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RE: A walk through my yard this morning. Farm Homestead
The beauty in the Philippines is easy to miss since I have already been here for 8 years, but it is very easy to recognize the beauty of this country in your photos.
Thank you my friend!
You're welcome, William.
You might feel uncomfortable with some of my comments but I'm sincere. I care about thinking clearly and I value the contributions of the Bible.
Like you, I have spent a lot of my life struggling to understand the truth, and I eventually came to realize that I can only understand parts of it.
I have no problems with. Your comments. The Bible also teaches there is only one way to understand the Bible and only one true teacher. The Holy Spirit. God Who spoke and everything we see and touch today is so incredibly beyond understanding to the finite mortal mind. He made us in His Image, but we cannot compare God to man. He is all powerful and we are not. He has all knowledge, and we don’t. He is infinite and we are finite. A lifetime of study and we can only scratch the surface. God is not revealing Himself to the scholar only. He is revealing Himself to the broken and sincere. To the humble and contrite.
I think I understand what you mean by Holy Spirit since I experienced it as a combination of intuition & emotion.
I've had a lot of spiritual experiences (mainly in relation to Christianity but I also had an experience with Hinduism) but don't really know how to make sense of it all. Some of it involved my state of mind and state of emotions at the time but there seemed to be a correlation between events and what I was thinking, feeling and sometimes predicting.
The Bible teaches that the One aTrue God is revealed to man in three distinct persons. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Hoky Spirit.
Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened,
Luk 3:22 And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.
We also have a conscience that tells us right from wrong.
It sounds like you think you understand what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit represents, and it sounds like you think it is clear in the Gospels what those three terms represent.
I personally don't think it's possible to understand the Gospels, including what the trinity is meant to represent. I am even wondering if they were ever meant to be understood at all.
The point is we can only understand what the Holy Spirit reveals to us. Understanding is easy with the right teacher. For sure God is not teasing us. He gave His Word as an operations manual for a successful life. Like the book in the glove box of a new car. The owner’s manual. This is what the Bible is.
Thanks for your comments my friend.
Mat 13:11 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
Thank you for discussing this with me William @mhm-philippines. It helps me write out some of my thoughts.
Here is my response to the above comment.
Part of understanding more is acknowledging that I don't understand everything and probably never will - as long as I am human, the closest thing to the absolute truth that I can get is partial truths, but I think that goes for the rest of us too.
The Bible might contain a lot of truth but it is still only partial truths since there are other parts of the absolute truth not included in the Bible i.e. germ theory, advanced mathematics and even a lot of the wisdom gained about psychology is not included.
It sounds like you are only interested in the truth and wisdom contained in the Bible, that is fine and it is probably because it works for you. It didn't work for me but I still gained a lot from experimenting with the Bible.
The Kingdom of Heaven for me is Reality.
It is not a place that we have to get to by leaving where we are now - it is the here, there, now & everywhere (a.k.a. in our midst).
It's called the Kingdom of Heaven since it's in the nature of reality to fulfill a person's desires & beliefs (faith), so if we want to change our experiences in reality, change our faith (desires & beliefs) and increase our faith.
That is the message I got from testing the parables of Christ and it is universal, anyone can understand it or follow it.