Jesus said, "Don't think for a moment that I came to grant peace and harmony to everyone. No, my arrival will change everything and create hostility among you. From now on even family members will be divided over Me and will choose sides one against another. Fathers will be divided from sons and sons from fathers; mothers will be divided from daughters and daughters from mothers, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, all because of Me. 

Now consider this; when you see a cloud forming in the west, don't you say, 'A storm is brewing? And then it arrives. And when you feel the south wind blowing, you say, 'A heat waves is on the way.' And so it happens. How foolish! You are such experts at forecasting the weather, but you are totally unwilling to understand the spiritual significance of the times you're living in, you can't even judge for yourselves what is good and right." "Oh foolish ones, who has bewitched you? O how terrible for those who confuse good with evil, right with wrong, light with dark, sweet with bitter. 

Throughout human history the fingerprints of God were upon humanity, yet they refused to honor Him as God or even be thankful for His kindness. Instead, they entertained corrupt and foolish thoughts about what God was like. This left them with nothing but misguided hearts, steeped in moral darkness. Although claiming to be wise, they were in fact shallow fools. 

This is why God lifted off his restraining hand and let them have full expression of their sinful and shameful desires. They were given over to moral depravity, dishonoring and mutilating their bodies by sexual perversion among themselves - all because they traded the truth of God for a lie. They worshiped and served the things God made rather than the God who made the things. For this reason God gave them over to their own disgraceful and vile passions. Enflamed with lust for one another, men and women ignored the natural order and exchanged normal sexual relations for that which is unnatural: and men committed shameful acts with men, receiving in themselves the due penalty of their errors. They trusted in confusion and sabotaged their lives." 

Everything written above comes from the Bible; some are paraphrases some are word for word translations; I believe this world view is truth and evident in our world today.  

 II got permission to share this and I'm eager to do so!

This woman has gone through life's most difficult circumstances, and yes, she was broken and near death until she met Jesus, and OH!!!! What healing he brought her!

"My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic, and my father was a megalomaniac who sexually abused me--incest.

I attached to neither.

Rather, I attached to my brother 7 years older than me,

and he loved me, doted on me, thought I was the best gift to him in the world.

That ‘saved’ me from dying in infancy as my mother never comforted or held her babies.

It’s all very complicated but the survival system in my brain (fight/flight/freeze)

opened and stuck in a locked position causing my adrenals to overwork,

my brain was constantly overdosed with hormones, cortisol, adrenaline constantly flowing and I learned many erroneous defense mechanisms which turned into untoward learned behaviors.

I’ve been in healing ministry with Jesus for 15 years.

Healing begins with forgiveness.

He cleared away the erroneous foundation in me,

wiped it clean and simply began teaching me in the way a child should go.

Right now, we’re dealing with undoing the wrong attachment to my elder brother and attaching to our Father and Jesus only.

Because of the above (which is brief) during the first 14 years of my Christian life walking with Jesus beginning at age 50, I was shunned by pastors, shunned by 2 churches,

twice locked into psychiatric wards for what doctors deemed ‘psychotic’ behaviors (8 fragments in my mind), lost all civil liberties and drugged.

I was diagnosed as being an Alcoholic,

diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder,

Attachment Disorder,

Major Anxiety Disorder,

Dependent Personality Disorder,

Borderline Personality Disorder,

with suicidal ideation, C-PTSD, and other terms I cannot remember.

All believers abandoned me, but 2.

My immediate family were all dead and I was estranged from my 2 daughters.

No one within the secular or Christian realm of psychiatry could or did help me.

Only Jesus. Jesus and me.

On top of all that, I had many wounds,

the embittered root systems of incest/sexual abuse,

fear/terror, lies, abandonment,

rejection, neglect, death ideation,

isolation, hyper-vigilance,

psychotic behaviors (fragmentation),

survival system injuries,

deadened emotions,

deadened conscience,

erratically systemic bodily functions,

myriad erroneously learned behaviors,

alcoholism,

I was a de-humanized creature, with a deeply rooted fear of all people, all the preceding exacerbated through freemasonry within my familial generational lineage.

For all of the above, I was a completely shattered person who ran all over the world from trauma, was homeless, raped and the list goes on.

Because of my experiential knowledge I am quite able to minister to the homeless, alcoholics, street people etc.,

because I understand the journey of pain

and when it’s left on its own the damaging effects it has on everyone.

Jesus walks the streets with me, Jesus ministers to people through my spoken and written words.

It is Jesus Who heals. Only Jesus.

Thank You, Jesus!"

 

"Worship is the free offering of ourselves to God; ever renewed, because ever imperfect. Worship expresses the consciousness that we are His by right, yet have not duly passed into His hand; that the soul has no true rest but in Him, yet has wandered in strange flights until her wing is tired. 

It is at once the lowliest and loftiest attitude of our nature. Breaking into strains, now penitential, and now jubilant; this twofold aspect of devotion must ever have, pale with weeping, flushed with joy; deploring the past, trusting for the future; ashamed of what it is, kindled by what is meant to be; shadow behind, and light before." 

James Martineau.  

 I don’t want to be a Christian

who forgets how to feel—

who hides behind answers,

quotes verses like shields,

and silences sorrow

with a song.

