Who are you talking to?

Posted on June 12, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

When Lyndon Baines Johnson was inaugurated as President of the United States he invited several guests for a meal at the family room of the White House. He asked journalist Bill Moyers, who had previously been a Baptist minister, to say grace. So, Moyers, quietly and reverentially, began to pray. But the new President, who couldn’t understand what was being said, interrupted him and said: ‘Speak up man.’ Without looking up and barely stopping in mid-sentence, Bill Moyers replied: ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ And that’s something Jesus went to great pains to teach us. When we pray, we are in the presence of God, and there is no place there for showiness or self-advertising. The important thing in prayer, Jesus said, is sincerity, not hypocrisy. And it’s prayers like that that actually get heard.

Posted in Prayer, Sincerity | Leave a comment

Some realities are not perceived by deductive reasoning

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

For the past couple of centuries, the Western World has tended to judge reality by what can be proved scientifically. Yet increasingly we have come to see that there are all sorts of realities that are not perceived by deductive reasoning, but are perceived intuitively. For example, you could read a learned treatise on the physical, chemical, psychological and sociological factors involved in falling in love, but never understand what falling in love is. But we all have an intuitive understanding that there is such a thing as falling in love. It’s one of those realities we grasp intuitively, not intellectually.
Faith is like that. Faith taps into that deep well of spiritual reality that lies, often hidden, within us all. Faith is the intuitive understanding that those spiritual realities are real – our spiritual perception of what our innermost being tells us is true.

Posted in Intuitive understanding, Reason, Spiritual Insight, Truth | Leave a comment

Blinded by the confines of their own intellects

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

The Russian novelist Dostoevsky once said: ‘He who desires to see the living God face to face should not seek him in the empty firmament of his mind, but in love.’ The great mistake of the current crop of fundamentalist atheists is that they cannot conceive of a reality beyond the confines of their own intellects. They are like people who are tone deaf and refuse to believe there is anything of beauty in a Mozart symphony because they can’t discern it; or people who are colour blind, ridiculing those who are enraptured by the colours of a sunset, because they are unable to see it.
But for those of us who do look deep into our hearts and know that there has to be something more, Jesus says: ‘Seek and you shall find.’ For ‘God rewards everyone who diligently searches for him.’

Posted in God, God shaped holes, Searching, Seeking and Finding, Spiritual blindness, Spiritual Darkness | Leave a comment

A lamp to my feet

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

Back in the dark days of the Cold War, Anatoli Shcharansky said goodbye to his wife as she left Russia for Israel. His parting words were: ‘I’ll see you soon in Jerusalem.’ But soon after he was detained and sent to the terrible labour camps of the Gulag. Stripped of his possessions, he managed to hide a copy of the Psalms, and when he refused to give it up, he spent one hundred and thirty days in solitary confinement. Eventually he was set free and allowed to leave the country. But as he was about to depart, the authorities tried again to confiscate his book of Psalms. As the world’s press watched, Anatoli threw himself down in the snow and refused to walk on to freedom without it. Those words had kept him going during his captivity and for him there was no freedom without them.
Like so many before him he could say: ‘Thy Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.’

Posted in Bible, Faith, Guidance, Hope, Spiritual blessing, Spiritual comfort | Leave a comment

The real test of someone’s philosophy

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

Just before before he died, the atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre resisted feelings of despair by saying to himself: ‘I know I shall die in hope.’ Then in profound sadness, he would add: ‘But hope needs a foundation.’ His words remind me of another famous philosopher and atheist, George Bernard Shaw, who, in one of the last things he wrote said: ‘The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name, I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.’
The real test of someone’s philosophy is whether they still express it when they reach the end.

Posted in Afterlife, Agnosticism, Atheism, Death, emptiness, Faith, Unbelief | Leave a comment

Conforming to the mask

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

Fredrick Beuchner wrote a story called ‘The Happy Hypocrite,’ about a man born with a facial deformity. He grew up alone and lonely. When reaching adulthood, he decided to move from his town to begin a new life. On his way, he discovered a beautiful mask that was able to fit his face and actually made him look handsome. At first, the mask was uncomfortable, and he was afraid that people would find out what he really looked like; but he continued to wear it. Eventually, he fell in love. But one day a cruel woman from his old home came to his town and realised who he was. In front of his friends and fiancé, she forced him to remove his mask. But when he removed it, it revealed a handsome face. Over the years, his face had conformed to the mask.
And that’s what happens to us when we, as the Bible says, ‘put on Christ.’ Inwardly, we change too.

Posted in New Heart, New Life, New love, Transformation | 1 Comment

Forgiveness and new starts

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

It’s hard to imagine anything more tragic than the death of nine-year-old Josiah Sisson, run down by a drunk driver on Christmas day, while out enjoying the Christmas lights with his family. And it’s hard to imagine anything more amazing than the sight of Josiah’s father, Karl, embracing that young driver and forgiving him. But Karl Sissons, who is the pastor of a Brisbane church, and his wife Bonny believe that forgiveness and new starts are what the message of Christ is all about, and that Christmas is the celebration of that story that ended at Easter with Jesus last words including his prayer that God would forgive those who were torturing and killing him. Karl and Bonny Sissons know that one day they will be reunited with their little boy. But in the meantime, they stand as a shining example of what it means to be a Christian.

Posted in Forgiveness, New start | Leave a comment

What do we gain by praying?

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

There are some things in life that we just do automatically, even though we later wonder why on earth we do them. One of them is praying. Even in this very secular and materialistic age most people still say they do it. A friend of mine, who is an agnostic – someone who doesn’t really know one way or the other if there is a God and a spiritual dimension beyond our material world – told me he often prays, but has no idea why because he doesn’t know if it produces anything. I told him about another man, who said that he couldn’t always describe what he gained by praying, but he could describe quite a few things he lost, including: anger, ego, greed, depression, insecurity, and the fear of death. So perhaps the answer to our prayers is not always in what we gain, but what we lose; and losing those things turns out to be our ultimate gain.

Posted in Agnosticism, Faith, Prayer | Leave a comment

It’s not him!

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

A few weeks ago I was called to the bedside of an old friend who had just died. I was struck again by the thought I always get at such times, that even though I can recognize the them, there’s something very different; the person I knew is not there. I remember the surprise in my sister-in-law’s voice when we got to the funeral home and saw her father laid out just after he’d passed away. She said: ‘It’s not him!’ I thought she was in some state of denial and really thought it was someone else’s body. But then she explained that she knew it was her dad’s body, but it wasn’t her dad.
I think most of us in that situation are struck by the same thing. It always makes me think of something C.S Lewis said: ‘You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.’ And instinctively we know that though that body is now dead, the soul that animated it still lives.

Posted in Afterlife, Death, Immortality | Leave a comment

When bad luck is self-inflicted.

Posted on March 17, 2017 by vincentsmithauthor

In nineteen seventy-nine one of the greatest upsets in the history of stockcar racing happened when Richard Petty ended his long losing streak and won the Daytona 500. However, it came as a surprise because on the last lap Petty was thirty seconds behind the leaders. But then, on the final stretch, the leading car forced his challenger onto the grass, after which the challenger caught up again and forced the leader into the outside wall. Both cars came to a screeching halt and the two drivers jumped out and got into an old-time slugging match. In the meantime, Richard Petty cruised by and won the race, going on from there to become one of the greatest names in stockcar racing.
Like the Bible says: ‘The race is not always to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong…Sooner or later bad luck hits us all.’ The real problem, though, is when the bad luck is self-inflicted.

Posted in Foolishness, Luck | Leave a comment