Featured Spiritual Envelopes
This is actually a read one get two free deal. I think my grocery shopping spawned that thought.
Well, first of all, some thoughts on spiritual gifts first. I was sitting in church today as our reverend talked to us about spiritual gifts and we went through Romans 12:3-8 in regard to spiritual gifts God has given us. I believe the emphasis in many churches on this subject comes from the pentecostal/charismatic church beliefs that put spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues at the forefront of their salvation message. Now I don't doubt these folks are wonderful people and they certainly follow the same God as any other Christian group. I do have a problem with their order of operations as it applies to salvation.
Being in a Presbyterian church, we hardly speak about such things. Spiritual gifts could be confused with serving on one of our many committees. Our message today was simply discover your God-given gifts and use them. In Romans 12, Paul mentions seven gifts and how we use these gifts to their extremes. I have no qualms with what was preached today, but I would have liked to hear more of our stance on spiritual gifts.
I really don't pay much attention to what the Presbyterian synod has to say on the subject because I've grown up building my own philosophy on everything. My parents grew up Baptist and Lutheran and eventually settled into this "Associate Reformed Presbyterian" church. I've come to follow some strange mix of them all. If you point out various aspects, I'd say I've taken the most humbling stance on each doctrinal matter. But enough about doctrine.
The thing that started me thinking was the thought of "seven spiritual gifts". Obviously there are more than the seven that Paul listed, but is there really a quantity of them? I've seen and heard churches creating a finite list of gifts numbering around 15 or so. Many churches offer classes that help to identify your spiritual gifts and find your place in the church. That is wonderful, but it also sounds very cult-ish. Whether it's the church of scientology or some other group, they all offer these self-examination classes. I think they all are conjured up by some doctrine to exact control on people. You take these classes and fill out some questionnaire and, through some illogical formula, an answer pops out telling you what to do.
The problem I see is this self-examination. We're suppose to trust that our own answers are going to point us in the way we should go. That will certainly do something. I've no doubt that we can choose a path for ourselves that seems right, but it's never going to show us what we're 100% capable of doing.
To quantize the spiritual gifts that God can offer us seems demeaning toward God. Here we are making a list and trying to comprehend God by forcing ourselves to choose from a small number of things that would define us. There's no way our minds can wrap around God, so why are we trying to wrap our minds around the gifts God gives us? I don't think there's any way we can determine the depth or quantity of our gifts without reaching and feeling around.
God may have given us equal gifts, but I don't believe anyone has the same number or kind of gifts. God cares about us too much to stop into Walmart and bulk-buy us our spiritual gifts. Even C.S. Lewis in his Narnia Tales has shown us how God gives each of us a gift suited for us. No two of us are the same, so how could we say that the same gift can suit two different people? Even if our gifts may be realized in the same way, we cannot take away one individual and expect the other to fill their place. There are no understudies in God's play, so why are people learning the same parts?
The second item today I guess will be random websites that link to other websites. I got this email today, and I have no idea how they got ahold of my gmail address, stating that CoolSiteToday! featured my website on the 9th. I don't mind the plug, but all this website does is plug one website every day. The only "category" is "cool", so your site will eventually be listed on the 2008 page with a couple hundred other sites (depending on how lazy the maintainer is). It's fine if you want to use the RSS feed to see what new random site is of interest today, but otherwise this website is a little useless. On top of that, the real face behind the website is a storefront for amazon book referral sales. Another reason why what points to cool is not cool. I ponder creating a website whitelist and saying, "this is the Internet, everything else is crap."
The final item I come to presently is my purchase of security envelopes. Mead is a great brand of pens and is other stationary, but I have become convinced that their engineers (if they still have engineers) were clearly spent on product development and less on the sales end of things. Their packaging is downright horrible. I have these plain envelopes I got at Walmart that have your standard reclosable box packaging and that's great. Mead decided to reinvent the box with this contoured "pull tab". The pull tab is made purely of line-cut cardboard. No perforation or plastic strip to keep the pull tab going. Just cardboard with lines cut into it. After wrestling it open so it looks like a mail filing bin thing, the parts of the strip remaining on both sides of the box are where the words "pull strip to open" are printed. More like, "rip box to shreds to open."