I don’t want a faith

of romanticized abstraction,

where resurrection is polished

and the cross is theory.

Give me something real—

flesh and blood,

grief and grace.

I want to weep

with eyes wide open.

Tears that speak truth.

Tears that rise

from the ground of compassion,

from the jagged knowledge

that the world is not

as it was meant to be.

I have seen it—

the wounded souls,

the haunted eyes,

the bruises beneath the surface.

I have felt the weight

of injustice

that crushes and isolates,

while the world looks away.

These are not tears of despair—

but of resistance,

of aching love,

of holding the pain

when no one else will.

I want a hope

that isn’t saccharine.

Not hopium.

Not denial in disguise.

But a defiant, dirt-under-the-fingernails

kind of hope—

the kind that walks through the valley,

sits in the ashes,

and still whispers,

“Even here… God.”

I want a gospel

that holds the wound.

A Christ who draws close,

a Spirit who groans,

a God who gathers every tear

in a bottle,

holds every sorrow

like a fragile flame,

and knows

what it is to break.

I want to believe—

not cheaply,

not loudly—

but with trembling trust,

that one day,

every tear

will be wiped away.

Not erased,

but remembered,

redeemed,

and transfigured.

Until then,

let me be the kind

who weeps.

Who walks in holy realism.

Who holds vigil

in the shadow of the cross

and waits,

with aching hope,

for the dawn.

- Rev'd Jon Swales

 

The following quote by James Martineau is written eloquently; his grasp on the English language is amazing; but it makes it hard to understand if you don't read much of it. 

Because of that, I ran it through ChatGPT which helps summarize it because it is so important to the Christian walk. 

Original 

"Our natural faculties and affections are graduated then to objects greater, better, fairer and more enduring, than the order of Nature gives us here. 

They demand a scale and depth of being which outwardly they do not meet, 

yet inwardly they are the organ for apprehending. 

Hence a certain glorious sorrow must ever mingle with our life: 

our actual is transcended by our possible; 

our visionary faculty is an overmatch for our experience: 

like the caged bird, we break ourselves against the bars of the finite, 

with a wing that quivers for the infinite. 

To stifle this struggle, to give up the higher aspirations, and be content with making our small lodgings snug, is to cut off the summit of our nature, and live upon the flat of a mutilated humanity."

 A.I. explanation - 

Our minds and hearts are drawn to things greater and more lasting than what the world offers. Though the outer world falls short, inwardly we’re built to grasp deeper meaning. This creates a beautiful sorrow in life—our reality is outpaced by our potential; 

our imagination exceeds our experience. 

Like a caged bird longing for the sky, we strain against our limits. To stop striving, to settle for comfort alone, is to deny the heights of our nature and live a diminished life.

 

I read that "The average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 95% are exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before." 

Wow! how sad, what a waste of potential, experience, insight and enjoyment. That very night I read this insightful piece by Martineau, about how God has implanted moral admirations and disgusts ready to awaken into power and do homage to the noble, and spurn the evil. History is long and rich, and the lives of the great and good are never far, but lie scattered like gems in biographies and good fiction that bring this various world before the mind, and in doing so it has a great effect on us. Here is how he describes, so eloquently and thought provokingly, its effect on us.  

"The effect of this wider experience is incalculably great. Opening fresh continents of character to mental survey, and throwing the human tones upon the ear in language unheard before, startling the young observer with the sigh of pity and the vow of justice and the prayer of sorrow, in dialect other than the vernacular, it acts upon the judgments of conscience like foreign travel upon those of perception; and imparts a quickness of insight and breadth of view which are unattainable within a narrow circle, and which, by the very presence within the memory of a thousand other scenes of beauty, bathe the home-landscape in a light of new endearment." 

 Beginning with the second century, the leadership of the Christian church passed to the early Church Fathers. 

They were men of Greek and Roman training and culture. 

Through them not only Greek philosophical ideals but also Greek methods of thought found an increasingly prominent place in Christianity. 

True to their inheritance and training, these great leaders regarded individual belief as far more important than social living. 

The church began to demand of its followers loyalty to a definite creed rather than loyalty to the service of their fellow men. 

As a result, the rank and file of the medieval church were wholly unconscious of the social dynamics which the scripture contain.

The Protestant Reformation put the scriptures again into the hands of the people; but unfortunately, it continued to fix their attention chiefly on the theological and largely ignored the social teachings of the Bible. 

The main emphasis was still on other-worldliness. Religion and practical ethics were regarded simply as the means whereby the individual might secure a title to future blessedness. 

There were a few striking exceptions; but a majority of the Protestant leaders failed to see that the message of historic Christianity is to the living, not to the dead, and that it must express itself in human society as well as in the soul of the individual.

Puritanism, with its splendid emphasis on personal ethics, still largely lacked the social passion. Its leaders, however, were powerfully influenced by the democratic ideals of the prophets and Jesus. Their heroic efforts to found a Christian commonwealth marked the beginnings of a new social consciousness. Until the close of the 19th century, however, a majority of the Protestant churches throughout the world were still under the chilling shadow of the Middle Ages. Even during the last quarter of that century, a prominent Protestant theologian declared: 

“Christianity is not a life: it is a dogma!”  

Charles Foster Kent, PH.D., Litt.D. from “The Social Teachings of the Prophets and Jesus.”