Poetry

Proverbial Fragments

by Terry Barlow
12/05/14
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If words prayed without thoughts fail to ascend to heaven, then thoughts must be the wings of prayer that bring those words there. Enoch and Elijah, like Jesus, ascended to heaven, but Enoch and Elijah, unlike Jesus, did not DESCEND from heaven in the first place.

  There was once an infinite infant who joined the infantry, in fact he grew to become commander and CHIEF of God’s infantry.

 We humans are all lazy, only in different ways, and we are also all ignorant, only on different days,  maybe, and in different areas. This realization isn’t a negative, if it helps us go easier on the weaknesses of others (with which and with whom we tend to compare ourselves only by our strengths) and easier on our own weaknesses sometimes.

  There’s earthly fame and there’s heavenly fame, and the one who experiences one may know nothing of the other. There’s earthly obscurity and there’s heavenly obscurity, and one is more serious than the other in that it is spread further and lasts longer. Come to think of it, if earthly obscurity preserves good character, then it IS heavenly.

  It’s been said that almost half of the ancestral line of Jesus Christ is made up of broken families. That needn’t surprise us in light of what God had to work with, and the fact that ALL of redemptive history is the account of the restoration of that original Adamic broken family.

  The Garden of Eden becomes a city, New Jerusalem. One might say it’s to be THE garden city. Far more will have been gained than was ever lost in The Fall, so all that was endured will have been well worth it!

 There are other garden cities on earth and even a garden state, but New Jerusalem far surpasses them all. The prophet Ezekiel spoke of a “garden of renown” or “a planting place.” (Ezekiel 34 v.29) The plantings in this case will be human plantings and flowerings made everlasting.

 If all shepherds are responsible for the condition of their sheep, then there are many hoping for the contrition of their sheep.

 It’s no wonder that Jesus cares so much about the sanctity of life when we consider that he was once a fetus inside a woman himself.

  Human nature is like twisted wood (acacia wood of example), the gnarls produce the snarls. But that gnarled and snarling wood can be inlaid with pure gold.

  May we find what we don’t expect in pleasant surprises, grain waving on the mountaintops, lambs in the place of lions…..and all seeming to come out of nowhere.

We can do wonderful things with sand like walking barefoot on it in the warm sunshine or building sandcastles out of it,  or burying friends and family members in it for fun.  We can even spread it before tires to gain traction for our cars on icy roads.  But one thing we cannot do successfully with sand and that is to build our houses on it.  It makes a lousy foundation.  It will sink and we would sink with it.  People, even the best of us,  are a lot like sand (Adam was formed from clay which is a form of sand) and cannot be depended on in this fundamental way:  as a base or basis to build our lives upon or around.

Christians were first called "people of the way."  When the society to which they belong is headed in a wrong direction, they need to be a "people IN the way!"

It's no surprise that "live" spelled backwards is" evil" when we consider what happens when we get right and wrong upside down and turned around, when the individual's purrpose in life has been perverted.

""Extra credit fir profundities!" proclaimed Mr. Kalina, our English teacher, as he gave the sentence diagramming assignment.  But I could no more be profound when trying to do so than I could be myself or "find myself" by making a deliberate attempt at it.

How fitting that Daniel.'s Babylonian name should be a prayer (Beltshazzar= praying for protection of the king)) speaking to his destiny as prophet and prayer warrior.

How beautiful too if our new names in heaven were to be prayers and praises speaking to our own destinies as worshippers of our glorious God and King.!

It is pertinent that in Jewish law and custom the child received its name on the 8th day of its life, the day the male babies were circumcised. (when the blood begins to coagulate, modern medical science learned!)  True identity is all bound up with circumcision, even spiritual identity and the inner circumcision of the heart, to cut away its hardness and sensitize to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Part of our true  identities is being known by the message we bring.  Check it out and see;  at least three of the so-called Old Testament "minor prophets" (no prophet is really "minor") located just before and even including Zechariah began preaching the literal meanings of their names!

 There is a way that the Big Bang Theorists are bound to be right, only in reverse.  Yes, Apostle Peter tells us in the New Testament (2Peter3 v10) how the world will end in something like an explosion, but not exploding at the beginning FROM a super dense point of singularity, instead exploding at the end TOWARD a point of singularity which will have been the POINT of all history and its center of singularity, Jesus Christ, before Whom Apostle Paul says every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord! (Phillipians2 v10)

Some say they have looked for truth in all the wrong places, but not if it's absence there kept them looking further and elsewhere until they" found it" or were found themselves. 

When I enter my house I hang my car key on a hook, the "hook" that the Key to heaven was hung on was the Cross.  He was put on "the hook" to get us OFF the hook. 

It is true that God doesn't force us but invites us instead, but He also commands us for our own good leaving us fer all the while to disobey at our own peril.

There is one rapture that is all through the Bible, the one of our being so enraptured with the love of Jesus for us and ours for Him that He cannot resist returning for us!

God is ever speaking as a spring is ever freshly flowing.  For God alone is it possible to be always speaking and yet always listening to us too!

 A good way to please God is to be pleased ourselves.

For us, as ambassadors of Christ who possess the ministry of reconciliation, there must be no such things as “irreconcilable differences.”  Otherwise wouldn’t we be guilty of giving up?