Category Archives: Church Culture

On Art

Academics & The Arts, Church Culture, Humanity, Humanity & Sin, Poetry, The Arts

As a favorite philosopher/theologian Francis Schaeffer stated quite appropriately in his thesis, How Should We Then Live, art  is merely the expression of a man’s mind.  I’ve spent many years processing this idea imparted to me by Dr. Schaeffer.  I knew I agreed with him from the moment I heard him utter it, but I think I knew there was more that needed to be said.

The true artist is of either the most courageous among us or the genuinely nonchalant; for he dares to create something abiding which will outlast his own existence here.  He is a person of conviction who boldly believes in his right and ability to impress on his own generation and on the ones to come his thoughts, his experience, or he is oblivious to his own place- maybe to his own identity, and in a whirlwind of reactivity leaves a piece of himself behind.

The importance of art certainly can not be overstated as it is of a permanence our physical bodies do not attain.   Art will endure and it will influence and persuade those whom it touches.  It will do these things with or without permission. It will do these things within and outside of boundaries, and it will remain our responsibility as individual souls to respond in a manner conducive to the blessing of our brothers and sisters in humanity.

Copyright 2018. L.L. Shelton.

 

Sensational Sexuality Diet

Church Culture, Holistic Health, Humanity & Sin, Married Life, Mental-Physical-Spiritual Health, , , , , , , ,

Steps To A Truly Satisfying Sexuality

Stop! Proceed with caution. This list has the potential to alter your life and is intended for married and soon-to-be-married eyes only. Not intended for minor use. Parental supervision suggested. You are on the honor system. You must not continue reading unless you fully intend to read through the last word and to the end. Please thoughtfully consider the terms. If you agree to the terms of use, you may proceed.

Steps to your satisfaction:

  1.  Binge! Throw out that one year Bible reading plan and read ahead to the next chapter. Ask God to join you through His Holy Spirit as you feast on The Word! Enjoy every morsel, each small bite so full of flavor and nutrition, created especially for your dining pleasure. Reconnect with the exciting authentic history, thrilling true tales of prophets and kings, the beautiful poetry, and miraculous moments of discovery and deliverance. Relate anew to the genuine Gospel and the establishment of the Christian church. Eat and drink until you begin to feel hopeful and content with your God.
  2. Purge! Now clean out that ridiculous clutter you’ve been stumbling over for so long. Is there a secret stash of soft porn somewhere? Do you only need to touch a screen to access it? Is there a Victoria’s Secret across the street from where you work? Is that Frederick’s or Chippendale’s catalogue someone brought in laying around somewhere? Are there steamy romance novels- you know the kind- filled with men human husbands could never manage to be, men who are perfect beyond measure, infallible heroes to the end? Are there lewd books, magazines  filled with pictures and stories of strange women- you know the type- perfectly built women with fabulous faces who beg to serve and to participate in aberrant sexual practice and couldn’t care less for a wedding ring? Is there legitimate pornography available to you and used by you, once in a while or regularly? Trash it! Toss it with the understanding that God abhors it. Ask your abba (your daddy) to give you the grace, strength, and courage to resist it. Ask Him to give you a new perspective (a new heart) toward those who are involved in creating these images to incite lust. Pity them. Pray for them as if they were your own people caught in a horrible self-destructive lifestyle. They are, after all, your human brothers and sisters.
  3. Starve yourself! Allow your thoughts of sexual satisfaction to rest on your spouse and only on your spouse throughout your waking hours. Ask God to continue the vigil as you sleep. Ask God to remind you that honest fulfillment in any arena is only possible when you are more concerned with giving than with getting. Recognize when your thoughts threaten to turn selfishly lustful toward your spouse, to linger lustfully on another or to turn sexual toward another, and refuse to stay; immediately command your mind in the name and power of Christ to turn back toward your spouse and toward your God. At this moment, God will remind you of some Truth in His Word regarding Himself. He is attempting to replace the potentially unwholesome thought with thought of Himself. Cooperate! Acknowledge the thought, embrace it and repeat it, again and again until you feel cleansed.  The more you listen to God, the louder He gets!
  4. Start over! When you fail, do not give up. Seek and ask for forgiveness, from God and from your spouse.  Use your will power given to you by The Holy Spirit, and in His strength, begin again. Together, with your abba, put one foot in front of the other, and proceed through these steps.

