Shades of Gray(ce)

New Blog!

2010-08-17T15:51:00.001-05:00

I will now be updating my blog from a new location.
http://shadesofgreyce.wordpress.com/
Please check there for updates and please subscribe!!
Thanks!!

Shades of Gray(ce): "You search the scriptures because in them you THINK you have life."

2010-08-11T13:01:00.000-05:00

Shades of Gray(ce): "You search the scriptures because in them you THINK you have life."

More to Come!!

2010-02-05T00:11:00.004-06:00

I have been working on a new entry for the last couple of days - but I have been trying to see just exactly in which direction to go and how to correctly word many of the things within me. In understanding the folly of religion, let me say this: I am admittedly much more familiar and educated, both formally and through self-imposed study and research, with Western religions, philosophy, and religious thought. Now, that being said, we must realize that Christianity and Judaism have their roots and origins in Middle Eastern thought. Realizing this has caused me, over the last decade or so, to rethink and re-investigate many of the teachings and assumptions of those who claim to adhere to the "true" practice of these religions - particularly Christianity. Why do they believe what they believe and think the way they think?

In gaining a clearer understanding of the Christian religion, we must look at its figurehead: the man Jesus. Needless to say, Jesus has always been much misunderstood, even during his earthly life of thirty plus years. Is there a difference in "Christ" and "Jesus"? What was really Jesus' true mission? Where does "law vs. grace" fit in this? What about the discussion on "missing the mark"? It will all come together...

Keep checking back - there is much more to come!!!

Bound and Determined.

2010-02-02T11:07:00.012-06:00

I concede that we all have indeed "sinned" - or rather, according to the correct definition and understanding of the word, we have all "missed the mark". But what is this "mark" we have missed? The belief that the "mark" or "bull's eye" to which we should set our aim is the fulfillment of some religious system's list of "do's and don'ts" is ultimately not only spiritually unfruitful - but it is actually very detrimental and a major obstacle to spiritual growth. It is also this belief and way of thinking which is responsible for pride and prejudice among us all.

What we do or don't do has never and will never make us any closer to God than we were the day we were born! Let that sink in for a moment. Let me repeat: What we do or don't do has never and will never make us any closer to God than we were the day we were born. Now let me clarify that by adding that I speak of our position with God. Nothing can nor will ever change our position with God. N-O-T-H-I-N-G! NOTHING!

How can I make such a bold statement? We are all the children of God. All of us. You. Me. Your neighbor. The guy at work that gets on your nerves. The woman at the checkout that looks at you funny when you buy your six-pack everyday. The Buddhist you sit next to on the train every morning. The Muslim who you ride the elevator with at work every day. The African-American who just bought the house next door. The Mexican who wants to date your daughter. The Hindu who just did surgery on your grandparent. The Jew who sits on the local school board. Regardless of who you are, your nationality, skin color, or even your religion - we are all ALL the children of God. And our position with God is set from birth and nothing can nor will ever change that. St. Paul even attested to this, as recorded in the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts, when he was speaking in Athens to pagans and idol worshipers and said "We are the offspring of God". He also said, in writing to the Ephesians, that there is "one God and Father of all, who is above all, through all, and in all".

Religion is very good at what it does. It serves its purpose well. All religion was man made. "Blasphemer!" "Heretic!" Call me what you will. The fact remains - every religion was created by people. Ultimately, they were created to "bind us" together and to separate us from others. The very word "religion" means "to bind". Most of the problems in the world today stem from religious differences - virtually every major war ever fought was rooted in and stemmed from differences in religion. The rules and regulations we have bound ourselves with and to; and, which causes us to separate ourselves and be separated from the rest of the world. To what end?

Why do we willingly bind ourselves and take on an attitude of separateness? To try to get close to God - to reconnect with God - to try to get a better position with God. Therefore, as long as you count yourself a member of any one religion, you are destined to be separated from me and multitudes of your brothers and sisters. And it is impossible to not be blinded by a form of pride, thinking your system of religion is better than another in trying to establish your position with God. This is why religious people and religious minded individuals can be some of the meanest and cruelest people on earth. They always think they are right and everyone else is wrong. Why? Because they have bound themselves tighter to their religion's rules, regulations, ways of thinking, and ways of believing - more than you. Because they are more dedicated to it. Because they think they have, or will have, a better position with God because of it - better than you do or will. Religion will always foster an "us vs. them" mentality. "We are holy. You are a sinner, evil, and less than what we are." The fact is - religion and religious thinking will only draw its follower ever more deeply into bondage - mental, spiritual, and, many times, emotional bondage.

