Worldview and Perspective on Awareness

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Author

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Scripture

Genesis 1:31, Job 12:7-10, Isaiah 55:12-13, Matthew 6:26-29, Romans 1:20, Psalm 19:1

Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percei...

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Author

Henri J. M. Nouwen

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Scripture

Acts 17:26, Genesis 1:27, Romans 5:12, Romans 3:23

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

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Recovering the Heart of Humanity

Author

Adam S. McHugh

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Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27 , Exodus 33:11-23 , Isaiah 43:1-4, John 10:1-15 , Luke 7:36-50, Psalm 139:1-6, 13-16

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

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Author

Gregory Spencer

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Genesis 1:1-3, Exodus 3:13-14, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, John 1:1-3, Romans 12:1-2, Psalm 19:1-4

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

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The Value of Origins

Author

Jen Wilkin

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Scripture

Genesis 1:27, Isaiah 64:8, Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:13-14, Ephesians 2:10, 1 Peter 2:9

Origins matter to humans. The Antiques Roadshow has held the interest of its viewers for over thirty-five years with a simple formula of determining the origins of items people have not properly...

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All That Good Stuff

Author

Mark D. Roberts

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Scripture

Genesis 1:null, Revelation 21:18-19, John 1:14, 1 Timothy 4:4, Colossians 1:16, Psalm 24:1, Genesis 1:31

Sometime in the last decade or so I started hearing the phrase “all that good stuff.” I think it happened first when I was ordering dinner at a restaurant. The waitress summarized the menu briefly, en...

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What Trees Can Teach us About Good Neighborhoods

Author

Don Everts

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Scripture

Genesis 1:null

There is a paradigm shift going on in the realm of forestry. For years there had been a consensus among ecologists that all trees were independent operators, each tree an island unto itself, the fores...

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Author

Barbara Brown Taylor

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Scripture

1 John 1:9, John 1:5, Ephesians 5:8, Genesis 1:3

Darkness is not the opposite of light; it is the absence of light.

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The Spectrum Of Conviction

Author

Tim Muehlhoff and Richard Langer

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Scripture

Genesis 1:26, Genesis 9:5-6, 1 Thessalonians 1:5, Romans 14:1-23, Romans 8:26-37, 1 Corinthians 1:17

So how can we form deep Christian convictions without dividing the church? Let’s take a deeper look at convictions themselves. Convictions are like light: they come in many colors and form across a sp...

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False Narrative: You Are An Accident

Author

James Bryan Smith

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Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27, Ecclesiastes 3:11, Job 33:4 , John 1:1-4, Colossians 1:16-17, Psalm 139:13-16

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...

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Adapted from the Brief Statement of Faith

Author

Chip Hardwick

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:27, Galatians 3:28

In sovereign love, you, O God, created the world good And made everyone equally in your image, Male and female, of every race and people, To live as one community. But we rebel against you; we hid...

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Author

Thomas Sowell

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Scripture

Genesis 1:28, Deuteronomy 8:18, Matthew 25:14-30, 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12, Psalm 128:2

Many economic fallacies are due to conceiving of economic activity as a zero-sum contest, in which what is gained by one is lost by another. This in turn is often due to ignoring the fact that wealth ...

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The Planet and the Body

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:1–3 , Job 38:4–7, Isaiah 45:18 , Colossians 1:16–17, Hebrews 3:4, Psalm 19:1–2

Scientist John Haldane once proposed to the English priest Ronald Knox that, given the vast number of planets in the universe, the emergence of life by sheer chance was inevitable. Knox responded with...

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Naming and Creation

Author

Jonathan Walton

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Scripture

Genesis 2:19-20, Genesis 1:5, Genesis 1:10, Isaiah 43:1, Exodus 33:17, John 10:3, Revelation 2:17

Names in the ancient world were associated with identity, role and function. Consequently, naming is a typical part of the creation narratives. The Egyptian Memphite Theology identifies the Creator as...

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The Good and the Beautiful without God

Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 19:1, Genesis 1:2, John 4:1-26, Philippians 4:8, Genesis 1:27

You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental ...

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God's Image: Our True Identity

Author

Chuck DeGroat

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 3:1-7, Romans 7:14-25, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Psalm 51:10

God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...

