Timothy's Thoughts

S omeone once questioned whether we can claim to have faith if we pray for rain and don’t carry an umbrella. As I indicated in yesterday’s post, just because we pray for something doesn’t mean God has to give it to us and yet, he wants us to make our requests known to him and he often gives us what we request. That causes me to question whether we should measure our faith by whether we carry an umbrella or not. When we have a problem that causes us to worry, whether it be a lack of rain, the desire for a child, or the health of a loved one, Philippians 4:6,7 tells us that we can make our requests known to God and he will give us peace. Sometimes that peace comes from God giving us the thing we asked for. I’m sure the church had a lot more peace when Peter showed up at the door than when they were praying for his release from prison. We might fault them for being surprised that he would show up, but they were probably hoping he would be released the next day or sometime that week. The...

O ften, when people talk about prayer, what they really want to know is how to get God to do what they want. There have been a number of studies that have attempted to see if prayer could be used for medicinal purposes. The result has been mixed. Some studies indicate that people come through surgery better when people are praying for them while others indicate they don’t or even do worse when people are praying for them. But no matter what the study results show, the goal of the prayer was to get God to do what we want. And that’s just a little silly, when you think about it. God is bigger than the Universe. Our expecting God to do whatever we want is similar to an ant walking across our kitchen counter asking us to put out some sugar for him, when we’re more likely to squish the little creature, and rightly so. We are nothing compared to God. And yet, the lines of communication are open between us and God. Jesus did that for us on the cross. The Bible encourages us to pray. What then...

I ’ve been thinking about alcohol recently. That’s not as bad as it sounds. I haven’t suddenly become an alcoholic. Beer smells like pig slop. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to drink the stuff and yet, people do. Aside from the fact that people are drinking such nasty stuff, it interests me that so many Christians have taken to the stuff. Today, it’s hard to believe that there was once a time in the United States that we passed an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” It was later repealed, but there was enough support among the several States at the time to make it the law of the land. How strange that today you would have a hard time getting many church people to support such a law. Today, the trend seems to be that many Christians are not only unopposed to other people drinking, but they are actively supporting the use of alcohol. Their argument for its use is usually along the lines of “the Bible does...

W hy do we have so many denominations? If you look at Christianity, you’ll see that there are many denominations, both great and small. And there are groups that can’t rightly be called denominations because they lack a hierarchical structure, but that hardly matters, there are a lot of different denominations. In recent years, many people have taken hold of the idea that the various denominations should work together. After all, “aren’t we all working to get to the same place?” Well, in a word, no. That’s part of the problem. I spend time hanging around writers in cyberspace. Many of them are Christians and what I’ve seen is that many of them seem to see no problem with bringing several denominations together. In some cases, they have participated in corporate worship in the form of having communion together at a writers conference. Not only does that remove the Lord’s Supper from the oversight of the church (and by that I mean a local visible body of baptized believers, which is ho...

I watched COPS the other day and saw one segment in which three boys were arrested for throwing rocks from an overpass. They hit a minivan and the driver chased them on foot until the police caught them. The police called their homes and their mothers came and bawled them out. The police tried to encourage the mothers by saying that their showing up showed that they cared for the boys. But I couldn’t help but wonder, where are the fathers? When I was a child, my father worked an hour away from home, so he wouldn’t have been able to show up quickly if I’d ever gotten into that kind of trouble. It might have been a case like that, but it’s unlikely. There is an absence of male role models in the lives of young men today. It seems to be worse in the black community, but no segment of society is exempt. Even among Christian families, men seem to be missing. Some people don’t seem to think this is a problem. I suppose they’ve got their heads in the clouds or something. Having grown up ...

O ne of the things in the Bible that’s hard to understand is the interplay between freewill and election. Some people put a lot of emphasis on freewill and others put emphasis on God’s election. The Bible seems to teach both and yet they seem like distant concepts. The other day, I heard a concept that I’d never heard before. We often question why God would choose one person and not another, when none of us are worthy. It doesn’t seem fair. But one preacher stated that he had the idea that the only person God ever chose was Jesus. I can’t say that I’ve thought through this completely, but it does seem to make sense. By that understanding, God isn’t looking at us and for some unknown reason picking us. Instead, God looks at the world and he sees a lot of sinners, but mixed in among those are some people that when he looks at them he sees Jesus. If you’re looking for cause and effect, God from before time began could look down though future history and see people who were covered by ...

I installed configuration management software on my home computer this weekend. The software is call subversion. Configuration management software has the ability to store previous versions of files and is primarily used by software developers so that more than one person can work on a file and then those changes can be merged back into the system. I'm using it for a hobby project, even though I'm the only developer on the project, because it allows me to make changes with less fear that I'll mess things up and won't be able to remember what I changed. I've been reading a book. The author said that he used configuration management software for the book. I think I might try that for the book I'm currently writing. In addition to the normal text, which I should give me reason enough for configuration management software, this book will have a significant number of pictures and graphs. With configuration management software, I'll be able to modify the pictur...