Tag Archives: creation

Blog

Threads: Design

Leave a comment

DESIGN: Romans 12:2 . Luke 2:52 . Genesis 2:7

-real & honest
-living life out of who you are
– the process of becoming that which God intends for us to be
-who you were created to be
-understanding who we are and who God is and the ever-happening transformation
-the way God intended us to live
-being formed into the image of Jesus
-accepting others in their realness
-not just for us but for others
-embracing God’s design for our lives
-restoration
-becoming truly human

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world” seems to me to be an extremely direct statement on radical living. If anything those words cause me to question everything. It’s my desire not to conform to the world that causes me to ask about the ethics of buying a house, I mean people give me weird looks when I say there are ethics to consider.
We are designed in God’s image. Our Creator has an intended purpose and design for how we are to live. That’s why this life of following Jesus is to be much more wholistic and encompassing then whether we’ve read our Bible in the morning and said our prayers before bed.
God has designed you and created you to live a certain way, not necessarily in the pattern that the world lives. That’s why we shouldn’t assume we should eat like the world does or sleep like the world does. I mean that in the most literal sense: Just because those in our world eat out a lot, or eat a lot of fatty foods, or eat free-trade (cheap due to unjust wages) food, does not mean we are okay to participate as well. Just because many in the world sleep through their education, stay up all hours of the night, or sleep half their day away does not mean each of those things are how we are designed.

And let me remind you God did not intend for our design to be a miserable one. We were created to Glorify God, and God is most glorified when we are most satisfied. We were created to experience joy and pleasure.
If you saw someone with a pogostick in their hand and they where playing with it by tossing it up in the air and catching it again, you’d probably look at them funny and try to explain to them, “That’s not what it’s designed for.”

C.S. Lewis once said:
“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Blog

I am not the Person I want to Become

2 Comments

Do you ever go through a day and look back at the end of it and wish you had done things differently? And not even so much wish you had done things differently, but wished you had reacted and lived more like you desire to then you actually did?

It’s tough to recognize that we are not static creatures. Too often I think we treat our own lives and the individual days that make up our lives as isolated incidents, within which we are simply who we are. Much like the frog in a pot of water, we are content to simply sit in our environment, oblivious to the water boiling us to our death.

You see, when I eat a piece of chocolate today I do not see it immediately adding pounds of fat to my waistline, slowing my biking speed or causing the onset of cancer. Yet years of those isolated days with pieces of chocolate, extra slices of pizza and ice cream sundaes will result in thirty pounds I never wanted to gain.

It’s the same with nearly all our actions. If today I responded in anger, or unlovingly, to someone I might simply write it off as justified, or just who I am. If I do not seek to be aware that this is not who I want to be, and make an effort to change it, I will wind up twenty years later with fewer friends and much more grouchy then I ever desired to become.

Today is not an isolated event. The choices I make today, the small actions I allow myself will carry into tomorrow. If I desire to be a healthier person, those choices start today. If I am to be a hard worker, I must be a hard worker today. I am not the person I want to become, but if I am diligent I can focus my actions today towards becoming that person.