jesus did not repress the biological vitality of a Magdalene; He merely turned her passion from love of vice to love of virtue. Such a conversion of energies explains why the greatest sinners - like Augustine - sometimes make the greatest saints; it is not because they have been sinners that they love God with their special intensity, but because they have strong urges, violent passions, flowing emotions which, turned to holy purposes, now do as much good as they once did harm.
Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals who have carried their sinning to extremes should despair or say, "I am too great a sinner to change" or "God would not want me." God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gestures, but with a "passionless passion" a "wild tranquility." A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, anymore than someone on dry land can swim; but as soon as a person takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done that keep one from God; it is present persistence in that wrong.
Someone who turns back to God, as the Magdalene and Paul, welcomes the discipline that will enable him to change his former tendencies. Mortification is good, but only when it is done out of love of God. Asceticism for asceticism's sake is actually a form of egotism, for self-discipline is only a means, the end of which is a greater love of God. Any form of asceticism that disrupted charity would be wrong - this was the mistake of the monk who decided to live only on crusts and upset the whole monastery, turning it into one vast crust hunt to satisfy his idiosyncrasies. Asceticism that makes us less agreeable to our neighbors does not please God.
Mortification of the right sort perfect our human nature; the gardener cuts the green shoots from the root of the bush, not to kill the rose, but to make it bloom more beautifully. As the perfection of the rose and not the destruction of the bush is the purpose of pruning, so union with God is the purpose of self-discipline. God deeds are done for human ends, such as to perpetuate one's name, receive nothing but a human reward; only deeds of mortification, done out of Divine Love, perfect the soul.
But they must be done from the right motive, and they must sacrifice the very things to which we wish to cling. Saint Paul reminds us powerfully that the most intense mortification done without love of God is useless: "And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing." - 1Cor. 13:3 - Archbishop Francois Fenelon shows how reservations in our willingness to accept self-discipline impede spiritual progress.
"People often hover around such reservations, making believe not to see them for fear of self-reproach, guarding them as the apple of the eye. If you were to break down one of these reservations, you would be touched to the quick...a very sure proof of the presence of evil. The more you shrink from giving up on any such reserved point, the surer it is that it needs to be given up. If you were not fast bound by it, you would never make so many efforts to convince yourself that you were free. Why is it that the vessel does not make way? Is the wind wanting? Nowise; the spirit of Grace breathes on it, but the vessel is bound by invisible anchors in the depths of the sea. The fault is not God's; it is wholly ours. If we will search thoroughly, we shall soon see the hidden bonds which detains us. That point in which we least mistrust ourselves is precisely that which needs most distrust."
Mortification is based, not on hatred, but on preference. The mother sacrifices the bloom in her cheek to put it on the cheek of an infant daughter; the scholar surrenders any hope he held for the development of his muscles; the moral life demands our saying "No" to false ideals that glorify power and egotism. It is quite a wrong thing, therefore, to say that you "give up" something during Lent. Our Lord Jesus never asked us to give up anything; He asked us to exchange: "What exchange shall you give for your soul?" When someone is in love with God, he finds that there are some things he can get along without, namely, the peace of soul that comes from obeying God's Will. So he exchanges the one for the other, surrender the lesser good to gain a Kingdom. He makes such a series of profitable exchanges everyday he lives.
Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worthwhile love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance that inspires no sacrifices. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What human has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads people, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronize the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord Jesus say, "Tolerate your enemies!" But He did say, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you." - Matt. 5:44 - Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature's animosities.
Self-discipline does more than this for us, however; it gives our lives a steady goal. The form of self-discipline most valuable in helping us to know where we are going is meditation, which will finally give us self-control through self-realization. Most tragic of all modern souls are those self-imprisoned in their own minds; meditation alone can break that maddening self-centered circle with an invasion by the Divine.
There are many men and women today who never meditate or discipline themselves in any other way. They find that they are cloyed with what they thought would satisfy; they try to make up for each disillusionment with a new attachment; they try to exorcise the old disgusts and shames with febrile new excitements. They change their partners in love, but their boredom and ennui remain. Their disorders become habit, and a seeming necessity; they allow open wounds in their souls because they deny that there are wounds, or even souls.
The chains of their slavery to despair are forged; their past sufferings still persist in their remorse; their future is dark with fear; their pleasures are less keen that they used to be, their anxieties more permanent; their excitements follow more rapidly, and their conscience is less in repose; their minutes in sin become nights of fear. They are a burden to themselves, a bore to their friends, disgusted but never satiated, made more hungry but never satisfied; in the end they pay charlatans handsome fees to be told that there is no sin and that their sense of guilt is due to a farther complex. But their moral cancer remains, even then; they feel gnawing at their hearts.
What shall these poor, frustrated, psychotic, and neurotic millions in our midst do to escape a creeping insanity and a growing madness? The only answer for them is to enter into themselves, to lift their eyes to the Divine Physician and cry, "Have mercy on me, O God!" If they only knew it, a single confession would rescue them by helping them to have their sins forgiven; it would also save them the small fortune spent in having their sins explained away.
God has promised us pardon if we are penitent, but not if we procrastinate. Sin will wear out mind, heart, and soul, but it will not wear itself out - it will have to purged out. The secret of peace of soul is to combine detachment from evil with attachment to God, to abandon egotism as the ruling,determining element in living and to substitute Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ as the regent of our actions. What is anti-God must be repressed; what is Godly must be expressed. Then one will no longer awaken with a dark brown taste in the mouth or a feeling of being run down at the heels. Instead of greeting each day with the complaint, "Good God, morning!" one will say, from the happiness of a soul in love, "Good morning, God!"
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
Page 3
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
But this is not an age in which asceticism, as an end, offers so great a temptation to most people that they need this warning. Self-indulgence is an error many times commoner today. It is more fatal, too. There is nothing so dangerous for a civilization as softness, as there is nothing so destructive of personality as a want of discipline. Arnold Toynbee, the historian, tell us that, out of twenty-one civilizations which have vanished, sixteen collapsed because of decay within. Nations are not often murdered; they more often commit suicide. That is the sinister meaning of our present mood of selfishness and love of pleasure, our affirmation of our egotism, our widespread refusal to discipline the self. Although two world wars have imposed upon us many sacrifices that we have accepted willingly, even these have not been sufficient to make us perform the greatest sacrifice of all - to give up the illusion that a person is most self-expressive when he allows the animal to gain mastery over the spirit.
We are scandalized at seeing what the release of the sub-human has done to the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists. Yet we have not learned that the same deleterious effects can be present in the individual who, starting with the philosophy that he is only a beast, immediately proceeds to act like one. To just the extent that a person is unmortified in his selfish passions, it becomes the necessary for some external authority to control and subdue those passions. That is why the passing of morality and religion and asceticism from political life is inevitably followed by a police state, which attempts to organize the chaos produced by that selfishness. Law gives way to force; ethics is replaced by the secret police. "There is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of civilization. On the contrary, absorption in case is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay."
The totalitarian regimes are symptomatic of a disease that has also attacked the men and women in countries that are free. It is the disease of disorder within humanity. Few realize the terrible dimensions of the present catastrophe; they are blinded by the fact that man has made great material progress. The truth of the matter is, however, that humanity has lost control over itself at the very moment when it has gained control over nature. Because humans have lost self-control and denied the spiritual purpose in life, they utilize for destructive ends the forces of nature that they have harnessed. Every gain in mastery of the forces of nature becomes a potential danger unless it is matched by an equal gain in man's mastery over his animal impulses.
To just the degree that a materialist psychologist interprets self-expression as the release of the animal instincts, he contributes to the world's present woe and disorder. Animal guided humans cannot conduct a civilization. They are more at home in war than in peace. We of today can be united against a common enemy through hate; it takes spirit and a common purpose to bind us together when peace comes. It used to be that wars were hard to wage, that peace came naturally with victory. Today the situation is reversed; the power of destruction are greater than the powers of construction in the modern world.
Peace is a fruit of love, and love flowers in the person oriented toward God. The greatest privilege that can come to a person is to have his life God-directed; this follows when he has remotely paved the way by disciplined self-direction. God cares enough for us to regulate our lives - and this is the strongest proof of love that He could give to us. For it is a fact of human experience that we do not care very much about the details of other people's lives unless we love them.
