Monday, January 23, 2006

Your Idea of the Church

This post requires interaction from the blog readers. Your assignment is to leave a comment about your experience(s) with church. They can be positive or negative. Take some time to and leave a comment. Please do not leave the church name when leaving a comment. If you don't want to leave your name with your comment, feel free to leave it as an anonymous comment.

Thanks all.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Topic of sexual desires

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
I Corinthians 6:18-20

If you take notice of the first sentence of the above passage, you will notice that it says, "Flee from sexual immorality." You will also notice it didn't use a single word or words such as; lust, divorce, homosexuality, beastiality, or affairs. The reason for this is because they are all the same sin in God's sight. They are all a form of sexual sin. Homosexuality is no different than a woman and a man getting together for sexual pleasure if they are not married. Why is it, we as humans try to make it different, try to make one a worse sin than another. God doesn't hate anyone. But, what he does hate is the sin that we commit. Imagine for a second, if you will, you have a son or a daughter that decides they have decided to move in with the opposite sex and have sexual relations. You have two options for a response; A) You can hate them for doing what they are doing, or B) You can still show love towards them but hate that they are living with someone. What is your answer? A or B? Now, lets change the scenario a little bit. Lets say your son or daughter has decided that they are homosexual. They have decided to have homosexual relations with another person. Now what would you choose? To hate them, or to still love them but hate there actions? I cannot imagine my son or daughter doing anything that would make me hate them. Yes, they will most likely do some type of action that I hate, but none the less I will not hate them for it.

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves.
Roman 12:9-10

Is it possible to love someone but at the same time hate the sin? I believe it is possible. I didn't say it would be easy. Jesus does this for us everyday. He loves us but hate our sins. There is only one thing we can to not be let into heaven. That one thing is rejecting Jesus. In rejecting Jesus, we reject the idea that we are sinners, we reject the idea that Jesus came to this world and died on the cross for our sins. Jesus did not do this in vain.

We must love people but at the same time hate what they are doing. If we are able to do that how much power there could be for the cause of Christ. This post, in a nut shell is to show how important it is love others regardless of what they may be doing, God's love can not be shown through hatred.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

It's Time to Get Real

This is an introductory post for what is to come in the next several weeks. I am not sure how many posts will be included altogether. Feedback and comments, as always, are welcomed and appreciated. I have contemplated several different issues which I believe Christians at some point face during their life-time. It is time for my views to get out into the world.

Unfortunately in the United States Christians tend to be viewed through two types of microscopes. The first microscope, being if you are a Christian then you must be religious. I hate the term religious, it implies following a set of rules, which is not what Christianity is about. A long with this view, most people tend to think that if you are a Christian then you must also be some type of religious fanatic, you must, it is assumed, have a extreme right wing view of life.

I would like to quickly give an example of one such group that is religiously fanatic and maybe even borderline terrorist. This group comes from Topeka, Kansas and is called the Westboro Baptist Church. The church web page address is www.godhatesfags.com Yes you read that correctly-- God Hates Fags. I'm here to tell you God does NOT hate fags, he actually loves them. I will be discussing more on this topic in another post.

The hyprocrosy of a Christian is the second microscope which we are viewed through. In many ways this is true. And this is where Christians are coming up short in their faith. Many people go to church. Many people call themselves Christians. Non-Christians see how how Christians act in everyday life settings. Honestly many Christians don't act much differently from their counter-parts. Now, I'm not saying if you are a Christian you have to be perfect. Being perfect is impossible. In fact, there is only one person I know that is perfect, that person is Jesus Christ. What I am trying to convey here is the fact of being real. There will be more posts on this very topic of being real.

I know I am not perfect. I don't pretend to try to be perfect. I have made mistakes in my past and currently make mistakes today and I will in the future. These mistakes I make are called sin. No one likes to hear the "s" word. Yes, I have sinned. I have sinned sexually, at a very young age. I still have consequences from the sin I committed in sixth grade. The sin I am talking about is pornography. Yes, I watched a porn in the sixth grade. Watching this warped my view point of the opposite sex. I began seeing girls in a sexual way rather than a holy way. This view didn't start forming until my high school years, but the foundation for it was set in the sixth grade. I am not addicted to porn, but I probably could come addicted to it easily if I let myself. To this day I don't want to watch anything that has sex scenes in them. Unfortunately sex seems to every where. Even in commercials. Delilah and I went to watch Cold Mountain in the movie theater. It was a great movie until the sex scene, I mean porn scene, because that is what it really was. The sex scene ruined the whole movie for me. I will not watch it again, no desire to, the movie has been ruined for me.

