Picture This

So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear!   (James 1:21-24 MSG)

Don't you just love the phrasing here? The word-pictures are stunning to my mind's eye. I can imagine coming to recognize a life lived less than desirably and then coming to grips with it. The action of scooping up the spoiled virtue and cancerous evil and dumping it into the garbage can. 

Lastly, slapping your hands together as though wiping them clean of the past mistakes, turning abruptly and walking in the opposite direction. Once the new life is begun and the fresh start is before you, things are different...eventually. We all must learn how to live out this new life.
This is where other Christians come into the picture. They can build relationships with us, mentor us and teach us how to live a life as Jesus would have us live. We learn how to love and care for each other. We practice real listening - to our mentors and then to each other as we share life.

And we do all this face-to-face. Not on social media, not in an impersonal text or email, but within touching distance. That is the only way to touch each other's lives. It is the one true way to cultivate real empathy.

I close today with verse 25 of The Message version of this text is completed by these vivid words: But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.

James 1:21-25

The Twitter of Life

 (Resurrection & Judgement)

Revelation 20:11-15

  

Our culture is changing in quantum leaps! Wasn’t it just yesterday that every kindergarten student read “Dick and Jane”? While last year my granddaughter, in her kindergarten class, used Chromebooks – whatever that is.

 

¹² I saw the dead, great and small, standing before God; and The Books were opened, including the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to the things written in The Books, each according to the deeds he had done. ¹³ The oceans surrendered the bodies buried in them; and the earth and the underworld gave up the dead in them. Each was judged according to his deeds.             TLB

 

Is it possible that the Living Bible, or some other hip modern day translation, might eventually refer to the “Book of Life” as the “Twitter of Life” or “Facebook of Life” or some other social media?

 

At the risk of sounding sacrilegious with this suggestion, just think about it? What is it that people post on social media other than what they’ve been doing? But do they tell everything that is happening; their every action, every thought, every desire, every emotion? No. Because if they did they wouldn’t have any friends left!

 

On the other hand, the Book of Life will. In social media we tell what we want people to know about us. The Book of Life will tell, as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story”. Or David may have said it better with this abbreviated quote.

 

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me… You know when I sit or stand; my every thought; where I am; what I am going to say before I even say it.                        Psalm 139:1-4 TLB

 

The Twitter of Life may sound catchy, but final judgment is definitely not. It is a

reality that all of us face, and it is only by God’s grace that we are free from “the lake of fire” as our destiny. Instead, our destiny lies in a “new heaven and a new earth” living in the eternal presence of our loving Holy Father.

 

 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%2020%3A11-15&version=NIV;TLB

https://www.biblegateway.com/audio/mclean/niv/Rev.20.11-Rev.20.15