We are not deeply interested in hearing more of those individuals whom we meet in the subway and in the street and on the highway. But as soon as we begin to know and love any of them, then we become more and more interested in their lives; we have a greater care for them. As we bring them into the area of our love, both our interest and their happiness increases. It is like this when we bring ourselves into the area of God's love: there is an increasing Divine guidance of the details of our life, and we are ever being made more sure of the depth and reality of His Love. To the extent that we abandon our personality to Him, He will take possession of our will and work in us. We are no longer ruled by commands coming from the outside, as from a cruel master, but by almost imperceptible suggestions that rise up from within. We feel as if we had wanted all along to do those things He suggests to us; we are never conscious of being under command. Thus our service to Him becomes the highest form of liberty, for it is always easy to do something for the one we love.
And God, of course, wishes us to seek the happiness. He can give if we will let Him. A mother who has a wayward daughter desires nothing more than to penetrate into her mind to inspire her will; her greatest sorrow is her inability to do this. The happiness of both is conditioned upon the daughter's allowing the mother's love to operate, for no parent can ever guide a child who wars against the parent's will. Neither can God guide us if we allow the animal in us to direct our will, demanding the satisfaction of each of its rebellious claims. As the whole order of the universe rests on the surrender of the chemicals to the plants, of the plants to the animals, of the animals to man, so the peace of man comes only in the surrender of self to God. Psychologists teaching that the needs of the id are more important than the ideals of the superego, that a discipline of sex ends in a tension and neurosis that can be released only by carnal abandonment - these individuals have increased the world's selfishness, egotism, and cruelty.
The principal cause of all unhappiness is unregulated desire - wanting more than is needed or wanting what is harmful to the spirit. The modern world is geared to increase our desires and our wants by its advertising, but it can never satisfy them. Our desires are infinite; the supply of any good on earth is finite. Hence our unhappiness and anxieties, our disappointments and our sadness. The only exist from this state is by control of the sense through mortification. This is what Our Lord Jesus meant when He said, "And if your hand or your foot scandalize you, cut it off, and cast it from you. And if your eye scandalizes you, pluck it out, and cast it from you." - Matt. 18:8-9 - Because, in our modern civilization, the biological is divorced from the spiritual, because freedom is isolated from dependence on God like a pendulum cut off from a clock, because liberty is interpreted only as freedom from something and not as freedom for something, it is especially necessary to revive the Christian practice of self-discipline.
As Rom Landau, rightly observes; Nothing short of religion will inspire self-detachment. A person will refuse for the sake of himself or herself as a finite human animal to undergo the discipline to which he will gladly submit, once he is brought into conscious relation with God. This is the crux of the entire problem. Separate a man from his spiritual nature, let him talk of himself merely as a physical organism, and his respect for himself will not be such as to induce him to make a sacrifice for anything that he considers essential to his material well-being or enjoyment. Once he faces God and becomes aware of the divine nature of his personality, he will recognize that more is involved than what constitutes his physical being. He will do for himself as related to God what he would not dream of doing otherwise.
Christian self-discipline is really self-expression - expression of all that is highest and best in self; the farmer plows under the weeds for the completest expression of the corn's desire to grow. Self-control, through mortification or asceticism, is not the rejection of our instincts, passions, and emotions, nor is it thrusting these God-given impulses into unconsciousness, as the materialists accuse the Christians of doing. Our passions, instincts, and emotions are good, not evil; self-control means only curbing their inordinate excesses. To take a little wine for the sake of one's stomach, as Saint Paul told Timothy, is to obey an instinct; but to take so much of it as to forget that one has either a head or a stomach is to abuse wine as a creature of God.
Once the instincts and passions are subject to the will, they can be controlled and guided. The Church does not repress passions when it restrains their unlawful expression. It does not deny emotions, anymore than it denies hunger; the Church only asks that, when a person sits at table, he shall not eat like a pig. Our Lord Jesus did not repress the intense emotional zeal of Paul; He merely redirected it from hate to love. Our Lord Jesus did not repress the biological vitality of a Magdalene; He merely turned her passion from love of vice to love of virtue. Such a conversion of energies explains why the greatest sinners - like Augustine - sometimes make the greatest saints; it is not because they have been sinners that they love God with their special intensity, but because they have strong urges, violent passions, flowing emotions which, turned to holy purposes, now do as much good as they once did harm.
Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals who have carried their sinning to extremes should despair or say, "I am too great a sinner to change" or "God would not want me." God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gestures, but with a "passionless passion" a "wild tranquility." A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, anymore than someone on dry land can swim; but as soon as a person takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done that keep one from God; it is present persistence in that wrong.
Someone who turns back to God, as the Magdalene and Paul, welcomes the discipline that will enable him to change his former tendencies. Mortification is good, but only when it is done out of love of God. Asceticism for asceticism's sake is actually a form of egotism, for self-discipline is only a means, the end of which is a greater love of God. Any form of asceticism that disrupted charity would be wrong - this was the mistake of the monk who decided to live only on crusts and upset the whole monastery, turning it into one vast crust hunt to satisfy his idiosyncrasies. Asceticism that makes us less agreeable to our neighbors does not please God.
Mortification of the right sort perfect our human nature; the gardener cuts the green shoots from the root of the bush, not to kill the rose, but to make it bloom more beautifully. As the perfection of the rose and not the destruction of the bush is the purpose of pruning, so union with God is the purpose of self-discipline. God deeds are done for human ends, such as to perpetuate one's name, receive nothing but a human reward; only deeds of mortification, done out of Divine Love, perfect the soul.
But they must be done from the right motive, and they must sacrifice the very things to which we wish to cling. Saint Paul reminds us powerfully that the most intense mortification done without love of God is useless: "And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing." - 1Cor. 13:3 - Archbishop Francois Fenelon shows how reservations in our willingness to accept self-discipline impede spiritual progress.
"People often hover around such reservations, making believe not to see them for fear of self-reproach, guarding them as the apple of the eye. If you were to break down one of these reservations, you would be touched to the quick...a very sure proof of the presence of evil. The more you shrink from giving up on any such reserved point, the surer it is that it needs to be given up. If you were not fast bound by it, you would never make so many efforts to convince yourself that you were free. Why is it that the vessel does not make way? Is the wind wanting? Nowise; the spirit of Grace breathes on it, but the vessel is bound by invisible anchors in the depths of the sea. The fault is not God's; it is wholly ours. If we will search thoroughly, we shall soon see the hidden bonds which detains us. That point in which we least mistrust ourselves is precisely that which needs most distrust."
Mortification is based, not on hatred, but on preference. The mother sacrifices the bloom in her cheek to put it on the cheek of an infant daughter; the scholar surrenders any hope he held for the development of his muscles; the moral life demands our saying "No" to false ideals that glorify power and egotism. It is quite a wrong thing, therefore, to say that you "give up" something during Lent. Our Lord Jesus never asked us to give up anything; He asked us to exchange: "What exchange shall you give for your soul?" When someone is in love with God, he finds that there are some things he can get along without, namely, the peace of soul that comes from obeying God's Will. So he exchanges the one for the other, surrender the lesser good to gain a Kingdom. He makes such a series of profitable exchanges everyday he lives.
Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worthwhile love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance that inspires no sacrifices. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What human has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads people, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronize the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord Jesus say, "Tolerate your enemies!" But He did say, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you." - Matt. 5:44 - Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature's animosities.
Self-discipline does more than this for us, however; it gives our lives a steady goal. The form of self-discipline most valuable in helping us to know where we are going is meditation, which will finally give us self-control through self-realization. Most tragic of all modern souls are those self-imprisoned in their own minds; meditation alone can break that maddening self-centered circle with an invasion by the Divine.
There are many men and women today who never meditate or discipline themselves in any other way. They find that they are cloyed with what they thought would satisfy; they try to make up for each disillusionment with a new attachment; they try to exorcise the old disgusts and shames with febrile new excitements. They change their partners in love, but their boredom and ennui remain. Their disorders become habit, and a seeming necessity; they allow open wounds in their souls because they deny that there are wounds, or even souls.
The chains of their slavery to despair are forged; their past sufferings still persist in their remorse; their future is dark with fear; their pleasures are less keen that they used to be, their anxieties more permanent; their excitements follow more rapidly, and their conscience is less in repose; their minutes in sin become nights of fear. They are a burden to themselves, a bore to their friends, disgusted but never satiated, made more hungry but never satisfied; in the end they pay charlatans handsome fees to be told that there is no sin and that their sense of guilt is due to a farther complex. But their moral cancer remains, even then; they feel gnawing at their hearts.