Now you might be asking, "Why in the world is Jake writing this stuff?" I want to be real. There will be more to come future installments.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Plans

It has been a while since I have last posted anything on my blog. I do have plans to do some serious writing on this blog in the near future. Some of the topics I will be writing about will be the following:
It's Time to Get Real
The Church is Missing the Mark
The S Word

In other news, I have started using the Fire Fox browser. I love it. I wish I would have started using it a long time ago. It is a very smooth browser to use. I suggest everyone should use it. You can get it at firefox.com

I am currently watching a documentary on the History Channel about Lincoln. (Yes, I am a nerd, I have always enjoyed learning things about our nations history) Anyways, this documentary his about Lincoln's history more specifically his mental and emotional part of his life. I never realized how hard he had it while growing up. He went through a lot of tragedies in his early years and fought depression through out his life. It's amazing how he made it to the presidency.

Later

Monday, January 09, 2006

More catch up, please.

It is 9 days into the new year and I have no New Year's resolution. Is it ok not have a resolution for the new year? Not that it really matters because I usually don't keep them very long. The Christmas season is officially over for us. We celebrated with my family in West Virginia over the weekend. Make sure you check out Delilah's blog for a great story. (delilahmiller.blogspot.com) It was a relaxing weekend. I was even able to do 2 geocaches, I am now up to 49 found, I'm getting there. During the last 2 weeks of work, I worked a grand total of 40 hours and had 24 hours of holiday pay, 8 hours of vacation pay and 8 hours of sick pay. I wish I always had to work 40 hours over a 2 week stretch, how nice life would be.
We mostly like will not be moving out of the area, we always talk about it, but it mostly just talk. I wouldn't mind moving to WV or TN but we do have a lot of connections here and for the time being don't want to change anything. Delilah found a job that she will be applying for, it is a volunteer coordinator at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron. I think it would be a fun job. We have been talking about taking her mom there for ummmmmm like 4 years now. For some reason or another it never pans out. I'm still waiting to hear back about my resume to the "crazy" guy. I really want the job. I've thought about asking for the salesperson job I think I would be able to do a great job at it. I have no experience in sales, but I think that can be to an advantage then he could train me how he wants me to work in the sales.
That is enough catch up for now, I'm sure I will be giving some more in the future.
Later. Peace. Word. Out.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Crazy

Fear not anonymous comment poster......
I have looked up the definition of crazy on dictionary.com and found the definition that fits my description of crazy perfectly and hopefully yours as well.

This is the informal definition of crazy.
Possessed by enthusiasm or excitement: The crowd at the game went crazy.
Intensely involved or preoccupied: is crazy about cars and racing.

The person that Delilah might or might not work with is definitely possessed by enthusiasm and is most definitely intensely involved in whatever he is doing.

The first and actual definition of crazy is: affected with madness; insane. One could have an argument that the person you know and love could be that type of crazy based on the team he likes, and I'm not talking about liking the Browns either. ;-)

By the way, not so anonymous are you?

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

A Poll

Many of you know by now I am in the hunt for a new job. I have one job lead right now and am just waiting to see what happens. The is another job opening I found in Johnson City, TN., which would be a great place to live considering how close it is to Bristol, TN. None of what I mentioned has anything to with this post. My question is........(hypothetical.....of course).............
If the wife had the opportunity to make some major money, possibly enough to let her husband stay home and not have to work.........but it involved some travel time away from the family........Possibly with a crazy guy..........(not bad crazy.......just funny crazy)...........would you (A)hey honey go on off to work, I'll manage, or (B)No way are you traveling with out me and the kids specially with that crazy guy, or (C)Well there really is no answer available.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Back in the Groove

Today is the legal day for New Year's Day. So I am not required to work today. Unfortunately Delilah has to. That is OK though, today has given me the chance to easily slide back into the groove of things. My day as been primarily spent doing laundry. How many loads of laundry can a family of 4 possibly have? Well, let me tell you. About 10. It seems crazy doesn't it? Ten loads of laundry seems like a lot and I'm not even sure where all the clothes come from. During a normal week of doing laundry we usually have about 7-8 loads to do. From some reason this last week we seemed to have an extra ordinary amount of clothes to wash. Moving forward. I was in our bedroom this morning and wanted to make sure I got all of Jude's sippy cups. (He usually wonders into our room at about 5:40 am and crawls in bed with us.) I got to looking under the bed and I found 5 sippy cups. I couldn't tell you how old they were. They were old. Put it this way, the ole gag reflex was in full force after I opened the first cup to rinse it out. I am surprised I didn't hurl into the kitchen sink. The milk in the sippy cup was a pasty gooey substance. It no longer smelled or looked like milk. It kind of reminded me of very thick yogurt. Yummy.
Anyways. Enough about cleaning and doing laundry. It is the new year, a time to look forward to the future and it's possibilities and a time to look to the past to learn from our mistakes. Hopefully everyone has a great New Year.
Good day.