One of the main problems with religion is its premise that we need to reconnect with God. Their whole system of belief and thought is based on folly - the belief that we are truly separated from God and from each other.

What are you aiming for?

2010-02-01T00:32:00.010-06:00

The divine influence upon your heart and its resulting outworking in your life. (See the last part of the entry for Jan. 27 below.) That is truly what grace is. That is a rightly understood definition of the Greek word used for "grace" in the Bible.

"No," you may say. "It means 'unmerited favour'." Well, that may be what you were taught that it means. But look it up in a classical Greek lexicon and rightly apply it to all the biblical references - and you will see that it has to mean much more than simply "unmerited favour".

We are going to look at one verse that oh so many traditional legalistic Christians use to try to make people believe they are less than they really are - that they are "sinners in the hands of an angry God". Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

Let's break this down some. What is "sin"? It seems easy for some people to categorize everyone as "sinners" - but they don't really know what they are saying. Are they saying that everyone is evil? Well, intentionally or not, that is the connotation which people derive from it. But, you see, it really is not that bad of a thing.

"Sin" simply means "to miss the mark". That's it. It comes from a Greek word that is actually more of an archery term. It is referring to shooting an arrow and missing the bull's eye - missing the mark. So a "sinner" would simply be someone who missed the mark. Thus "sinners", plural, is just a bunch of people who what? Missed the mark. Simple. Not evil.

So let's look at this over-used verse again - replacing "sinned" with its meaning: "For all have 'missed the mark' and come short of the glory of God." By replacing a word which has, for generations, brought feelings of shame and guilt - we can begin to actually see some light and understanding. But - what of this bull's eye - this mark - which we have all missed?

According to this verse, we have missed the mark and "come short of the glory of God". So, the mark - the bull's eye - is "the glory of God". See, the bull's eye we were supposed to have been shooting for has never been a set of rules and regulations set forth by whatever religious system in which we find ourselves encompassed - it has never been that which Paul often referred to as "the law" - which not only included the "ten commandments" but also the hundreds of other religious rules and implications that were written in the "old testament" and which the scribes and Pharisees added to and enforced.

See, the "law of Moses" was never intended to be the bull's eye for people to shoot for. God never intended nor expected man to try to gain acceptance nor justification by the things we do or don't do.

Then what is/was the point of the "law of Moses"? What is this "glory of God" which is to be our bull's eye? Where does grace fit in this?

sorry

2010-01-28T15:30:00.004-06:00

Hmm....

Not sure what exactly happened to my blog entry I posted.

Last night when I tried to log in here to post another, it would not even show the blogger.com nor blogspot.com websites - so not sure what kind of issues they had.

But I will have to start doing my blog in a word-processer program and then saving it there and copy and paste it here so that I do not lose it again and waste the time I put into it.
So check back over the weekend or Monday for an update....

"You search the scriptures because in them you THINK you have life."

2010-01-27T00:01:00.008-06:00

No one during Jesus' day knew the Jewish scriptures better than the Pharisees and the scribes. They knew their scripture word for word. They could quote it, teach it, preach it better than anyone. But they were the very ones Jesus pronounced several "woes" unto in Matthew chpt 23 - and he even referred to them as serpents and vipers.

I have thought often over the last few years of what would happen if I went around to some of the churches around here and, after the pastor or priest finished his message, I were to get up and say "Woe to you. You serpent! You Viper!" LOL I do not doubt I would quickly be ushered out the door and told never to return.

The fact is, the religious leaders of today are no different than they were in Jesus' day. They use the scriptures to control people - some more subtly than others. And they themselves know and worship those scriptures, and their belief systems, more than they do God.

Jesus told the scribes and Pharisees to "search the scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life." (Jn 5:39)
They didn't know the real purpose nor the real meaning of the scriptures, even though they could quote them word for word and preach and teach them. They were so engrossed in the scriptures and what they believed and thought the scriptures meant that they thought that was where their very life came from.