What shall these poor, frustrated, psychotic, and neurotic millions in our midst do to escape a creeping insanity and a growing madness? The only answer for them is to enter into themselves, to lift their eyes to the Divine Physician and cry, "Have mercy on me, O God!" If they only knew it, a single confession would rescue them by helping them to have their sins forgiven; it would also save them the small fortune spent in having their sins explained away.
God has promised us pardon if we are penitent, but not if we procrastinate. Sin will wear out mind, heart, and soul, but it will not wear itself out - it will have to purged out. The secret of peace of soul is to combine detachment from evil with attachment to God, to abandon egotism as the ruling,determining element in living and to substitute Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ as the regent of our actions. What is anti-God must be repressed; what is Godly must be expressed. Then one will no longer awaken with a dark brown taste in the mouth or a feeling of being run down at the heels. Instead of greeting each day with the complaint, "Good God, morning!" one will say, from the happiness of a soul in love, "Good morning, God!"
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
Page 3
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Monday, November 12, 2012
This brings us to the contrasting Christian philosophy of self-expression. Christianity, like modern paganism, believes that repression is harmful, but it makes a necessary distinction. Christianity says that the repression of evil thoughts, desires, and acts - such as the urge to kill, despoil, calumniate, rob, injure, covet, hate - is good for the soul; it deplores the repression of guilt or sin through a denial of the need of confession. And it states that the repression of actual graces, inspirations to a good life, and the urge to sacrifice self for neighbor is bad for soul.
Christianity does not believe that the repression of the sex instinct is good. But it does believe in repression the abuse of these instincts, so as to prevent lust in the one case and gluttony in the other. The Church has never taught that a human being is made up of principally of two levels, the conscious and the unconscious; she states that there are three levels, body, soul, and the desire of God. Man is not just a beast, subject to the claims of his animal instincts; he has also ethical and spiritual selves that demand expression according to their natures. But this is not always easy.
The Church states that there is not an automatic subordination of the human body to the soul and of the whole personality to God - an ideal of ordered living that constitutes, for the Christian, the essence of self-expression. Both man and nature appear to have departed in some way from their original pattern or essence. Something has happened to damage human nature, and all the evidence points to the fact that this came about because man himself in some way abused his freedom. Both the world and man seem to have fallen; they are on a lower level than they were destined to be, and the responsibility for this fall cannot be placed upon God.
It must be man. Because of this fall, there is a bias toward evil in man; as a result, the body does not always submit itself to the soul, nor does the soul always look, for its commands, to God. Sometimes the body makes claims that are very imperative, although they are against the best interests of the soul. Sometimes the soul, in its turn, is willing to concede primacy to those libidos, on the grounds that the return will be much more immediate than the returns of the spirit.
Because there are three and not two elements involved in human personality, it follows that the Christian doctrine of self-abandonment is radically different from the philosophy of abandonment to the animal instincts. Those who believe in carnal self-realization "do not seem able to grasp the fact that to embrace any and every experience is the easiest thing in the world, whereas to refuse some experiences for the sake of possessing others is an infinitely harder but truer method of attaining self-realization. Moreover, it is fatal to talk smoothly of the necessity of self-realization without taking the slightest thought as to what sort of self is to be realized."
Materialist psychology believes in a passive abandonment of the soul, in which the higher part of the personality gives free rein to the lower part and its spontaneous appetites. It falsely believes that, by living according to animals inheritance, personality will receive back from the mysterious animal forces those gifts of creativity that the sick soul has lost. The Christian, on the contrary, believes, not in a passive abandonment, but in an active abandonment that consists in an effort of self-control. The soul takes itself in hand, disciplines the lower errant passions to bend them to higher aims. Just as the farmer could not live unless he had domesticated the animals and made them subject to himself, so man cannot live with himself unless he trains the wild beasts that are within him, makes them subject to himself, and then, in turn, surrenders his whole personality to God.
Happiness consists in overcoming the bias to evil by realizing one's Divine vocation and by overcoming the urge of nature; and this is not achieved through the orgiastic release of primeval forces, but rather through an askesis that amounts almost to violence. This is what Our Blessed Lord Jesus had in mind when He said that the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and only the violent will bear it away. To the Christian, the way of perfection is the way of discipline, because he or she understands perfection as the satisfaction of personality in its highest reaches - namely, the attainment of life and truth and love, which is God. If a person passively abandons himself, he is doomed to death in his present condition. To recover health, he must take a bitter medicine and undergo a kind of operation.
When Our Blessed Lord Jesus spoke of His doctrine as a yoke, He asked His followers to be pure in a world full of Freudians; to be poor in spirit in a world of competitive capitalism; to be meek amid the armament makers; to mourn among the pleasure seekers; to hunger and thirst after justice amid the pragmatists; to be merciful among those whose would seek revenge. Anyone who does these things will be hated by a world that does not want God.
The Christian law of discipline is very different from both the Hindu and the Greek ways of perfection, which were based upon a kind of self-induced indifference. Generally, the Hindu was indifferent to the world. The Christian rejects the idea that a person ought to work either for the extinction of his soul or for a complete detachment from the world order. His Church tells him that self-expression is inseparable from the salvation of the world and of the individual soul. That is why the essence of the Christian system is seem in Sacraments that utilize the disordered elements of the universe by sanctifying them, so that they are made to serve the purpose of the soul and the furtherance of human personality. By accepting the supreme worth of both the world and of humanity, the Church says the purpose of our saving ourselves is also that of saving the world.
A further forgotten point on the subject of Christian asceticism is that self-discipline, which is the condition of self-expression, is seen not as an end, but a means. The end of all self-discipline is love. Anyone, therefore, who makes the taming of animal impulses the end and prime purpose of his life - as some of the Oriental mystics do - achieves the negation of the flesh but not the affirmation of the spirit. Saint Paul told the Corinthians that, if a person should deliver his body to be burned, it would profit him nothing unless he had Divine Love.
The Christian uses mortification to liberate himself from the slavery of his fallen nature, freeing himself to live in God's Love. Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ never said that carnal desires in themselves were evil. He said only that we must not permit them to burden the soul with such anxiety for their satisfaction that we lose the greater treasures. The end of Christian living is the attainment of love, and there is a double commandment touching this love: one, to love God; the other, to love neighbor. To realize either aspect, some asceticism is required. The only way we can help ourselves to love God is by conquering our selfishness, and the only way that we can ever conquer the evil in our neighbors is by making them feel the beneficent power of our love.
That love can be choked and nearly destroyed by other weeds besides lust. Worldliness is one of these. An almost forgotten truth, even among some practicing Christians, is that it is never the physical world, but only the spirit of the world, that is evil; therefore the soul must detach itself from the world. "Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in Him." - 1John 2:15 - This word that Saint John castigates is not the world of our bread and butter existence, but rather the secular spirit that regards time and space as a closed system from which God is excluded. Politics and economics divorced from the moral law, education without religion - these are some of the manifestations of the worldly spirit, and all of them are harmful.
Page 2
Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Christianity does not believe that the repression of the sex instinct is good. But it does believe in repression the abuse of these instincts, so as to prevent lust in the one case and gluttony in the other. The Church has never taught that a human being is made up of principally of two levels, the conscious and the unconscious; she states that there are three levels, body, soul, and the desire of God. Man is not just a beast, subject to the claims of his animal instincts; he has also ethical and spiritual selves that demand expression according to their natures. But this is not always easy.
The Church states that there is not an automatic subordination of the human body to the soul and of the whole personality to God - an ideal of ordered living that constitutes, for the Christian, the essence of self-expression. Both man and nature appear to have departed in some way from their original pattern or essence. Something has happened to damage human nature, and all the evidence points to the fact that this came about because man himself in some way abused his freedom. Both the world and man seem to have fallen; they are on a lower level than they were destined to be, and the responsibility for this fall cannot be placed upon God.
It must be man. Because of this fall, there is a bias toward evil in man; as a result, the body does not always submit itself to the soul, nor does the soul always look, for its commands, to God. Sometimes the body makes claims that are very imperative, although they are against the best interests of the soul. Sometimes the soul, in its turn, is willing to concede primacy to those libidos, on the grounds that the return will be much more immediate than the returns of the spirit.
Because there are three and not two elements involved in human personality, it follows that the Christian doctrine of self-abandonment is radically different from the philosophy of abandonment to the animal instincts. Those who believe in carnal self-realization "do not seem able to grasp the fact that to embrace any and every experience is the easiest thing in the world, whereas to refuse some experiences for the sake of possessing others is an infinitely harder but truer method of attaining self-realization. Moreover, it is fatal to talk smoothly of the necessity of self-realization without taking the slightest thought as to what sort of self is to be realized."
