Author name: Tom Stuart

What is your theology doing for you?

Growth & Development, Relationship with God /

Theology does strange things to people. Isn’t it curious how it can liberate some people while incarcerating others? Or attract some while alienating others?

Theology literally means the “study of God” and in the vernacular refers to ones systematic view of God. How a person views God is like someone looking at the stars at night. To the casual observer it inspires a moment’s thought to the vastness and beauty of the universe. To the romantic it arouses a sustained infatuation for the mystery of both the Creator and His creation. To the astronomer it stirs a commitment to a lifelong study of its celestial secrets and its origin.

How we view God then can run the gamut from either tickling our fancy to gripping the very core of our being.

Dr. Ralph Neighbour, in his book Where Do We Go From Here, did everyone who feels theologically challenged a great service. He took the epistemological nuances of theology and simplified its understanding to a rubber-meets-the-road application when he said “theology breeds methodology.” In other words what you believe about God will dictate how you live your life. Tell me what you are believing and it will be self evident how you should be living.

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6 Questions for Lenten Reflection

I wish I'd said that., Relationship with God /

Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. (2 Corinthians 13:5)

The season of Lent, the forty days of spiritual preparation leading up to Easter, began last week with the observance of Ash Wednesday. In the Christian tradition, Lent is a time for the believer to commemorate the great price Jesus Christ paid for humankind’s redemption through His passion, death, burial and resurrection. Typically the observance of Lent is expressed by individual believers through prayer and repentance, fasting and other acts of self-denial, and almsgiving.

No matter what denominational or liturgical background, Lent is a season in which every believer is called to reflect upon the meaning and depth of one’s own faith relationship with God. It is a time as the apostle Paul says to “examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine.” (2 Corinthians 13:5)

This examination process, as one can imagine, can take a myriad of forms. Discoveries of new approaches to spiritual self assessment are particularly helpful because they can enable the believer to probe here unto uncharted depths of the soul. This Lent I have been blessed to make such a find.

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Do blessings fall from cloudless skies?

Overcoming, Relationship with God /

Have you noticed that “blessings” from God are not always clothed like blessings? Sometimes when they knock on our door we do not recognize them. Like peddlers, mendicants, little girls with cookies or young men and women with glossy literature we want to turn them away, give them a scrap of our time, be polite but hesitate to open the door more than necessary to converse briefly with them and then hopefully send them on their way to our neighbors. We don’t see them as blessings, but as nuisances and interruptions in our busy day of pursuing blessings by another more familiar name. We are too caught up in crossing things off our to-do lists so we can at least feel blessed, even though we really may not be blessed.
When blessings come, they are not only unrecognizable but they are also sometimes late, out of sequence and just not what we would affix as giving value to our lives. We are much more prone to bemoan the absence of blessings in our lives in the frustration of dealing with their delays and in so doing prove ourselves more ungodly than godly and anything but deserving. It is a catch 22 as they say, a paradoxical conundrum in which the very act of seeking a blessing has a way of dredging up the ungodly side of our nature that would threaten to disqualify us from the very thing we yearn.

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The Pain for Peace Exchange

Overcoming, Relationship with God /

Just yesterday I was talking to a person and we were commiserating about the fact that the longer we live the less we know. This observation was generated out of a mutual confession of perplexity with regard to recent painful disappointment he had suffered. Some things in life, especially painful circumstances beyond our control, the unfixable of life, eclipse our understanding. Like the moon passing before the sun, or cloudy skies blocking its warming rays, there are times when we do not comprehend the whys and wherefores of life. Such darkness can make it difficult to find our way.

It is necessary to be reminded that understanding the reasons for our lot in life is not necessarily the solution to our problems. While there is a tendency in all of us to grapple with the “why” question, sometimes it serves only to prolong our pain. One thing is certain, pain and suffering are an ever present part of the human condition. Not only does our experience testify to this, but an examination of the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of God confirms it. Isaiah the prophet predicted hundreds of years before His birth that He would be “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3) And the writer of Hebrews tells us years after His death, burial and resurrection that He “learned obedience from the things He suffered.” (Hebrews 5:8)

If Jesus had to deal with pain and suffering in His life, how much more do we? In fact Paul the apostle tells us that our suffering in some mysterious way is meant to compliment and complete the sufferings of Christ. (Romans 8:17 & Colossians 1:25)

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