This diet is guaranteed to radically alter your life! Your sexual urges are designed by God not only to ensure procreation, but to drive you away from yourself and toward your spouse to aid in the development of a particular level of intimacy with God, as well as with your spouse, unique to marriage.  By implementing this plan you will find your own sexuality transformed! If your spouse is committed as well, your joy in one another will be rich.  It will not happen overnight, as with any diet, this one must be participated in fully and committed to as a lifestyle to result in lasting success.

Finally, we make authentic love because we are under the influence of the genuine love of God, and are inspired  to the giving of ourselves and receiving of another in a beautiful way because of it.  Anything less is ordinary loveless sex.

Disclaimer: Some participants will need to focus on God as someone other than “daddy,” as their earthly daddy (or mama) wittingly lead them toward or directly contributed to their sexually retarded development. I urge those to remember that God is a perfect father and cares tenderly for his creation as a good mother cares for her young. Though you may have no immediate earthly example of a Godly parent available, you may find it helpful to imagine such a leader through literary ideal, including biblical, and film illustrations, and to know that God (according to His Word) joins you in your grief.

Copyright 2016. L.L. Shelton.

Carry On

Church Culture, Living the Word, , , , , , , , , ,

A bit of testimony for those of you who are acquainted with trial:

In two thousand nine, I was purposefully tending to my tasks, meeting the day to day challenges sometimes with nothing short of what seemed to me a herculean effort- and managing (for the most part) to do so cheerfully, when “stuff” happened in my personal life that threatened to derail me.

Contrary to popular teachings of church culture, a healthy person rarely forgets, so we must learn to forgive ourselves and others anyway, and expect that past troubles may never be completely finished- in this lifetime.

Therefore, my new stuff piled on top of the old stuff and I began to unravel. The junk threatened to rip out every carefully managed seam. But as my eldest son is fond of reminding me, I am undaunted; and as I am accustomed to doing, I began to cautiously and with as much care, re-ravel.

It seemed a wonder in the beginning that each time I repaired and pieced together a part of my self, a new force (often from a direction I may have never anticipated) popped up, sometimes with true vigor, and made the attempt to rip out my pain-staking work. Oh how I hate being forced to start over…

As a girl I loved to play Monopoly. It was by far my favorite. The game of Life was the only one to run it a close second. A unique aspect of Life was that you could collect children along the way and I thought that the grandest aspect of any game. By the time I was twelve, Baby Island had been my favorite book for awhile, and in fact not even my fifteen- year-old competitors were offered a babysitting gig in my neighborhood unless I had first turned it down. So I spent some time trying to figure a way to incorporate this characteristic play into Monopoly.

These things aside, Monopoly continued to rule from my point of view, and I would do everything short of agreeing to watch my somewhat younger brother set fire to something to entice him into a game. Please, please, please… and to keep him from quitting when we had been hard at it for two days and I owned everything but his skin, I would come up with a million new lending schemes to keep him struggling along.

But though I stood the undisputed Monopoly-loving champion of Branderham Drive, there was something even I despised about the game. I sometimes felt the game creators designed the aspect especially for me. That thing I abhorred in the game, was to be told to return to start. One measly flip of the dice… Go back to the beginning. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. No! No! No! I would reel inside my head, sometimes and probably much to my brother’s chagrin- outside my head.

Maybe I could somehow cheat my way out of this disastrous death to my plans for this turn? After all, going to jail beat the deal hands-down, as first-of-all in any fair society one is there because justice is being served. Certainly not due to circumstances seemingly completely out of one’s control! And there was always the chance one would roll his way out before wasting as much time and distance, and more often than not I seemed to have the fortuitous likelihood of shaking and rattling my way to free parking from there, where our cousins had taught us to keep a five hundred dollar bill waiting for the lucky lander…

But it wasn’t to be, as even then I was insistent on rigorous honesty, feeling certain that the glory of winning at the expense of my integrity was only another way of losing- albeit often carefully veiled. (It is appropriate for me to introduce here the truth that I had no concept of doing anything purely for the Glory of God at this stage of my life- lest we are tempted to give me too much credit for my perspective.)