Materialist psychology believes in a passive abandonment of the soul, in which the higher part of the personality gives free rein to the lower part and its spontaneous appetites. It falsely believes that, by living according to animals inheritance, personality will receive back from the mysterious animal forces those gifts of creativity that the sick soul has lost. The Christian, on the contrary, believes, not in a passive abandonment, but in an active abandonment that consists in an effort of self-control. The soul takes itself in hand, disciplines the lower errant passions to bend them to higher aims. Just as the farmer could not live unless he had domesticated the animals and made them subject to himself, so man cannot live with himself unless he trains the wild beasts that are within him, makes them subject to himself, and then, in turn, surrenders his whole personality to God.
Happiness consists in overcoming the bias to evil by realizing one's Divine vocation and by overcoming the urge of nature; and this is not achieved through the orgiastic release of primeval forces, but rather through an askesis that amounts almost to violence. This is what Our Blessed Lord Jesus had in mind when He said that the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and only the violent will bear it away. To the Christian, the way of perfection is the way of discipline, because he or she understands perfection as the satisfaction of personality in its highest reaches - namely, the attainment of life and truth and love, which is God. If a person passively abandons himself, he is doomed to death in his present condition. To recover health, he must take a bitter medicine and undergo a kind of operation.
When Our Blessed Lord Jesus spoke of His doctrine as a yoke, He asked His followers to be pure in a world full of Freudians; to be poor in spirit in a world of competitive capitalism; to be meek amid the armament makers; to mourn among the pleasure seekers; to hunger and thirst after justice amid the pragmatists; to be merciful among those whose would seek revenge. Anyone who does these things will be hated by a world that does not want God.
The Christian law of discipline is very different from both the Hindu and the Greek ways of perfection, which were based upon a kind of self-induced indifference. Generally, the Hindu was indifferent to the world. The Christian rejects the idea that a person ought to work either for the extinction of his soul or for a complete detachment from the world order. His Church tells him that self-expression is inseparable from the salvation of the world and of the individual soul. That is why the essence of the Christian system is seem in Sacraments that utilize the disordered elements of the universe by sanctifying them, so that they are made to serve the purpose of the soul and the furtherance of human personality. By accepting the supreme worth of both the world and of humanity, the Church says the purpose of our saving ourselves is also that of saving the world.
A further forgotten point on the subject of Christian asceticism is that self-discipline, which is the condition of self-expression, is seen not as an end, but a means. The end of all self-discipline is love. Anyone, therefore, who makes the taming of animal impulses the end and prime purpose of his life - as some of the Oriental mystics do - achieves the negation of the flesh but not the affirmation of the spirit. Saint Paul told the Corinthians that, if a person should deliver his body to be burned, it would profit him nothing unless he had Divine Love.
The Christian uses mortification to liberate himself from the slavery of his fallen nature, freeing himself to live in God's Love. Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ never said that carnal desires in themselves were evil. He said only that we must not permit them to burden the soul with such anxiety for their satisfaction that we lose the greater treasures. The end of Christian living is the attainment of love, and there is a double commandment touching this love: one, to love God; the other, to love neighbor. To realize either aspect, some asceticism is required. The only way we can help ourselves to love God is by conquering our selfishness, and the only way that we can ever conquer the evil in our neighbors is by making them feel the beneficent power of our love.
That love can be choked and nearly destroyed by other weeds besides lust. Worldliness is one of these. An almost forgotten truth, even among some practicing Christians, is that it is never the physical world, but only the spirit of the world, that is evil; therefore the soul must detach itself from the world. "Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in Him." - 1John 2:15 - This word that Saint John castigates is not the world of our bread and butter existence, but rather the secular spirit that regards time and space as a closed system from which God is excluded. Politics and economics divorced from the moral law, education without religion - these are some of the manifestations of the worldly spirit, and all of them are harmful.
Page 2
Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Saturday, November 10, 2012
More than seven hundred years ago, one of the most learned men who ever lived, Thomas Aquinas, wrote a treatise on the passions that to this day has never been surpassed. Treating of anxieties, he said, "Any idea which is hurtful to the mind does harm in just the proportion that it is repressed. The reason is: the mind is more intent on a repressed idea than if it were brought to the surface and allowed to escape."
This was not a completely new idea even when he wrote, for it was already implied in the Sacrament of Confession, which bares hidden anxieties, thus serving two purposes on the psychological level: It prevents their seeping into the unconscious and causing a complex, and it also weakens them because when they are brought to the level of the will, they can be controlled or even conquered.
The nineteenth century (which was already four centuries removed from the Christian practice of confession and repentance) began to see the terrible effects of the general repression of anxieties, guilt, sin and worries. But the new writers gave a slightly different twist to the old idea that repressions are dangerous. Because God, morality, and the possibility of personal guilt were all denied, the new philosophy affirmed that the repression of passions and instincts was wrong. (It was the repressed idea against which Thomas Aquinas warned.) The new notion said that a person's id and his animal instincts ought to have free expression against the totems and taboos of the old superstitions of morality, God, religion. This psychology affirmed, "Be self-expressive. Religion and morality are destroying your personality." All restraint, authority, and discipline were viewed as harmful to the character. Such a philosophy could not stand up against sound reason.
If a person is really made better and saner because he gives way to his sexual instincts and is uninhibited by the Christian law of lifelong marriage, why should not a person be better because he gives way to other instincts, such as the hunting instinct? Why not organize a "kill your enemy" hunt, uninhibited by the moral taboo of the Fifth Commandment? If we were logical in allowing the same self-expression to the fear instinct as to the sex instinct, then we ought to praise a soldier who, in the midst of battle, deserts his post, just as some writers now praise a husband when he deserts his wife. If the sex instinct is not to be bound by moral taboos, why should the pugnacious instinct be bound? Why should not an aggression be allowed to assert itself by punishing the people who get ahead of us at a bargain counter - especially if they are smaller? If arrest followed this demonstration, why not plead that the civil law is only a moral taboo that originated among African headhunters and is, therefore, destructive of human personality, with no binding force in this enlightened twenty first century?
If the repression of the sex instinct is abnormal, why should not the repression of the hunger instinct be abnormal? Why not condemn dieting? No one has yet tried to convince the body cultists that a religious totem and taboo are responsible for a fourteen-day diet.
This theory of license is founded on the false assumption that a psychological complex can always be cured by giving it a physiological outlet. This is as silly as saying that the way to cure a worry about your debts is to drain the blood out of your heart. The mental and the physical, the spiritual and the carnal, are not on the same level. One might as say that the psychological urge some people have to kill others could be cured by giving them a machine gun or that the mental impulse to commit suicide could be cured by a plunge off the Brooklyn Bridge. In regard to the sex instinct, self-expression can hardly be the cure it is said to be - for those who are most abandoned to the gratification of these instincts are not only the most abnormal but also the most unhappy of people, and they constitute the greatest menace to society.
The theory of license assumes that the so called religious "totems" and "taboos" have been responsible for repression and are therefore the causes of mental disorders. But why, we may ask, have these religious totems and taboos had such an appeal if not because they already coincided with the right reason and the highest aspirations of the human race? Why should moments of social degeneration and world chaos, such as the fall of Rome and our own times, be also the periods of greatest license and irreligiousness?
But there is a profounder objection to this program for people. For if the free expression of a person's carnal instinct against his moral instinct is right, then surely the repression of the moral instinct must create a problem of still greater repression. There is always going to be something repressed. Giving the animal instincts free play causes a repression of moral ideals. All that, this false theory of license does is to substitute one form of repression for another. The facts of history and individual experience prove that nothing has so much contributed to the development of mental disorders, especially neuroses, as the repression of the moral sense by those who wanted no higher ethics than that of the stud farm.
Finally, the theory is founded on a false idea of what self-expression means. Everything ought to be self-expressed according to its nature. But the nature of a human being is not the same as the nature of a goat. Endowed with an immortal soul, as well as with a body, a person is most self-expressive, not when he follows his animal instincts, but when his rational, God-given nature is in command. When a person expresses himself contrary to his nature, he begets sin in his soul, evil tendencies in his bones, odd twists and abnormalities in his unconscious - to say nothing of remorse in his conscience.
