alto saxx

... posted at 6:01 PM by joey.

"I have traveled the world. I have searched high and low. I have found nothing that satisfies my mind, my heart, and the deepest longings of my soul like Jesus does. He is not only the way, the truth, and the life. He is my way, and my truth, and my life -- just as he can be for anyone who reaches out to him. Because remember what Paul told the Athenians: 'He is not far,' he said, 'from each one of us.'"
ravi zacharias

"At the midnight of human ignorance, there are a lot of lights in the sky. Noontime, there's only one. And that's Jesus Christ, the light of the world."
norman l. geisler

... posted at 3:55 AM by amz8854.

from the case for faith by lee strobel

How can a mere finite human be sure that infinite wisdom would not tolerate certain short-range evils in order for more long-range goods that we couldn't foresee?
... Imagine a bear in a trap and a hunter who, out of sympathy, wants to liberate him. He tries to win the bear's confidence, but he can't do it, so he has to shoot the bear full of drugs. The bear, however, thinks this is an attack and that the hunter is trying to kill him. He doesn't realize that this is being done out of compassion.
Then, in order to get the bear out of the trap, the hunter has to push him further into the trap to release the tension on the spring. If the bear were semiconscious at that point, he would be even more convinced that the hunter was his enemy who was out to cause him suffering and pain. But the bear would be wrong. He reaches this incorrect conclusion because he's not a human being.
... I believe God does the same to us sometimes, and we can't comprehend why he does it any more than the bear can understand the motivations of the hunter. As the bear could have trusted the hunter, so we can trust God.

... it's not logically possible to have free will and no possibility of moral evil. In other words, once God chose to create human beings with free will, then it was up to them, rather than to God, as to whether there was sin or not. That's what free will means. Built into the situation of God deciding to create human beings is the chance of evil and, consequently, the suffering that results... he created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom... The overwhelming majority of the pain in the world is caused by our choices to kill, to slander, to be selfish, to stray sexually, to break our promises, to be reckless.

... as we face struggles and trials and suffering, we sometimes can't imagine good emerging. But we've seen how it did in the case of Jesus, and we can trust it will in our case too... God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore, he's not being evil by allowing that pain to exist.

... we're ontologically good -- we still bear God's image -- but morally we're not. His image in us has been tarnished. The prophet Jeremiah said that 'from the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain,' and the prophet Isaiah said, 'all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.' Our good deeds are stained with self-interest and our demands for justice are mixed with lust for vengeance. Ironically, it's the best people who most readily recognize and admit their own shortcoming and sin. We are good stuff gone bad, a defaced masterpiece, a rebellious child... Pain and suffering are frequently the means by which we become motivated to finally surrender to God and to seek the cure of Christ.

We know that moral character gets formed through hardship, through overcoming obstacles, through enduring despite difficulties. Courage, for example, would be impossible in a world without pain. The apostle Paul testified to this refining quality of suffering when he wrote that 'suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.' Let's face it: we learn from the mistakes we make and the suffering they bring. The universe is a soul-making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. The point of our lives in this world isn't comfort, but training and preparation for eternity. Scripture tells us that even Jesus 'learned obedience through suffering' -- and if that was true for him, why would it be even more true for us?


'No matter how deep our darkness, he [Jesus] is deeper still.'

... posted at 7:46 PM by amz8854.

"Anticipation. We lose our own life's moments trying to find the ones that others tell us are important. And we end our lives with the question, How will I be remembered by others? Never thinking how we would remember ourselves."

my xanga
amy's blog
joh's blog
joey's blog
sanboo blog
livejournal