Prophetic shadows

This is the third iteration of this post and while I'm tired and a bit frustrated to get to this point, I'm also thankful that the Lord pushes us through the tedious to get to something better.

Some things of late that are burning in me:

• God is bigger than me and while I say these words, they reflect realities I can not imagine
• Revelation is universal. Jesus is universal. Yet I am Existentially responsible for the human I become and how I will respond to God's love
  
• Humanity has an affinity to law. Religion attempts to bridge proper living (AKA law) with interactions with God that are beyond religious description. Religion is not evil and spirituality good. Rather both are more a means of history, reflecting important elements that others have found helpful. Religion/spirituality is our snapshot of God's intervention. It has value, but the further we get from the source, the more distortive it can become
  
• We can find points of history that tell us what we want to hear about God and we can reject tradition to the exclusion of God. History and tradition are not monolithic - they are tinkered, reconceived, used for glorious and evil ends. They must be handled with care and respect, not to the point of cynicism and not to the point of unadulterated acceptance
  
• The Bible is an amazing description and sacred illumination to the redemptive history that started prior to it and continues beyond it
• In Jesus those elements of faith that were revelatory of God through ancient understandings continue their life. Through Jesus all contemporary faith statements become scrutinized and have their life
  
• Our propensity for law distances us from God while God offers a life in the Spirit where we must take responsibility for our choices through our conscience
• We need religious expression because to get beyond religion in most cases is to become self-consumed. To worship often requires a context provided beautifully by religion. God interacts and we respond. Unfortunately, he is often responding freshly while we are dogmatizing the latter experience
• We must recognize that religion has a built-in motivation for self-preservation that often supersedes truthfulness when faithful judgment on it is harsh. It becomes a life that sometimes is the means for salvation and other times hinders God's work. The work of the prophetic is to provide God's judgment and allow for disillusionment and renewed life with different/better conceptions of God at the time
• God is beyond good and evil. He stepped through chaos to create order. Somehow this plays a part in our understanding of who he is. He cannot be domesticated
  
• Somehow God is involved in societal culture. There is a thread of the church in culture as there is a strand of culture within those who believe. Our separation of church and state (which has been mutually beneficial to both) is artificial, but the alternative is not a nation of anti-abortion laws, prayer in school, and the 10 commandments in court houses. It is a people where their conscience is shaped by the Spirit, the work of their hands is the ministry, and love is not part of a priority list it has become their existence through intuition and action
  
• If believers refuse to hear the Spirit and continue to preserve religion as an effort to benefit God without his involvement, he will use others who are able to hear. God is not more concerned about Christianity's success over Islam. Rather he is concerned that salvation in his terms is experienced through Christ
  
• Art, human love, music, poetry, and expressions of meritless kindness give humanity a starting point to understand God's grace. To be born again is to throw away preconceptions on the important things in life and let Christ mold us as a baby learns language, trust, and love in union with mom
  

Some of this probably sounds New Age-y. Tomorrow, with fresh eyes, I might be greatly embarrassed or not able to remember a bit about why I wrote a particular sentence (though it seems so self-evident now).

Good night and blessings...