Such a person's whole being rebels against its misdirection by the evil will. A railroad train is most self-expressive when it follows the tracks laid down by the engineer; if its self-expression consisted in repudiating the tracks (because they were laid down by an engineer with a religious psychosis) it would discover it was no longer free to be a railroad train. If a triangle sought the power to express itself into four sides, it would discover it was no longer free to be a triangle. A boiler that rebels against the dogmatic limitation of having only a certain number of pounds pressure per square inch and thus explodes finds that its expression is nothing but self-destruction.
Dr. C.E.M. Joad has written that the theory of self-expression is so ridiculous that nobody really believes in it.
What we do believe is that some forms of self-expression are good, others bad; that the expression of self in sympathy is good; in jealousy, bad; in kindness, good; in cruelty, bad; in helpfulness and service, good; in malice and self-aggrandizement, bad. However - this also we know - in so far as what is expressed is bad, the more expression of it there is, the worse. For example, if I am good tempered and kindly when sober, but am a congenital dipsomaniac with a tendency to wife beating when drunk, it is obvious that the more I express myself in terms of my sober traits and kindliness and good temper, and the less I express myself in terms of my congenitally drunken traits of rage and violence, the better.
Very serious effects follow the abandonment of oneself to biological and animal instincts. It increases despair and morbidity; the individual becomes trapped in the license to which he or she submits. Freedom is destroyed when the victim becomes a slave to something external. Sacred Scripture tells us that the one who sins becomes a slave to sin. This kind of self-expression, instead of allowing a person to become self-possessed, ends in his losing control over the self and making it other-possessed, which is the new form of modern slavery. Finally, because it repudiates the moral sense, such self-expression lessens responsibility and thus leads to the destruction of the human character. As time passes, it brings sorrow and despair. For if abandonment to the passions and animal lust is the pathway to self-expression, then what consolation shall an individual seek in old age? Such a philosophy may satisfy young animals, but not old animals.
Actually, there are needed for humanity's development two kinds of activities or expressions: the immanent and the transcendent. One remains within the person; the other acts without. The false philosophy of self-expression admits only the second kind and results in a completely externalized human being. A true self-expression perfects the spirit first and then objectifies it, producing culture; culture always perished when inwardness of the spirit is lost in the "activism" of externals. Slavery results - a new serfdom quite different from the slavery of earlier ages. For in the old variety, man was subject to the external through his own egotistic, selfish will.
Marx and Freud were right in dealing with slavery as one of man's recurring problems, but neither of them understood its nature. Both of them took the inner slavery for granted; both rightly assumed that egotism is normal, one of them studying it in the collective field, the other in the individual. Such egotism is Fallen Man's flaw, recognized by everyone who assumes a Transcendent Source from which man comes and toward which he tends. Someday, some historian with profound insight will show us how external slavery is always the mass production of internal slavery - how man, in slavery to his own lower nature, has attempted to make his condition normal by enslaving others.
Debauchery is another effect of personal sin that seeks external expression, in this case by corrupting others. For the inwardly empty cannot bear their burden alone - they trend to empty society of whatever values it possesses. Solitariness of the soul creates its own atmosphere and makes a solitary world. Self-expression, understood as the expression of the animal self whose satisfactions are external, thus begets not only its own destruction but also the dissolution of peaceful society.
The traditional restraints and moral sanctions of society come to be regarded more and more as worthless, outworn taboos or as cruel checks placed upon individual egotism, which now goes under the name of freedom. A stage is eventually reached where there is no acknowledged limit to self-expression. The most traitorous deeds are defended as civil rights; the defense of even the natural law is ridiculed as "medieval." This lawlessness, if widespread, creates such confusion in society that a tyrant soon arises to organize the chaos through force. Thus is fulfilled the dictum of Dostoevski that "unlimited freedom leads to unlimited tyranny."
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
This was not a completely new idea even when he wrote, for it was already implied in the Sacrament of Confession, which bares hidden anxieties, thus serving two purposes on the psychological level: It prevents their seeping into the unconscious and causing a complex, and it also weakens them because when they are brought to the level of the will, they can be controlled or even conquered.
The nineteenth century (which was already four centuries removed from the Christian practice of confession and repentance) began to see the terrible effects of the general repression of anxieties, guilt, sin and worries. But the new writers gave a slightly different twist to the old idea that repressions are dangerous. Because God, morality, and the possibility of personal guilt were all denied, the new philosophy affirmed that the repression of passions and instincts was wrong. (It was the repressed idea against which Thomas Aquinas warned.) The new notion said that a person's id and his animal instincts ought to have free expression against the totems and taboos of the old superstitions of morality, God, religion. This psychology affirmed, "Be self-expressive. Religion and morality are destroying your personality." All restraint, authority, and discipline were viewed as harmful to the character. Such a philosophy could not stand up against sound reason.
If a person is really made better and saner because he gives way to his sexual instincts and is uninhibited by the Christian law of lifelong marriage, why should not a person be better because he gives way to other instincts, such as the hunting instinct? Why not organize a "kill your enemy" hunt, uninhibited by the moral taboo of the Fifth Commandment? If we were logical in allowing the same self-expression to the fear instinct as to the sex instinct, then we ought to praise a soldier who, in the midst of battle, deserts his post, just as some writers now praise a husband when he deserts his wife. If the sex instinct is not to be bound by moral taboos, why should the pugnacious instinct be bound? Why should not an aggression be allowed to assert itself by punishing the people who get ahead of us at a bargain counter - especially if they are smaller? If arrest followed this demonstration, why not plead that the civil law is only a moral taboo that originated among African headhunters and is, therefore, destructive of human personality, with no binding force in this enlightened twenty first century?
If the repression of the sex instinct is abnormal, why should not the repression of the hunger instinct be abnormal? Why not condemn dieting? No one has yet tried to convince the body cultists that a religious totem and taboo are responsible for a fourteen-day diet.
This theory of license is founded on the false assumption that a psychological complex can always be cured by giving it a physiological outlet. This is as silly as saying that the way to cure a worry about your debts is to drain the blood out of your heart. The mental and the physical, the spiritual and the carnal, are not on the same level. One might as say that the psychological urge some people have to kill others could be cured by giving them a machine gun or that the mental impulse to commit suicide could be cured by a plunge off the Brooklyn Bridge. In regard to the sex instinct, self-expression can hardly be the cure it is said to be - for those who are most abandoned to the gratification of these instincts are not only the most abnormal but also the most unhappy of people, and they constitute the greatest menace to society.
The theory of license assumes that the so called religious "totems" and "taboos" have been responsible for repression and are therefore the causes of mental disorders. But why, we may ask, have these religious totems and taboos had such an appeal if not because they already coincided with the right reason and the highest aspirations of the human race? Why should moments of social degeneration and world chaos, such as the fall of Rome and our own times, be also the periods of greatest license and irreligiousness?
But there is a profounder objection to this program for people. For if the free expression of a person's carnal instinct against his moral instinct is right, then surely the repression of the moral instinct must create a problem of still greater repression. There is always going to be something repressed. Giving the animal instincts free play causes a repression of moral ideals. All that, this false theory of license does is to substitute one form of repression for another. The facts of history and individual experience prove that nothing has so much contributed to the development of mental disorders, especially neuroses, as the repression of the moral sense by those who wanted no higher ethics than that of the stud farm.
Finally, the theory is founded on a false idea of what self-expression means. Everything ought to be self-expressed according to its nature. But the nature of a human being is not the same as the nature of a goat. Endowed with an immortal soul, as well as with a body, a person is most self-expressive, not when he follows his animal instincts, but when his rational, God-given nature is in command. When a person expresses himself contrary to his nature, he begets sin in his soul, evil tendencies in his bones, odd twists and abnormalities in his unconscious - to say nothing of remorse in his conscience.
Such a person's whole being rebels against its misdirection by the evil will. A railroad train is most self-expressive when it follows the tracks laid down by the engineer; if its self-expression consisted in repudiating the tracks (because they were laid down by an engineer with a religious psychosis) it would discover it was no longer free to be a railroad train. If a triangle sought the power to express itself into four sides, it would discover it was no longer free to be a triangle. A boiler that rebels against the dogmatic limitation of having only a certain number of pounds pressure per square inch and thus explodes finds that its expression is nothing but self-destruction.
Dr. C.E.M. Joad has written that the theory of self-expression is so ridiculous that nobody really believes in it.
What we do believe is that some forms of self-expression are good, others bad; that the expression of self in sympathy is good; in jealousy, bad; in kindness, good; in cruelty, bad; in helpfulness and service, good; in malice and self-aggrandizement, bad. However - this also we know - in so far as what is expressed is bad, the more expression of it there is, the worse. For example, if I am good tempered and kindly when sober, but am a congenital dipsomaniac with a tendency to wife beating when drunk, it is obvious that the more I express myself in terms of my sober traits and kindliness and good temper, and the less I express myself in terms of my congenitally drunken traits of rage and violence, the better.