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Blaming Creation Instead of Sin

Author

Albert Wolters

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:31, Romans 8:20-21, 1 Timothy 4:1-5, Colossians 1:20, Psalm 24:1

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

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Near a Wonderful Beauty

Author

Donald McCullough

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Scripture

Ecclesiastes 3:11, Genesis 1:31, Psalm 19:1, Psalm 8:3-4, Romans 1:20, Psalm 96:11-12, Psalm 65:9-13, Colossians 2:2-3

J.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon has a passage that conveys the attractive and terrifying aspects of the mystery of God: It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, th...

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If birds could write books, their story of creation

Author

Barbara Brown Taylor

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Scripture

Genesis 1:2, Exodus 14:21, 1 Kings 19:11-12, Psalm 104:3-4, Acts 2:2-4, John 3:8, Matthew 6:25-34

If birds could write books, their story of creation would no doubt read quite differently than ours. In the first place, I expect they would make quite a lot out of that wind of God that swept over th...

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Author

Keywords

Scripture

Proverbs 27:19, Job 7:17, Genesis 1:27

Man is something delightful—if he indeed is a man

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The Creation of Light

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:3-4, John 8:12-20, 1 John 1:5-10, Psalm 27:, Matthew 4:12-17

In The Lost World of Genesis One , John Walton points out that the creation of light and the division of day and night is profoundly puzzling if we understand light in the modern way, as a material o...

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Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:31, Psalm 139:13-14, John 1:14, 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, Philippians 3:20-21

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body ...

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George McDonald’s Great Fear

Author

George MacDonald

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Scripture

Psalm 8:, Genesis 1:31, Psalm 19:1, Psalm 104:24-25, Psalm 96:11-12, Psalm 65:9-13, Matthew 6:28-29

George MacDonald, The Scottish author who had a profound effect on C.S. Lewis among others, once wrote a letter to his father about what he believed would be a great obstacle to his faith; that once h...

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Christianity Refuses Cynicism

Author

Andrew Greeley

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Scripture

Genesis 1:31, Habakkuk 2:14, Isaiah 25:8, Revelation 21:1-4, Revelation 22:3-4

Reject Christianity, if you will, out of motives of cynicism; turn away from it because you believe. Reality is malign and punitive; choose a God that is cantankerous, vindictive, or forgetful, or det...

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Israel Was Part of The Ancient World

Author

John H. Walton

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Scripture

Genesis 1:1, Exodus 20:13

The [Mesopotamian ancient texts] serve as sources of information for us to formulate the shape of each culture’s ways of thinking. In most areas there is more similarity between Israel and its neighbo...

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Comparing the Genesis Creation Account with their Neighbors

Author

A. J. Swoboda

Keywords

Scripture

John 1:3, Psalm 104:24, Genesis 2:2-3, Genesis 1:27, Genesis 1:31

The Jews were not the only religious people in the ancient world. There were others, such as the Akkadians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and they had their own creation stories. When one compares the ...

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Which “World” Are we Talking About?

Author

C. J. Mahaney

Keywords

World

Scripture

John 2:15, Genesis 1:31, John 3:16

The “world” of 1 John 2:15 doesn’t refer to the created order or to the blessings that come from living in a modern society, such as modern conveniences or medical and scientific advances. For God cre...

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Author

David Atkinson

Keywords

Scripture

Genesis 1:null

If “evolution” is…elevated to the status of a world-view of the way things are, then there is direct conflict with biblical faith. But if “evolution” remains at the level of scientific biological hypo...

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Author

Vicki K. Black

Keywords

Scripture

Isaiah 7:14, Micah 5:2, Genesis 1:1, Psalm 8:3-4, Colossians 1:15-16

“In historical time, Christmas happened over two thousand years ago in Bethlehem; in theological time, Christmas happens now, in the mystery of God choosing to dwell within humankind, a mystery that t...

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Even the Almighty took seven

Author

The Pastor's Workshop

Keywords

Scripture

Proverbs 15:23, Proverbs 16:1, Ecclesiastes 3:1, James 1:19, Proverbs 25:11, Genesis 1:

Franklin D. Roosevelt had hoped the Yalta conference (which discussed the future of Europe and Germany post-WWII) wouldn’t last more than five or six days. Winston Churchill, however, remarked, “I do ...

worldview and perspective on Awareness

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