I guarantee you - there are some of you reading this right now who think your life, your eternal life, comes from what you believe and what you think you know about your religion's scriptures. Let me assure you - the ONLY difference your beliefs make is in how what-you-believe affects your living now - not your "after-life".

During a time of fasting, it is said that Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread. There is so much symbolism here - if you can see it. The stones can actually symbolize a couple of things in the scriptures. They can symbolize all of the scriptures themselves. They can symbolize the tablets of stone that Moses is said to have received the laws of God upon. The stones can also symbolize things we believe or experiences and encounters with God we had in the past. (Take the story of Jacob and his dream of the ladder to heaven - after the dream he took the stone he had used for a pillow and made a monument out of it.) And bread - well it can symbolize many things - the words spoken by teachers and prophets given to sustain the people, the bread of communion, the fellowship of believers (aka church), etc. Bread gives us sustenance.

So basically, this temptation of Jesus to take the stones and turn them into bread, was really a temptation to try to find his life in the scriptures. But Jesus countered that by saying that we should not find our true life and spiritual nourishment from that - "but by every word that proceeds(continually flows) from the mouth of God."

Jesus was, in essence, being tempted to live by the "letter - which kills" (which is what the Pharisees lived by) rather than by the "Spirit - which gives life."

Do you realize, Spirit lives in you? Not in a book.
This is grace. The divine influence in your heart.

Jesus: The Heretic

2007-10-02T11:36:00.002-05:00

What a way to start an entry huh? Jesus the Heretic. Sort of gets your attention? Well, it was actually something Jesus heard alot while he was teaching. And I would venture to say that if he were here teaching today, there would be a surprising number of religious "Christian" leaders who would say the same thing. There are so many who claim to know him and his message and yet, in truth, they really do not have a clue.

Remember, this blog is primarily dealing with the message of grace and love. We are not here to discuss in depth every aspect of the teachings of Jesus nor the validity of the biblical version of his life. But I will say this - the higher on a pedestal you place the man Jesus, the harder it will be for you to truly understand and follow him and his teachings. The problem is - it has been shoved down people's throats for so long that "Jesus is God" that everyone forgets that Jesus was a man - a human being, capable of everything and anything that any other human being has ever done or will do. And it was as a man that Jesus taught and ministered as he did.

Jesus constantly questioned and even disputed claims held as truth by the sacred texts of his time. Even things credited to have been written by the patriarch Moses, Jesus flat out said "This is not the nature of God." And he was called a blasphemer and heretic because of it. There was even at least one time when the angry crowd took him to the edge of a cliff in order to throw him over and stone him to death because of his having said things such as this. This was recorded to have happened near the beginning of his ministry. Now think about all of this. Here is this virtual nobody from the ghetto (Nazareth/Galilee) who is bringing into question things attributed to one of the greatest patriarchs of your religion - the one who is said to have written a major set of your most sacred texts. Not only was Jesus a "nobody", most of those that knew him considered him to be either a bastard (literally) or at least to have been conceived illegitimately. So needless to say, Jesus was looked upon with disdain from his birth by this highly religious and pious community. So who was he to even think of questioning the sacred writings of his religion?

Why Is Grace Such a Scary Topic?

2007-09-28T11:58:00.000-05:00

Grace seems to be a scary topic for most churches and religious people. Why is it so scary? I believe it is largely due to the fact that they really do not understand God's love - and grace and love are tied together inseparably. You cannot have love without grace and you can't have grace without love - at least not God's kind of love and grace. And God's love and grace, being inseparable, are both unconditional. People have a hard time with unconditional love. I guess it would be pretty safe to say that we, as a whole, typically have a hard time with "unconditional" anything.

We tend to put the same limitations on God that we ourselves think we have. Because we may find it hard to love unconditionally - we think God is incapable of it as well. We try to make God in our own image. It's somewhat funny and also very sad that we do this. I have seen so many people try to justify themselves by saying that God thinks the same thing or acts the same way when in fact, it really shows that they do not know God as well as they think they do. They will even try to use "sacred" texts such as those found in the ever popular "Holy Bible". But what they do not realize is that when, in fact, these "sacred" texts put any kind of limit on God's love and grace - it is precisely because the writer of that text had a much too limited view of God him or herself. But that would be blasphemous, wouldn't it, to say that these "sacred" texts present us with a possibly skewed view of God? Well, just ask Jesus.