Very serious effects follow the abandonment of oneself to biological and animal instincts. It increases despair and morbidity; the individual becomes trapped in the license to which he or she submits. Freedom is destroyed when the victim becomes a slave to something external. Sacred Scripture tells us that the one who sins becomes a slave to sin. This kind of self-expression, instead of allowing a person to become self-possessed, ends in his losing control over the self and making it other-possessed, which is the new form of modern slavery. Finally, because it repudiates the moral sense, such self-expression lessens responsibility and thus leads to the destruction of the human character. As time passes, it brings sorrow and despair. For if abandonment to the passions and animal lust is the pathway to self-expression, then what consolation shall an individual seek in old age? Such a philosophy may satisfy young animals, but not old animals.
Actually, there are needed for humanity's development two kinds of activities or expressions: the immanent and the transcendent. One remains within the person; the other acts without. The false philosophy of self-expression admits only the second kind and results in a completely externalized human being. A true self-expression perfects the spirit first and then objectifies it, producing culture; culture always perished when inwardness of the spirit is lost in the "activism" of externals. Slavery results - a new serfdom quite different from the slavery of earlier ages. For in the old variety, man was subject to the external through his own egotistic, selfish will.
Marx and Freud were right in dealing with slavery as one of man's recurring problems, but neither of them understood its nature. Both of them took the inner slavery for granted; both rightly assumed that egotism is normal, one of them studying it in the collective field, the other in the individual. Such egotism is Fallen Man's flaw, recognized by everyone who assumes a Transcendent Source from which man comes and toward which he tends. Someday, some historian with profound insight will show us how external slavery is always the mass production of internal slavery - how man, in slavery to his own lower nature, has attempted to make his condition normal by enslaving others.
Debauchery is another effect of personal sin that seeks external expression, in this case by corrupting others. For the inwardly empty cannot bear their burden alone - they trend to empty society of whatever values it possesses. Solitariness of the soul creates its own atmosphere and makes a solitary world. Self-expression, understood as the expression of the animal self whose satisfactions are external, thus begets not only its own destruction but also the dissolution of peaceful society.
The traditional restraints and moral sanctions of society come to be regarded more and more as worthless, outworn taboos or as cruel checks placed upon individual egotism, which now goes under the name of freedom. A stage is eventually reached where there is no acknowledged limit to self-expression. The most traitorous deeds are defended as civil rights; the defense of even the natural law is ridiculed as "medieval." This lawlessness, if widespread, creates such confusion in society that a tyrant soon arises to organize the chaos through force. Thus is fulfilled the dictum of Dostoevski that "unlimited freedom leads to unlimited tyranny."
Page 1
If you wish to donate. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
Sunday, November 4, 2012
The Hebrew word from which Satan comes sometimes refers to human enemies. - Ps. 109:6-7 - Once it refers to the angel of God who opposed Balaam. - Num. 22:22-35 - But whenever this word is used as a proper name in the Old Testament, it refers to the great superhuman enemy of God, human beings, all good. - Job 1-2 -
This use of the word also occurs frequently in the New Testament, for example; The devil offered the world to Jesus if He would worship him, but Jesus refused and replied, "Be off," Satan! For scripture says: You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone. Then the devil left him, and angels appeared and looked after him. - Luke 4:10-11 -
In the Old Testament, Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:11-19 furnish a picture of Satan's original condition and the reasons for his loss of position. These passages were addressed originally to the kings of Babylon and Tyre. But in the long range implications, they were refer to Satan himself. They tell of an exalted angelic being, one of God's creatures who became proud and ambitious. He determined to take over the throne of God to himself. As a result, God removed him from his position of great dignity and honor. Building up upon this foundation. Revelation 12 sketches the further stages in Satan's work of evil. In his fall from God's favor, Satan persuaded one third of the angels to join him in his rebellion.
How did you come to fall from the heavens,
Daystar, son of Dawn?
How did you come to be thrown to the ground,
you who enslaved the nations?
You who used to think to yourself,
"I will climb up to the heavens;
and higher than the stars of God
I will set my throne.
I will sit on the Mount of Assembly
in the recesses of the north.
I will climb to the top of thunderclouds,
I will rival the Most High."
What! Now you have fallen to Sheol
to the very bottom of the abyss! - Isaiah 14:12-15 -
The word of Yahweh was addressed to me as follows, Son of man, raise a dirge over the king of Tyre. Say to him, The Lord Yahweh says this:
You were once an exemplar of perfection,
full of wisdom,
perfect in beauty;
you were in Eden, in the Garden of God.
A thousand gems formed your mantle.
Sard, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx,
jasper, sapphire, carbuncle, emerald,
the gold of which your flutes and tambourines are made,
all were prepared on the day of your creation.
I had provided you with a guardian cherub;
you were on the holy mountain of God;
you walked amid red-hot coals.
Your behaviour was exemplary from the day of your creation
until the day when evil was first found in you.
Your busy trading
has filled you with violence and sin.
I have thrown you down from the mountain of God,
and the guardian cherub has destroyed you from amid the coals.
Your heart has grown swollen with pride
on account of your beauty.
You have corrupted your wisdom
owing to your splendour.
I have thrown you to the ground;
I have made you a spectacle for other kings.
By the immense number of your sins,
by the dishonesty of your trading,
you have defiled your sanctuaries.
I have brought fire out of you to consume you.
I have made you ashes on the ground
before the eyes of all who saw you.
Of the nations, all who know you
are lost in amazement over you.
You are an object of terror;
gone for ever. - Ezekiel 28:11-19 -
Throughout the Old Testament period Satan sought to destroy the messianic line. When the Messiah became a man [fully human] Satan tried to eliminate Him.
Demons, devils, evils, are force that opposes God and His work of righteousness in the world. They also creates and invokes disturbance to the harmonious order of the universe. But the Sacred Scripture/Holy Bible make it plain that even the so called 'physical demons', physical devils', physical evils', are the result of a far more serious moral and spiritual evil that began with the "Fall" of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. - Gen. 3 -
Demons, devils, evils, are fallen angels who joined the kingdom of Satan in rebellion against God. Since Satan fall, the adversary of God and His plan of righteousness and redemption in the world. Satan has opposed God's plan to establish His kingdom on earth. The first thing, Satan did was to influenced and tricked Eve, in order to use human being to establish his kingdom rather than God's kingdom.
The ultimate source of demon, devil, evil in the world is Satan, also called 'the Wicked one' or 'the Evil one.' Thus, these fallen angelic being who is the supreme enemy of God and human beings, and Satan is his name, and devil is what he is - the accuser and deceiver. The Wicked one, Evil one, this phrase depicts the devil's fundamental nature, and he is the source of all evil and wickedness.
The devil is people's worst enemy because he was a murderer from the beginning are strong words from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ. - John 8:44 - Starting with Eve, the devil has attempted to deceive every living soul. Ironically, evil also comes from the hearts of human beings.
Jesus called the people to him again and said, 'Listen to me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean. If anyone has ears to hear, let him listen to this.'
When he had gone back into the house, away from the crowd, his disciples questions him about the parable. He said to them, 'Do you not understand either? Can you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot make him unclean because it does not go into his heart but through his stomach and passes out into the sewer?' (Thus, he pronounced all foods cleans) And he went on, 'It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. For it is from within, from men hearts, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and made a man unclean.' - Mark 7:14-23 -
The origin of Satan and his companion, demons, devils is not explicitly told in the Sacred Scripture/Holy Bible. But its speaks of the fall and later imprisonment of a group of angels. The group that participated in the fall apparently followed one of their own number, Satan. The fall occurred before God's Creation of the world, leaving Satan and his angels free to contaminate the human race with wickedness.
The earth grew corrupt in God's sight, and filled with violence. God contemplated the earth: it was corrupt, for corrupt were the ways of all flesh on the earth. God said to Noah, The end has come for all things of flesh; I have decided this, because the earth is full of violence of human's making and I will efface them from the earth. At the times, only part of the fallen angels took part in the wickedness at the time of the Flood. - Gen. 6:1-13 -
Next he will say to those on his left hand, Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.- Matt. 25:41 -
As there were false prophets in the past history of our people, so you too will have your false teachers, who will insinuate their own disruptive views and disown the Master who purchased their freedom. They will destroy themselves very quickly; but there will be many who copy their shameful behaviour and the Way of Truth will be brought into disrepute on their account. They will eagerly try to buy you for themselves with insidious speeches, but for them the Condemnation, pronounced so long ago, is at its work already, and Destruction is not asleep.
