Tried With Fire

The Romantic period is typified by an uncontested embrace of personal experience, not merely as self-expression or self-representation, but also as epistemology and personal identity (who I am, ontologically)... Romanticism claimed that you know truth through the lens of your personal experience, and that no overriding or objective opposition can challenge the primal wisdom of someones subjective frame of intelligibility. In romanticism, this knowing and being known is identity-rooted and identity-expressive. Romanticism went beyond a solipsistic, me-centered understanding of selfhood. Solipsism is the belief that only one's own mind and its properties are sure to exist. Romanticism took this one step further to declare personal feelings and experience the most reliable measure and means of discerning truth. 1 This quote from Rosaria Butterfield's Openness Unhindered  makes the case that sexual orientation as identity is a byproduct of romanticism. I agree with her complet...

Several years ago pre-Doctrines of Grace, a book was recommended to me when my ex- first moved out.  At that point, discernment was the last thing on my mind because all I wanted was comfort and hope.  It seemed reputable and a bestseller, which must be worth something.  W ell written and emotionally compelling, the book pulled at my heart strings. I cried buckets, and upon finishing, I was convinced that God was a lovesick Father. Deep down humanity was longing for God and deeply sorry for their sin. The last thing to do is drive someone away by talking about repentance and sin, so the key is to be as nice as possible and not offend in any way.  It certainly made me feel better, but it also gave false hope for reconciliation. In hindsight, I was banking on sentiment not truth. The book gave me what I wanted to hear and feel at the time. I didn't want to face the possibility of God actually ordaining my trial. I didn't want a God who doesn't give happy endings to hi...

I have been fairly distrustful of feelings lately, but I am still human enough to want to feel God's love, to feel hope especially in this ongoing trial. Today was such a day. Sometimes the feelings are there, but they weren't today. What to do? Should I go looking for something to generate them? I could have surfed the Internet and found something heartwarming and sentimental to give me a warm fuzzy, like the infamous Footprints in the Sand . (Don't mean to offend anyone, but I really dislike that poem.) But is it enough for me to believe what the Word says about God and His character? Is that enough for me to bank on regardless of whether I feel it or not and whether I see it happening now or not? I keep coming back to something Pastor Ryan shared about Joseph. Joseph's faith in God was demonstrated by the fact that he asked the Israelites to take his bones back to the promised land. It wasn't a question of if. It was a question of when. Joseph did not see it i...