truth Archives - Invitations to Ascend

August 17, 2020September 18, 2020

How to stand as the battle wages

We live in a physical, material world. A world that can be measured, seen, and observed. That we can experiment upon and understand. And that is all there is. Isn’t it?

However, such a notion is foreign to many, if not most, of the people who walk upon this earth. And for those who have done so for millennia. For these people, the spiritual and supernatural are as familiar as the air that we breathe. Life is not limited to the physical, rather the significance of the spiritual is understood and embraced.

But for most of us who live in the West, this is not so.

July 10, 2020September 18, 2020

The lenses that we look through

A year or two ago, I listened to a sermon in which the way we see God was discussed. To be fair, I am not even sure if that was the main point of the message, but it struck me and stuck with me. The lens through which we see God clearly has profound ramifications. For it determines how we relate to Him, and also to others.

But what occurred to me then, and has sat with me ever since, is that identifying this lens is undoubtedly both challenging and complicated. For we see God through our eyes, our experience, prejudices, preconceptions, through what others have told us, what we have read and heard. Beyond doubt, all these things colour our perceptions. While we will never see perfectly, this is something we must be aware of, and seek, wherever possible, to overcome. For if we fail to do so, we may end up following a God who is not.

June 13, 2020September 17, 2020

Where do I begin?

It is so easy to pretend that we are something that we are not. We like to portray an image of who we are to others: to our friends, acquaintances, strangers, to God and even to ourselves. It is often so much easier to live a life of pretence than to face the reality of who we are and the circumstances that surround us. Obviously, our society encourages this by bombarding us with opportunities to escape – whether it be through movies, binge-watching tv series, unending opportunities to lose ourselves in books, gaming, or any other form of entertainment. And our online image can be so divorced from the reality of who we are that we can fool the world into thinking that we are someone other than ourselves.