When angels sinned, God did not spare them: he sent them down to the underworld and consigned them to the dark underground caves to be held there till the day of Judgment. Nor did he spare the world in ancient times: it was only Noah he saved, the preacher of righteousness, along with seven others, when he sent the Flood over a disobedient world. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, these too he condemned and reduced to ashes; he destroyed them completely, as a warning to anybody lacking reverence in the future; he rescued Lot, however, a holy man who had been sickened by the shameless way in which these vile people behaved - for that holy man, living among them, was outraged in his good soul by the crimes that he saw and heard of everyday. These are all examples of how the Lord can rescue the good man from the ordeal, and hold the wicked for their punishment until the day of Judgment, especially those who are governed by their corrupt bodily desires and have no respect for authority.
Such self-willed people with no reverence are not afraid of offending against the glorious ones, but the angels in their strength and power make no complaint or accusation against them in front of the Lord. All the same, these people who only insult anything that they do not understand are not reasoning beings, but simply animals born to be caught and killed, and they will quite certainly destroy themselves by their own work of destruction, and get their reward of evil for the evil that they do. They are unsightly blots on your society: men whose only object is dissipation all day long, and they amuse themselves deceiving you even when they are your guests at a meal; with their eyes always looking for adultery, men with an infinite capacity for sinning, they will seduce any soul which is at all unstable. Greed is the one lesson their minds have learnt. They are under a curse.
They have left the right path and wandered off to follow the path of Balaam son of Beor, who thought he could profit best of sinning, until he was called to order for his faults. The dumb donkey put a stop to that prophet's madness when it talk like a man. People like this are dried up rivers, fogs swirling in the wind, and the dark underworld is the place reserved for them. With their high flown talk, which is all hollow, they tempt back the ones who have only just escaped from paganism, playing on their bodily desires with debaucheries. They may promise freedom but they themselves are slaves, slaves to corruption; because if anyone lets himself be dominated by anything, then he is a slave to it; and anyone who has escaped the pollution of the world once by coming to know our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, and then allows himself to be entangled by it a second time and mastered, will end up in a worse state than he began in. It would even have been better for him never to have learnt the way of holiness, than to know it and afterwards desert the holy rule that was entrusted to him. What he has done is exactly as the proverb rightly says: The dog goes back to his own vomit and: When the sow has been washed, it wallows in the mud. - 2 Peter 2:1-22 -
As a result of his original status and authority, Satan has great power and dignity. So great is his strength that Micheal the archangel viewed him as a foe too powerful to oppose. - Jude 9 - Satan's influence in worldly affairs is clearly revealed. - John 12:31 - Satan nature is malicious and exercises his evil power through demons too. A part of Satan continuing ambition to replace God is his passionate yearning to have others worship him. Since God has frustrated this desire and put down Satan's rebellion, he has become God's exact opposite. He is "the Wicked and Evil one" while God is "the Holy One." "the Compassionate One."
Satan leads people into sin by various means. Of the various methods used by Satan in carrying out his evil work, none is more characteristic than 'Temptation.' Along with his work of tempting mankind, Satan also delights in deception, and as a great deceiver, Satan is an expert at falsifying truth.
These people are counterfeit apostles, they are dishonest workmen disguised as apostles of Christ. There is nothing unexpected about that; if Satan himself goes disguised as an angel of light, there is no need to be surprised when his servants, too, disguised themselves as the servants of righteousness. They will come to the end that they deserve. - 2 Cor. 11:13-15 -
But Satan is destined to fail in his continuing rebellion against God. His final defeat is explicitly told in the Sacred Scripture/Holy Bible. The death of Christ on the cross, the resurrection of Christ is the basis for Satan's final defeat. - Luke 10:18; John 12:31; 20:10; Heb. 2:14-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Rev. 12:7-9 - The final victory will come when Jesus Christ returns and Satan is cast into the burning lake of fire. This burning lake is the second death; and anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was thrown into the burning lake. - Rev. 20:1-15 -
And now war broke out in heaven, when Michael with his angels attacked the dragon. The dragon fought back with his angels, but they were defeated and driven out of heaven. The great dragon, the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan, who had deceived all the world, was hurled down to the earth and his angels were hurled down with him. - Rev. 12:7-9 -
Then I saw an angel come down from heaven with the key of the Abyss in his hand and an enormous chain. He overpowered the dragon, that primeval serpent which is the devil and Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years. He threw him into Abyss, and shut the entrance and sealed it over him, to make sure he would not deceive the nations again until the thousand years had passed. At the end of that time he must be released, but only for a short while.
Then I saw some thrones, and I saw those who are given the power to be judges take their seats on them. I saw the souls of all who had been beheaded for having witnessed for Jesus and for having preached God's word, and those who refused to worship the beast or his statue and would not have the brand-mark on their foreheads or hands; they came to life, and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. This is the first resurrection; the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were over. Happy and blessed are those who share in the first resurrection; the second death cannot affect them but they will be priests of God and of Christ and reign with him for a thousand years.
Then I saw a great white throne and the One who was sitting on it. In his presence, earth and sky vanished, leaving no trace. I saw the dead, both great and small, standing in front of his throne, while the book of life was opened, and others books opened which were the record of what they had done in their lives, by which the dead were judged.
The sea gave up all the dead who were in it; Death and Hades were emptied of the dead that were in them; and everyone was judged according to the way in which he had lived. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the burning lake. This burning lake is the second death; and anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was thrown into the burning lake. - Rev. 20:1-15 -
Page 1
Faith . Hope . Love - Welcome donation. Thank You. God bless.
By bank transfer/cheque deposit:
Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah
Bank: Public Bank Berhad account no: 4076577113
Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
This use of the word also occurs frequently in the New Testament, for example; The devil offered the world to Jesus if He would worship him, but Jesus refused and replied, "Be off," Satan! For scripture says: You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone. Then the devil left him, and angels appeared and looked after him. - Luke 4:10-11 -
In the Old Testament, Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:11-19 furnish a picture of Satan's original condition and the reasons for his loss of position. These passages were addressed originally to the kings of Babylon and Tyre. But in the long range implications, they were refer to Satan himself. They tell of an exalted angelic being, one of God's creatures who became proud and ambitious. He determined to take over the throne of God to himself. As a result, God removed him from his position of great dignity and honor. Building up upon this foundation. Revelation 12 sketches the further stages in Satan's work of evil. In his fall from God's favor, Satan persuaded one third of the angels to join him in his rebellion.
How did you come to fall from the heavens,
Daystar, son of Dawn?
How did you come to be thrown to the ground,
you who enslaved the nations?
You who used to think to yourself,
"I will climb up to the heavens;
and higher than the stars of God
I will set my throne.
I will sit on the Mount of Assembly
in the recesses of the north.
I will climb to the top of thunderclouds,
I will rival the Most High."
What! Now you have fallen to Sheol
to the very bottom of the abyss! - Isaiah 14:12-15 -
The word of Yahweh was addressed to me as follows, Son of man, raise a dirge over the king of Tyre. Say to him, The Lord Yahweh says this:
You were once an exemplar of perfection,
full of wisdom,
perfect in beauty;
you were in Eden, in the Garden of God.
A thousand gems formed your mantle.
Sard, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx,
jasper, sapphire, carbuncle, emerald,
the gold of which your flutes and tambourines are made,
all were prepared on the day of your creation.
I had provided you with a guardian cherub;
you were on the holy mountain of God;
you walked amid red-hot coals.
Your behaviour was exemplary from the day of your creation
until the day when evil was first found in you.
Your busy trading
has filled you with violence and sin.
I have thrown you down from the mountain of God,
and the guardian cherub has destroyed you from amid the coals.
Your heart has grown swollen with pride
on account of your beauty.
You have corrupted your wisdom
owing to your splendour.
I have thrown you to the ground;
I have made you a spectacle for other kings.
By the immense number of your sins,
by the dishonesty of your trading,
you have defiled your sanctuaries.
I have brought fire out of you to consume you.
I have made you ashes on the ground
before the eyes of all who saw you.
Of the nations, all who know you
are lost in amazement over you.
You are an object of terror;
gone for ever. - Ezekiel 28:11-19 -
Throughout the Old Testament period Satan sought to destroy the messianic line. When the Messiah became a man [fully human] Satan tried to eliminate Him.