All this to illustrate, I am putting it mildly when I tell you that this nearly continual necessary re-working of seams has brought me near to exhaustion.

Yet through it all, God Himself did not weary. Many times I confidently told Him that I was sure I couldn’t finish the race- that beyond a doubt I would not finish well, and every time He was there to remind me that I could and I would, but only because I belong to Him and He has my back… And that what I know to be true concerning Him and yet can not see, I should and must trust.

This particular season of accumulating personal loss has not concluded, and maybe it never will… even still I know that I am not to be undone, because I am no longer all there is to me. I may be wounded and I may forever bear the scars of grief but I will not be crushed because God through the death and the life of a part of Himself, his Son, Jesus Christ, has favored me as His own child.

This privileged ownership means also, that today is not all there is, and today will never be all there is… so I will keep mending and reworking those seams by the Grace of God. And I will keep longing for and hoping for and working for tomorrow. And I will continue to pray that by His Grace my brothers and sisters also will retain this very real hope and that it will remain alive and burning in our souls!

Copyright 2017. L. L. Shelton.

Brief Thoughts on Marriage

Bible Talk, Church Culture, Family Life, Married Life, , , , , , ,

To begin:  There is only ONE good reason for getting married and for having children, and it is:  Because GOD wants you to do it.  And if it is HE wanting you to do it; it is because He wants you to be a part of what HE is building. He wants you to be a part of illustrating HIS story to a watching world. God desires for you to be a part of LOVE as defined by Him.

Don’t allow yourself to enter these arenas, the building of marriage and family, at the persuasion of any other than God in Christ, or without reading His Word and getting whatever grasp upon this that your maturity and His patience allow to you. These are not institutions for the faint of heart and will never withstand the difficulties that come along with them unless built upon a proper foundation. Marriage and family belong to Him. They are His design and He has said that they must be structured upon Him, upon the principles set forth in His Word, to be successful.  And the terms for success in marriage must be and are determined by its Creator.

Maybe you have entered into these things lightly and without a proper amount of forethought. It is not too late. You must pray for GOD to make your partner willing and as He does this, the two of you begin (together in Christ) to tear down the old relationship and to start anew on the correct foundation. Seek out an older married couple in whom you see Christ (in other words, you observe them living together according to the principles set forth in The Bible for the living out of their shared faith). Approach them and directly ask for their active guidance and participation in your lives. If resources allow, find a Biblical counselor to assist you in building this new platform for your marriage.

Another issue may be that your partner remains unwilling to consider Christ. In this case, you must continue in earnest prayer, gentleness, and good will toward your spouse until such time as God releases you from the relationship, and you are free to start again; and this must be done with the greatest caution for two primary reasons.  The first is that you must try with all your will to NOT push your partner away from either yourself or God in the hope that the other will leave soon. This happens often in such a case and is regularly realized only when an experienced helper points out to the Christian in the marriage that this is indeed what that one is doing. The second reason is that you are quite liable to abandon the frying pan in favor of the fire, unless you have spent an adequate amount of time in the judicious study of Holy Scripture concerning the Way of Life of a Christian in order that you may more easily recognize a fraud should there be opportunity for a next time around.

Paul reminds us in a letter to the early church that it is better not to marry at all than to enter the covenant casually.  It is a choice open to the Christian to remain single and serve GOD fully from that position, rather than serving Him from the position of marriage.  However, for God’s saved child, there is no choice as to serve or not to serve, and if your heart is completely without reservation His own; you will be compelled to serve despite your finest efforts to the contrary.  (The difficulties and delights specifically associated with the Christian’s choice to remain single are beyond the scope of this short essay.)

In the end, I don’t wish to leave the impression that there are no joys associated with marriage but only trials, as that would be wholly untrue.  There are multiple blessings to be had within the marriage relationship- true friendship, God’s allowance to fully know and to be fully known by another human being- to completely relate to another person, children within God’s favor and under the protection of a legitimate bond.  I count it a great privilege to enjoy many of the wonders of marriage.

