FALLING SHORT OF GOD'S GLORY

Sin is that which defaces God's image and ours, made in that image. Anything less than the whole image is Sin.

'...for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God...'
Romans 3 vs 22

Love is that which glorifies God and His creation, ourselves in particular as its pinnacle.

'What is man that You are mindful of him,
Or the son of man that You take care of him?
You made him a little lower than the angels,
You crowned him with glory and honour,
And set him over the works of your hands.
You have put all things in subjection under his feet.
Hebrews 2 vs 6,7,8.

MIRRORS

The more we belittle God's glory, the more we diminish ours.
The more we behold Christ's glory, the more like Him we become.

The world prefers narcissism, beholding only itself. The Church is not immune to this with religion becoming 'self-caressing luxury.'

'We all, with unveiled face, beholding in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.'

2 Corinthians 3 vs 18

TRUE CHURCH

Where better to hide a lie than in the home of seeming truth - the visible church ? Today we look in the wrong place for the mother of the Child caught up into heaven. As it says, there is a place of safety prepared for her in the wilderness. Not many comforts to be found there.

'And she bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and to His throne.
Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God...'

Revelation 12 vs 5,6.

THE GLORY OF MAN

Seeing the God-given beauty of body and mind in ourselves and others,taking responsibility for living a God-pleasing life in present reality.

That is true humanity.

LIFE

We sacrifice the present to a future that can never be.

SOCIALISM THROUGH THE EYES OF THE LEFT

The 'Progressive Idea' matters more than 'the People'. It is always being reborn because it never survives. It carries the scent of death as it worships nihilism.

David Horowitz
Peter Collier

THE RAGE OF A REVOLUTIONARY

Anger and hostility towards the present, hope in a future which never arrives. Endless rage, awaiting the apocalyse, convinced of heaven on the other side.

REALITY

We never live where we are because we are always on the way to somewhere else, which we cannot yet conceive.

'Home' is a place where we never seem to arrive.

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON EVOLUTION

If evolutionary science detracts from God's glory and immanence in all of life, and in man's dignity as made in the image of God, then as C S Lewis phrased it, 'let science be dammed'.

MEANING

God has a purpose in all things and we are made in His image.

We cannot live without meaning.

FALSE HOPE

Encouraged by unscrupulous optimists.

Roger Scruton

SCABS

People develop scabs to cover traumatic events in their lives. We do well not to pick at them while the injury is healing.

Man's body has tremendous resources and is capable of repair from within.

MENTOR

Someone who believes in you and what you aspire to, and stands alongside to encourage and instruct you along your way.

THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE

In looking for a purpose to drive our lives, we can do no other than imitate Christ, who said it was His purpose to show the world that He loved His Father by what He did. Obedience to death.

John 14 vs 31

GRATITUDE

Bestowing value on others enables them to value themselves. As we recognise their aspirations they are given the power to pursue them.

They and their aspirations matter.

THE 'I'

Self without self-knowledge is dangerous. It refuses to live within restraints and seeks only self-gratification. The 'untamed I' betraying the 'collective 'we' of society.

Roger Scruton

ANGRY MEN

Men become angry when deprived of their illusions. They will never accept responsibility for their error or acknowledge the ensuing danger.

Does this have a familiar ring in the politics of today?

BLINDFOLDS AND EARPLUGS

Men are addicted to illusion, unable to see painful reality. Men, such as C S Lewis, seek to strip the blindfolds from the eyes of our minds.

One such illusion is Progress, but Christians are happy to march to its tune.

At times God ordains blindness as we willfully refuse to recognise Him, deafness as
the voice of the world is sweet to our ears, blocking out the voice of wisdom.

'Hearing you will hear and shall not understand.
And seeing you will see and not percieve;
For the heart of this people has grown dull.'

Matthew 13 vs 14

IT

Men who live in the 'Artic vacancy of cyber-space' are unfit for human encounters, escaping a call to take responsibility for themselves as part of the 'we' of society.

'The world-wide web threads its filaments into every human brain', turning men into an interconnected database.

Trust and accountability are absent tenants.

Roger Scruton

MAN

Men without true manliness are a mockery of man made in the image of God.

We women do well to remember we were deceived first and their acquiescence in our disobedience stripped this from them.

FRANCIS BACON

Reading of his life and on his own confession, he was ruled by greed for wealth and status. For him, progress was the way to rid us of all that holds us back from prosperity and health, bringing about utopia.

Although a brilliant thinker, setting the way forward for modern science, he had a sad lack of knowledge of God and His ways. In his view, man was master of his destiny.

The root of progress was poisoned by self-aggrandisement.

CONVERSATION

To engage others in meaningful conversation, we need to recognise them and draw them to ourselves. There needs to be an evident desire to share something of value to them.

Knowledge must enable us to engage with assurance, respect and dignity, marks of a genuine professionalism.

CIVILISATION

There needs to be an ongoing conversation about the 'considered life'. The Ways of Man must be rewritten in every age without losing any of their excellence

FUTURE

Maybe there is a way coming to free us from the sticky tape of an outmoded bureaucracy.

Self-discipline, accountability and respect are the glue if a new building is to rise.

HUMILITY

The King became a servant so that His enemies could become kings.

'I have seen servants riding horses while princes walk in the dust'

Ecclesiastes

IVF

'Fertility without the fun'.

We prefer to play god with embryos.

PRICE

'We should never buy knowledge at the cost of life.'
C S Lewis

Eve followed Satan's lure to be as God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge and paid by loosing spiritual life. We follow her example and have been paying for it ever since.

Is it ever ethical to kill in order to learn?

TRUE ETHICS

'Only those who have been educated in the wisdom of life, can muse on ethics.'
'The well-nutured man recognises Reason when it comes'.
Aristotle

'With those who follow a different Way, it is useless to take counsel.'
Confucius.

Those without Ancient Wisdom may be hostile but never critical of 'The Way'. An open mind is idiocy. 'If his mind is open let his mouth be shut'.
C S Lewis.

IDEOLOGIES

Fragments of what all men think, 'wrenched from their context and swollen to madness in their isolation.'

C S Lewis
The Abolition of Man

'MEN WITH CHESTS '

Men with chests are those who have 'trained emotions', connecting the 'reason of the head to the belly of desires'. This training should be the heart of education, drawing on ageless wisdom, sometimes known as 'Tao,' to be universally found. True men are those who have ardour to pursue virtue. There is to be a 'propagation of manliness to men'.

A true leader has learnt to harness his emotions for the benefit of others.

Today we have propaganda for secularism and wonder why, when we call for virtue and enterprise, we find none. We look for honour and find traitors.

Clever men's heads appear larger as they have no chests.

Abolition of Man
C S Lewis

PRECIOUS LIVES

We 'tear our babies from the breast' in order to survive in an self-driven economy, projecting our little ones into learning before they can reason. We are persuaded to'fit them for progress and the future', unkowningly grooming them to covet as we do. We give little thought for the values by which a true society survives. We now have a generation to whom living in debt is 'normal' and self-gratification rules.

Walter Lippman, a true progressive, perhaps spoke truly when he said that bringing women into the labour market would bring death to society. He saw them, rather, as enriching the home with knowledge gained from progress and science.

To whom are our young precious?