Demons, devils, evils, are force that opposes God and His work of righteousness in the world. They also creates and invokes disturbance to the harmonious order of the universe. But the Sacred Scripture/Holy Bible make it plain that even the so called 'physical demons', physical devils', physical evils', are the result of a far more serious moral and spiritual evil that began with the "Fall" of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. - Gen. 3 -
Demons, devils, evils, are fallen angels who joined the kingdom of Satan in rebellion against God. Since Satan fall, the adversary of God and His plan of righteousness and redemption in the world. Satan has opposed God's plan to establish His kingdom on earth. The first thing, Satan did was to influenced and tricked Eve, in order to use human being to establish his kingdom rather than God's kingdom.
The ultimate source of demon, devil, evil in the world is Satan, also called 'the Wicked one' or 'the Evil one.' Thus, these fallen angelic being who is the supreme enemy of God and human beings, and Satan is his name, and devil is what he is - the accuser and deceiver. The Wicked one, Evil one, this phrase depicts the devil's fundamental nature, and he is the source of all evil and wickedness.
The devil is people's worst enemy because he was a murderer from the beginning are strong words from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ. - John 8:44 - Starting with Eve, the devil has attempted to deceive every living soul. Ironically, evil also comes from the hearts of human beings.
Jesus called the people to him again and said, 'Listen to me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that goes into a man from outside can make him unclean; it is the things that come out of a man that make him unclean. If anyone has ears to hear, let him listen to this.'
When he had gone back into the house, away from the crowd, his disciples questions him about the parable. He said to them, 'Do you not understand either? Can you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot make him unclean because it does not go into his heart but through his stomach and passes out into the sewer?' (Thus, he pronounced all foods cleans) And he went on, 'It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. For it is from within, from men hearts, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and made a man unclean.' - Mark 7:14-23 -
The origin of Satan and his companion, demons, devils is not explicitly told in the Sacred Scripture/Holy Bible. But its speaks of the fall and later imprisonment of a group of angels. The group that participated in the fall apparently followed one of their own number, Satan. The fall occurred before God's Creation of the world, leaving Satan and his angels free to contaminate the human race with wickedness.
The earth grew corrupt in God's sight, and filled with violence. God contemplated the earth: it was corrupt, for corrupt were the ways of all flesh on the earth. God said to Noah, The end has come for all things of flesh; I have decided this, because the earth is full of violence of human's making and I will efface them from the earth. At the times, only part of the fallen angels took part in the wickedness at the time of the Flood. - Gen. 6:1-13 -
Next he will say to those on his left hand, Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.- Matt. 25:41 -
As there were false prophets in the past history of our people, so you too will have your false teachers, who will insinuate their own disruptive views and disown the Master who purchased their freedom. They will destroy themselves very quickly; but there will be many who copy their shameful behaviour and the Way of Truth will be brought into disrepute on their account. They will eagerly try to buy you for themselves with insidious speeches, but for them the Condemnation, pronounced so long ago, is at its work already, and Destruction is not asleep.
When angels sinned, God did not spare them: he sent them down to the underworld and consigned them to the dark underground caves to be held there till the day of Judgment. Nor did he spare the world in ancient times: it was only Noah he saved, the preacher of righteousness, along with seven others, when he sent the Flood over a disobedient world. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, these too he condemned and reduced to ashes; he destroyed them completely, as a warning to anybody lacking reverence in the future; he rescued Lot, however, a holy man who had been sickened by the shameless way in which these vile people behaved - for that holy man, living among them, was outraged in his good soul by the crimes that he saw and heard of everyday. These are all examples of how the Lord can rescue the good man from the ordeal, and hold the wicked for their punishment until the day of Judgment, especially those who are governed by their corrupt bodily desires and have no respect for authority.
Such self-willed people with no reverence are not afraid of offending against the glorious ones, but the angels in their strength and power make no complaint or accusation against them in front of the Lord. All the same, these people who only insult anything that they do not understand are not reasoning beings, but simply animals born to be caught and killed, and they will quite certainly destroy themselves by their own work of destruction, and get their reward of evil for the evil that they do. They are unsightly blots on your society: men whose only object is dissipation all day long, and they amuse themselves deceiving you even when they are your guests at a meal; with their eyes always looking for adultery, men with an infinite capacity for sinning, they will seduce any soul which is at all unstable. Greed is the one lesson their minds have learnt. They are under a curse.
They have left the right path and wandered off to follow the path of Balaam son of Beor, who thought he could profit best of sinning, until he was called to order for his faults. The dumb donkey put a stop to that prophet's madness when it talk like a man. People like this are dried up rivers, fogs swirling in the wind, and the dark underworld is the place reserved for them. With their high flown talk, which is all hollow, they tempt back the ones who have only just escaped from paganism, playing on their bodily desires with debaucheries. They may promise freedom but they themselves are slaves, slaves to corruption; because if anyone lets himself be dominated by anything, then he is a slave to it; and anyone who has escaped the pollution of the world once by coming to know our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ, and then allows himself to be entangled by it a second time and mastered, will end up in a worse state than he began in. It would even have been better for him never to have learnt the way of holiness, than to know it and afterwards desert the holy rule that was entrusted to him. What he has done is exactly as the proverb rightly says: The dog goes back to his own vomit and: When the sow has been washed, it wallows in the mud. - 2 Peter 2:1-22 -
As a result of his original status and authority, Satan has great power and dignity. So great is his strength that Micheal the archangel viewed him as a foe too powerful to oppose. - Jude 9 - Satan's influence in worldly affairs is clearly revealed. - John 12:31 - Satan nature is malicious and exercises his evil power through demons too. A part of Satan continuing ambition to replace God is his passionate yearning to have others worship him. Since God has frustrated this desire and put down Satan's rebellion, he has become God's exact opposite. He is "the Wicked and Evil one" while God is "the Holy One." "the Compassionate One."
Satan leads people into sin by various means. Of the various methods used by Satan in carrying out his evil work, none is more characteristic than 'Temptation.' Along with his work of tempting mankind, Satan also delights in deception, and as a great deceiver, Satan is an expert at falsifying truth.
These people are counterfeit apostles, they are dishonest workmen disguised as apostles of Christ. There is nothing unexpected about that; if Satan himself goes disguised as an angel of light, there is no need to be surprised when his servants, too, disguised themselves as the servants of righteousness. They will come to the end that they deserve. - 2 Cor. 11:13-15 -
But Satan is destined to fail in his continuing rebellion against God. His final defeat is explicitly told in the Sacred Scripture/Holy Bible. The death of Christ on the cross, the resurrection of Christ is the basis for Satan's final defeat. - Luke 10:18; John 12:31; 20:10; Heb. 2:14-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Rev. 12:7-9 - The final victory will come when Jesus Christ returns and Satan is cast into the burning lake of fire. This burning lake is the second death; and anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was thrown into the burning lake. - Rev. 20:1-15 -
And now war broke out in heaven, when Michael with his angels attacked the dragon. The dragon fought back with his angels, but they were defeated and driven out of heaven. The great dragon, the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan, who had deceived all the world, was hurled down to the earth and his angels were hurled down with him. - Rev. 12:7-9 -
Then I saw an angel come down from heaven with the key of the Abyss in his hand and an enormous chain. He overpowered the dragon, that primeval serpent which is the devil and Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years. He threw him into Abyss, and shut the entrance and sealed it over him, to make sure he would not deceive the nations again until the thousand years had passed. At the end of that time he must be released, but only for a short while.
Then I saw some thrones, and I saw those who are given the power to be judges take their seats on them. I saw the souls of all who had been beheaded for having witnessed for Jesus and for having preached God's word, and those who refused to worship the beast or his statue and would not have the brand-mark on their foreheads or hands; they came to life, and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. This is the first resurrection; the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were over. Happy and blessed are those who share in the first resurrection; the second death cannot affect them but they will be priests of God and of Christ and reign with him for a thousand years.
Then I saw a great white throne and the One who was sitting on it. In his presence, earth and sky vanished, leaving no trace. I saw the dead, both great and small, standing in front of his throne, while the book of life was opened, and others books opened which were the record of what they had done in their lives, by which the dead were judged.
The sea gave up all the dead who were in it; Death and Hades were emptied of the dead that were in them; and everyone was judged according to the way in which he had lived. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the burning lake. This burning lake is the second death; and anybody whose name could not be found written in the book of life was thrown into the burning lake. - Rev. 20:1-15 -
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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