Now,  in this day of much confusion concerning marriage and family, I implore you to search God’s Word for yourself to find that these very things that I tell you are true. And may The Lord God of All bless your every effort!

Signposts: How Churches Can Minister to the Divorced

Copyright 2016.  L.L. Shelton

How Bad Do Ya’ Want It?

Church Culture, Education, Family Life, Living the Word, Married Life, , , , ,

As a Biblical counselor, I hear these and other words of the same meaning quite often:  The church is suffering from lack of community.  Our marriage is in trouble due to lack of intimacy.  My response: How bad do ya’ want it?

Community and intimacy are alike in that they are the result of a cyclical pass through vulnerability. Most of us prefer anywhere to there. Community and intimacy are the continual culmination of transparency, and accountability. These things require the practice of genuine love and authentic faith. These things mandate that our love be abundantly evident that we may expose ourselves without fear, and that we will welcome critical examination in our effort to be the best we can be for the other- and doing anything without fear requires faith.

What is faith? It is the evidence of things hoped for and the belief in things not yet realized.  Do we have it? Faith in God? Faith in ourselves, with God? Faith in one another? Do we believe that all things are possible with God? Do we believe that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength? Do we believe that we can trust God to make out of each of us, fallen as we are, something beautiful? Something resembling Himself? Can we patiently suffer one another- forgiving, seeking forgiveness, receiving grace, offering grace, guiding, allowing ourselves to be guided, being consistent as well as realistic in our expectations of one another as we wait for Him to do this in His time and in His way, both individually and in a corporate sense?

May I submit to you that this is what must be if we desire community with others, if we yearn for intimacy with another? It will not be easy. It will be difficult to achieve and to maintain- and it will be the place where our joy may be made complete.  Therefore, absolutely without a doubt, worth it.

How bad do ya’ want it?

Copyright, 2015, L. L. Shelton

Bride On Fire

Church Culture, Living the Word, Politics, , , , ,

The strangely fluid and beautiful creature leaps and bounds in bright colorful array engulfing the structure that is the object of its appetite.  A crowd gathers, for a moment stunned by the apparent freedom of this gaily frolicking entity.  Then, as if shaking off a kind of stupor, someone screams to be saved.

In answer to the plea, a courageous number of that fantastic fraternity formed to fight this very devil, soon arrive and begin their bold work. The flames are doused and the remaining folks gathered at the scene, staring at the remnants of the edifice as it smolders amid the ashes, observe as the next skilled team arrives and begins the important work of inspection that will ultimately, hopefully, determine the origin of the monster.

The Church is on my mind, and having lived more than a half century now, it is my estimation that the road to perdition begins with one’s elevated view of oneself.

In  America, no more than 2% of our total population is gay, and approximately .8% of the 2% are involved in a same sex relationship, and fewer still are legally married.  Clearly, we have a much greater problem with other sexual sins in this country, such as fornication and adultery.  Of course, even the criminal sexual sins of child molestation and rape occur more frequently among us than does the sin of practicing homosexuality.

The sanctity of marriage is intended to be built upon a foundation of sexual purity which applies to all people.  The foundation has been under attack since humanity began.  Most of the twentieth century saw the institution of marriage, an institution necessarily established by God for our protection and to increase our joy, being questioned and demeaned by American society in general.  Yes, even we, the organized church felt it necessary to debate many issues surrounding the sanctity of marriage and family long before beginning to argue its very definition.  I submit to you that we, as a church, failed to properly defend marriage against those relatively minor attacks, thus we now stand perilously close to losing the war.

However, while It may be too late for us, as a nation, to raise the stakes- it is never too late for us to up the ante as the church.  Jesus did.

Jesus said, “Let’s begin with understanding lust as a sexual activity sinfully equal to adultery.  Let’s begin by demanding of ourselves a clean heart.” 

If we, the American population of the church, begin cleaning at the level that Our LORD mandated we may be able to effect the kind of change in our nation that is seen as nothing short of miraculous. 

