True Love.

Love is not desire, as Professor Dallas Willard would say. Desire seeks to have it's way with what is desired. It wants to eat it. It craves it, but it does not love it. Desire does not want to serve the beloved, for the beloved is not a beloved at all but is rather the belusted; treated by the one desiring it's own way without any respect for her at all.

Love seeks the good of that which is loved.

True love is marked by giving, not getting. Just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for us, so we too are to exemplify His love for one another by living for one another in an exceedingly sacrificial way. Go above and beyond in loving one another. Evoke the beloveds' beauty with your love. Bring out the best in the one whom you love. If you want to love as Christ loves, you must give your whole being to the practice of love, treating others as you would want to be treated. You cannot do this apart from God. You need His generous love abiding in you in order for you to truly love as Jesus has loved. The more time you spend in the presence of the One who is Love [God], the more readily you will become a loving being. Dwell with Him, love Him, and learn to love like Him.

-burton 261E

The University of Knowledge.

It brings me great grief to be amidst the presence of a handful of students and a professor fifteen years older than I all laughing at the pitiful and hopeless people who still hold some kind of belief in "God," equating this belief with the belief that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy actually exist. They laugh as though those people who place their belief in God do so with hardly any thought past "He just does.", and that the thought that those people do put into His existence contains little, if any, depth at all. The professor rips away any bit of potential evidence for God's existence, extracting a well constructed thesis out of context and picking bits and pieces out of history as though these small chunks contained the real remnant of truth. The very basis or starting point of most arguments that aim at destroying belief in God begin with false pretenses, and they do not give even remotely a fair representation of the biblical view of God in relation to humanity. To rebuke such false statements is difficult when the starting point of the statement claimed starts with a lack of the bigger picture. I want to so desperately present the whole picture in its entirety, but in order to do so requires an audience that is willing to listen. Thus far, I have found nothing but meaningless knowledge and questioning that leads herds of beautiful minds nowhere.

We all place our belief in something. It may not be God, but every human being believes in something as the ultimate cause or the primary source of all living things, and if he does not believe in an ultimate cause or a primary source then he believes in nothing, and to claim belief in nothing is still claiming belief in something. It is impossible to believe in nothing unless you also (along with that belief in nothing) don't believe in your own existence (or don't believe that you do exist), thus if you believe in your own existence you believe in something--namely, yourself. When I was religious, focusing on morality and obeying rules, I placed my trust in the law. When I was an Atheist, I put all of my trust in myself and it brought me much depression, purposelessness, and pain, for I knew that with all of the powers I could personally gather, those powers, in the end, matter very little at all in relation to everything else that has gone on over the progression of time. Now that I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, I put all of my trust in God and He has given me hope, joy, peace, and a great sense of purpose. Where are you putting your trust? Is it in yourself, humanity, material objects, rules, or people? Examine yourself and see what you believe in, what you hope in. Would you die for that belief? I will die for mine.


-burton 261E

My Apologies.

I do want to apologize for my lack of updating this blog. It's been quite some time now, and for many different reasons it makes complete sense to me as to why it has been so terribly long.
I have been on a wonderful quest of learning, and upon this quest I have begun to make numerous discoveries through which my eyes have seen a much larger horizon that is greatly beyond me. It's difficult for me to explain right now, but my time is going to be better spent gathering my thoughts and writing them in the form of a book for a while, and whence this book is filled with all of its pages (however many pages that may be), I will then, once again, continue to post regularly.
If I had all of the time in the world to write bits and pieces of my thought processes, I would, but life is such that I am forced to many other obligations as well as time commitments and must spend this short time that we call life as efficiently as possible.

Hope to return sooner, rather than later (or rather than never again),
burton

P.S. Please keep me in prayer.

The Great Confirmation.

No feeling in the world is greater than when the Lord confirms His work in and through you. When the Lord God Almighty tells you firsthand that He is with you and that He has gone ahead of you to clear the way for His marvelous plans to be executed for His great glory. What a wonderful emotion, experience, and moment is this.

-burton 261e

A Wonderful Take on the Human Condition.

This quote is such a wonderful take on the human condition (Our condition :P) in relation to the absolute necessity of a life lived in full dependence on God and pure relationship with Him to live in a manner worthy of the calling in which we have been called:

"How slothful and unfit we are for this blessed work.
Only the Spirit of God can enable us to do right."
-Andrew Murray (Pg. 10, With Christ in the School of Prayer)

The "knack that you never want to come back."

I believe that all of us, have at the very least 'jumped the gun' once on God. What I mean by that is we sometimes get so caught up in our own desire, that we tend to play God and go for that desire without waiting on Him long enough; without consulting Him properly through His own, perfect, God-like timing.

In 1 Samuel 14, King Saul, just after being anointed and appointed King over Israel, 'jumps the gun' on God and in turn, becomes His own God.

Saul's son, Johnathan, caused a great commotion North of the Israelites encampment where the Philistines had a garrison, and had slaughtered twenty men with only himself and his armor bearer. When the first twenty fell, the whole Philistine garrison trembled and the ground shook with panicky footsteps. When Saul's watchmen noticed the scattering of the Philistines, Saul quickly counted heads to see whom of the Israelites was missing. When the heads were counted, sure enough, Johnathan and his armor bearer were gone. In verse 18, Saul called for the Ark of God, which meant that His first reaction to what was happening around Him was to consult God. This is good. However, in verse 19, Saul tells the priest to remove his hand (or put the ark back where it was) because of the urgency of the moment and rushes straight into battle without God's permission. He decides that listening to the voice of God would have taken too long and it would have ruined his military advantage. The problem with Saul's actions is that he didn't obey the voice of God and didn't depend on Him. Yes, Saul's first thought was to seek God's advice, but he did not go any further than that initial thought. Instead, Saul acted on his own insight and broke his commitment to obey God, He broke his dependence with God and chose independence from God; Saul was not a man after God's own heart.

The point of me writing about Saul's disobedience is to provide a biblical example of how we, as humans, have a knack for determining what's right or what's wrong in our own eyes without first asking God what His verdict is. If you recognize the prideful tendencies in your own heart, and you repent and ask God to change them, then I pray that this will be one knack in your life that will never have to come back.

Stay humble, be obedient, ask God what He desires for your life, and pursue just that.


-burton 261E