Well, first of all, some thoughts on spiritual gifts first. I was sitting in church today as our reverend talked to us about spiritual gifts and we went through Romans 12:3-8 in regard to spiritual gifts God has given us. I believe the emphasis in many churches on this subject comes from the pentecostal/charismatic church beliefs that put spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues at the forefront of their salvation message. Now I don't doubt these folks are wonderful people and they certainly follow the same God as any other Christian group. I do have a problem with their order of operations as it applies to salvation.
Being in a Presbyterian church, we hardly speak about such things. Spiritual gifts could be confused with serving on one of our many committees. Our message today was simply discover your God-given gifts and use them. In Romans 12, Paul mentions seven gifts and how we use these gifts to their extremes. I have no qualms with what was preached today, but I would have liked to hear more of our stance on spiritual gifts.
I really don't pay much attention to what the Presbyterian synod has to say on the subject because I've grown up building my own philosophy on everything. My parents grew up Baptist and Lutheran and eventually settled into this "Associate Reformed Presbyterian" church. I've come to follow some strange mix of them all. If you point out various aspects, I'd say I've taken the most humbling stance on each doctrinal matter. But enough about doctrine.
The thing that started me thinking was the thought of "seven spiritual gifts". Obviously there are more than the seven that Paul listed, but is there really a quantity of them? I've seen and heard churches creating a finite list of gifts numbering around 15 or so. Many churches offer classes that help to identify your spiritual gifts and find your place in the church. That is wonderful, but it also sounds very cult-ish. Whether it's the church of scientology or some other group, they all offer these self-examination classes. I think they all are conjured up by some doctrine to exact control on people. You take these classes and fill out some questionnaire and, through some illogical formula, an answer pops out telling you what to do.
The problem I see is this self-examination. We're suppose to trust that our own answers are going to point us in the way we should go. That will certainly do something. I've no doubt that we can choose a path for ourselves that seems right, but it's never going to show us what we're 100% capable of doing.
To quantize the spiritual gifts that God can offer us seems demeaning toward God. Here we are making a list and trying to comprehend God by forcing ourselves to choose from a small number of things that would define us. There's no way our minds can wrap around God, so why are we trying to wrap our minds around the gifts God gives us? I don't think there's any way we can determine the depth or quantity of our gifts without reaching and feeling around.
God may have given us equal gifts, but I don't believe anyone has the same number or kind of gifts. God cares about us too much to stop into Walmart and bulk-buy us our spiritual gifts. Even C.S. Lewis in his Narnia Tales has shown us how God gives each of us a gift suited for us. No two of us are the same, so how could we say that the same gift can suit two different people? Even if our gifts may be realized in the same way, we cannot take away one individual and expect the other to fill their place. There are no understudies in God's play, so why are people learning the same parts?
The second item today I guess will be random websites that link to other websites. I got this email today, and I have no idea how they got ahold of my gmail address, stating that CoolSiteToday! featured my website on the 9th. I don't mind the plug, but all this website does is plug one website every day. The only "category" is "cool", so your site will eventually be listed on the 2008 page with a couple hundred other sites (depending on how lazy the maintainer is). It's fine if you want to use the RSS feed to see what new random site is of interest today, but otherwise this website is a little useless. On top of that, the real face behind the website is a storefront for amazon book referral sales. Another reason why what points to cool is not cool. I ponder creating a website whitelist and saying, "this is the Internet, everything else is crap."
The final item I come to presently is my purchase of security envelopes. Mead is a great brand of pens and is other stationary, but I have become convinced that their engineers (if they still have engineers) were clearly spent on product development and less on the sales end of things. Their packaging is downright horrible. I have these plain envelopes I got at Walmart that have your standard reclosable box packaging and that's great. Mead decided to reinvent the box with this contoured "pull tab". The pull tab is made purely of line-cut cardboard. No perforation or plastic strip to keep the pull tab going. Just cardboard with lines cut into it. After wrestling it open so it looks like a mail filing bin thing, the parts of the strip remaining on both sides of the box are where the words "pull strip to open" are printed. More like, "rip box to shreds to open."