Copyright 2015, L.L. Shelton

Smith to Schaeffer, It’s Only Paper

Books, Church Culture, Poetry

 

image

Give me one good reason,
One good reason to justify
The method God would choose,
His only son to testify,

His only precious son to use,
He, himself, to glorify,
Before all others humiliate,
Salvation to solidify.

With all power at his fingertips,
He could have spared his blameless son.
One word given from his lips,
New plan, and still the world be won!

Why make that wicked angel?
He knew without debate!
He must not have been thinking.
Maybe his mind wasn’t straight?

Not to mention all the babies,
Throughout the ages mutilated,
The criminals who do no time
While good mens’ lives are confiscated…

I find myself uncomfortable
With who God claims to be.
I think I’ll re-invent him,
Fashion him to best suit me.

There, now! Let me look at you.
You are riveting to see,
Yet, as I am observing you,
I’m seeing only me.

Though I do like you better,
You have become quite small
And truth be told, if you be God
There is no God at all.

Copyright 2014, L.L. Shelton

Postmodern and Organized

Church Culture, Living the Word, , ,

imagePostmodern and Organized

Surely, you must know that in today’s society, particularly today’s western society, it must not be assumed that Christianity is the organized church and that the church is organized Christianity. Today’s christian church may be organized around any number of ridiculous ideas about God, many of which are devoid of Truth or are pulled from The Body of God’s Work and twisted until they are nearly unrecognizable to the man of Faith.

Today’s organized church has gone the way of today’s organized marriage or has it been the other way around? Today’s church may be representative of absolutely nothing even remotely resembling Truth; or it may illustrate a bit of truth here and there, often just enough to be tantalizingly near to accurate.

Therefore, one must never assume that because he has entered the church building he is standing on Holy Ground. The one who has entered the building of a church has entered a building labeled a church for the purpose of communicating myriad messages about who knows what. (2 Corinthians 11:3-4, 2 Timothy 3:1-5, The Letter of Jude)

However, some of today’s organized churches are a vehicle to allow both the True Church of Christ and the unsaved to meet together with the purpose of the unsaved being taught The Gospel in the case that they are elect and would like to receive Christ. While the true and yet imperfect believers are gathered in the church building they profess Jesus Christ as The Only Begotten Son of The One True and Living God and express their collective faith and thanksgiving by the avenues of worship of God The Father through prayer, song, and the whole study of His Living Word.

Even so, do not enter the building of any organized church with the expectation that everyone that you meet there is a Christian or even that everyone in a position of leadership there is a Christian; and do not expect that you yourself have become a Christian because you have taken up the habit of meeting there with this particular group of people, even should you mimic their ways. (Matthew 7:15-23, John 5:21-23, John 6:65, John 8:42-43, 1 John 4:5)

You may be attending a church simply because you enjoy the atmosphere which is for the most part kinder and gentler than the environment outside of it, or because you are in need of social connection and you find the group pleasant or helpful. Maybe you are attending because your mother and father attended as did their parents before them and it is simply all that you know. There may be as many reasons for an unbeliever attending church as there are for a Believer attending the circus!

Then again, maybe you are attending because unbeknownst to you, you are elect and are searching for your true father. If you are searching for your true father, you must search in those places where He is to be found. Look not for the building labeled church or even christian, but rather for the one or ones who are reading and studying the whole of His Holy Word, and search for evidence of The Faith in the lives of those gathered around His Word which is The Holy Bible; not for sinlessness in them but for an obvious desire to be perfect as defined by God, to be perfect in Love. These people may be found in any type of building anywhere, conversely unbelievers may be found in church buildings and christian universities, colleges, and seminaries all over the western world. (Matthew 5:43-48, John 14:15-21, 1 John 3:16-24, 4:17-18)

This makes the search for your father a bit more complicated than you may have imagined, but if He is your father you have nothing to fear, only believe that in the form of Jesus Christ your Father’s heart did beat for you and it is guaranteed that you will not remain lost or separated from Him forever. He has planned to bring you home and He never fails to do as He has promised.

