Thursday, 22 November 2007 by Paul Dubuc.

I once took a trip to Disney World with my family and we stayed for a week. Much of it was fun, but after a few days in that world I began to have an uneasy feeling. Disney World is a fabricated experience that is made to be as totally enveloping as possible. Everywhere you go there are amusements, entertainments, displays and details that seem to blur the line between fantasy and reality. The transportation, the restaurants and living accommodations are all part of the design. I went into a building designed to look like a church in Norway which wasn’t really a church building. The apartment we stayed in was modeled to look like a tree house out of Swiss Family Robinson but it wasn’t built in a real tree. I saw robots designed to look and act like humans and humans dressed up and acting like robots. After a few days of living in this world I looked up at the stars in the night sky and the thought crossed my mind, “at least those are real, aren’t they?” As much fun as Disney World was, especially for the kids, I was happy to get back to the real world. But how real is the world I live in? Read the rest of this entry »

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Monday, 15 October 2007 by Paul Dubuc.

When I was looking around for a devotional topic for last week’s Prayer at Six meeting, I came across the evening devotional for that date (October 8th) in Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening. The 20th verse of the book of Jude exhorts us to “pray in the Holy Spirit.” In this devotional reading, Spurgeon gives his rendition of what this means. First, he characterizes prayer as a two-way relationship with God when he says that, “Only the prayer which comes from God can go to God.” Prayer is a conversation with God, not a monologue. Prayers that are entirely self-motivated have little effect. He then goes on to describe five qualities of praying in the Spirit. We considered the first one at this evening’s meeting: “Praying in the Holy Spirit is praying in fervency. Cold prayers ask the Lord not to hear them. Those who do not plead with fervency, plead not at all. As well speak of lukewarm fire as of lukewarm prayer—it is essential that it be red hot.” This got me to thinking about what fervency means for prayer. Read the rest of this entry »

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Friday, 20 July 2007 by Paul Dubuc.

Okay, maybe I’ve been reading ThinkChristian too much lately, but they just found a very good quote on the Radio Bible Class web site which needs to be widely voiced. The salient point of it is that “Truth spoken without love is devastatingly harmful. Love expressed without truth is tragically misleading.” This is an important balance that most of us find hard to practice but which Scripture encourages us to fulfill by Jesus’ example and Paul’s teaching. Truth and love don’t contradict one another but it seems so difficult for us to blend the two. It seems easier for us to convey one to the exclusion of the other when both are required. Why is that? Is it a product of our fallen nature? All I know is that it takes a lot of grace to overcome this tendency in myself. I’ve been thinking about what kind of person it takes to consistently blend these characteristics in his or her relationship to others. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sunday, 3 June 2007 by Paul Dubuc.

After trying other things for a couple of years, I’ve just started using the St. James Daily Devotional Guide again. This was the mainstay of my devotional reading and prayers for several years before that. It’s a simple Bible reading plan that’s easy to follow and adapt you your schedule. It’s sensitive to the liturgical church year, which I appreciate.

Today is Trinity Sunday and in the Gospel reading in John 16:5-15 Jesus draws our attention to the importance of an all-too-often discomfiting and (therefore) neglected member of the Trinity: The Holy Spirit. We may have a familiar image of God as Father and creator of the universe. His human incarnation we know as Jesus Christ in the Gospels. But the Holy Spirit is harder to conceptualize. The other two images are easier for us to manipulate, control and keep at a distance in accordance with our own desires. The Holy Spirit is dynamic, unpredictable, uncontrollable. Our relationship with a distant Father figure or a flesh and blood historical person can be “kept in its place” at our end. But who can escape the presence of a Spirit or avoid a confrontation with him?

Jesus says that it is to his disciples’ benefit that he go away because the coming of the Helper, the Holy Spirit, allows us to relate to God in a much less limited way. This is good for us whether it makes us feel comfortable or not. Indeed, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit’s coming will make many people uncomfortable. What to make of vv. 8-10, where Jesus tells us so? The three ways and reasons that Jesus gives for the discomfiting nature of the Holy Spirit all seem to have to do with the separation between God and his creatures. As the Holy Spirit, God comes alive in the very lives of those who serve him. We Christians ought to be the evidence that helps others to believe and repent of their sin, displaying in our own lives God’s goodness and love, and exposing by contrast all evil for what it it is.

God is not content to be distant, controlled or ignored by those who call themselves by his name. The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth. He doesn’t let us get comfortable with our own self deceptions. He is the very essence of any real and alive relationship with God. We best not ignore him, even if his work makes us uneasy at times, because he is the only way that all that belongs to the Father and the Son comes to us.

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