There are times when I feel really close to God, I hear him and I feel so connected to him. There are other times I feel so far away, and I hate it when I cant hear God.
I was discussing this with a friend, and they asked me why I think this might happen. I said that I think when I put in the time for God (praying, reading his word,meditation…) I feel closer to him. This is quite logical I guess, but i didnt realise just how significant it was until my friend recomended that I read a book called ‘Celebration of Discipline’ written by Richard Foster. It is a very good book, and I recomend it to anyone look to deepen their relationship with God.
This book is teaching me the importance of putting in the time to deepen my relationship with God, to get past the superficiality and the material and to explore a deeper spiritual relationship with God.
Through reading the first few pages of this book I realised several things, the great importance of discipline, to notget caught up so much with the busyness of life and to focus my mind on what is important to God.
These are things that I have been trying to do for the past few months, specifically with my Church. I wanted to be more commited and serve God and others. So I prayed about it and asked God to reveal to me how I should do this.I started to tithe my time, by being commited to attending Church atleast once a week, attendingmy house group/bible study and I took up a duty within the Church. Through reading this bookI have realised the spiritual significance of these things.
One of the questions I often asked was why do I sometimes feel close to God and other times I dont, Richard Foster answers this by saying it is a gift that God gives to us by his grace, we cannot earn it or achieve it ourselves, we can ask God to give us this gift and through developing disciplines like meditation we can deepen our closeness with him.
My first blog is going to be about truth, this is because of a recent conversation I had about faith. Following this conversation I started thinking about the nature of truth and whether or not it is absolute or relative.
I believe that truth is absolute because it would be a very strange concept if it was seen as changeable or dependable. I think that there are some things that are absolute truths, they are infinite and not dependent upon our perceptions or interactions with the world.
I believe as a Christian that there are truths about God that are in essence absolutely true. For example Gods existence and his nature, these are not dependent upon our knowledge or belief, they are true no matter what. Another example is morality, there are some things which are simply right or wrong. As a whole I am a very open minded person, and non-judgmental in my attitude combined with this I also believe that there are some things which are just true.
Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that we perceive the world through world pictures
such as: Science, Religion and Culture. Science is one way of interpreting the world, and Religion is another. Our own personal world pictures can be seen as relative, different for each individual and affected differently by culture, religion, science etc. I agree with Wittgenstein in so far as to say that we perceive the world through a world picture (which may relative), but I think that there are truths that there are absolute and therefore not dependant upon our perceptions of them and also not effected by our actions.