Copyright 2014 L.L. Shelton

Adam & Eve: Those Idiots!

Bible Talk, Church Culture, Living the Word, ,

adam and eve

Teaching Bible to children is a delightful experience for me. Throughout my careful, thoughtful lessons are numerous ah-ha! moments… I can only hope there are a few in the minds of my small charges, as well.

One day, as I was sharing the age-old history of the first man and the first woman with whom God dwelt, I arrived at the place in the report at which I was compelled to relate the extremely disappointing news that both Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit, bringing about a tragic situation for humankind.

Of course, what followed was a series of excited interjections, a few in the form of questions: “No way! Couldn’ they ‘ave just had peanut butter and crackers if they were hungry?” “ Yeah… And there was prob’ly candy!”  “An’ now we’re all in trouble… those idiots!” And with the slow, deliberate shake of a little head, “Anybody knows you can’t trust a snake.”

Now, while their observations were not completely without merit, their remarks did indicate restricted vision. Children tend to view The Word of God through a narrow lens, and for the most part, limit themselves to two colors- black and white. Though this is sometimes appropriate, and often provides the needed dramatic emphasis; it is at other times limiting, and the need for a more expansive view is obvious. Adam had turned to worshiping the creation rather than The Creator, a grave sin indeed, and Eve exchanged the Truth of God for a lie; sins in which we all would have readily participated, had we been in their place. Their actual eating of the fruit was an outward display of the garbage that had taken residence in the heart.

As adults, we should be equipped and able to switch to a broad scope and to embrace a full spectrum of light, permitting our perspective to be imbibed with every possible hue; in so doing we may find the liberation of our souls!

Certainly, there are various hindrances to a person’s being able to think As an adult:  Natural and appropriate immaturity as in a child, general immaturity, or specific immaturity such as emotional, social, intellectual or spiritual immaturity. There is retardation and there are developmental delays and disorders which affect the capabilities of some, and of course there is the weak will.  These are real obstacles which cause some of us to genuinely exist in a fledgling state, or less able to think and to behave as an adult, despite our historical age.

But for most of us, a simple willingness to take the initiative in the sanctification process will prove to bring about the gracious help and kind generosity of Our Heavenly Father, and He will mold and grow the soul longing to be fully freed by The Truth of Scripture. Though we will remain imperfect while we are attached to these bodies, we will be free in the sense that we are comprehending Scripture and are able to apply it appropriately in our lives.

Furthermore, this is to be a beautiful benefit to those who are less mature, in that according to Scripture, the more mature are entrusted with the supervision and careful consideration of the others. God has truly designed and is orchestrating by His Spirit a perfect system, by which the needs of His children may be perfectly met in this fallen place: The Church. When we are functioning optimally– keeping first things first, keeping our eyes on Jesus Christ and by His grace obeying Our Father- we are the best thing that ever happened to this planet- for we are in sime sense, Christ on Earth!

And yet we display a tendency to divide and to argue one with another, sometimes to the exclusion of serving a broken world as we should. For example: We deliberate over the literal versus the metaphorical in Scripture which is in some instances necessary, however  it is apparent to me that Our Great God, to whom and with whom all things are possible, could easily have dictated a perfect document in which many or all things are both. For instance: Proverbs 31 speaks of a godly woman as one who keeps the oil in her lamp burning throughout the night; she is not idle. I believe that this is literally true throughout many seasons in her life as she is never one to neglect her duties, as well as metaphorically true, in the sense that the oil is representative of The Holy Spirit who is ever present in, and never extinguished from her life. (Please note that I am not saying that there may be a metaphorical meaning for something that is historically understood and consistently presented as literal, instead of the literal, only that there may be a metaphorical meaning in addition to the literal.)

I have found a world of beautiful possibilities by studying The Word with these things in mind; however I am by His grace, ever aware of The Absolute Truth, and of the consistency with which God’s Word will reveal Itself , in other words, the unwillingness of God to contradict Himself, and His unwillingness to confound and exasperate His children.

Therefore, the more I study, the more grateful I become to Him who has rendered the plight of the idiot, glorious!

©L.L. Shelton, 9/27/2011