Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Greetings, special ones.

Forgive me for the volume here. Whew! Yesterday was a full day. When I finally had time to finish up the composition for yesterday, my head wouldn’t work. I guess I have a kind of personal resolve to follow through with this…since I started it. Following through with these compositions is not just an investment in my own spiritual health, but also in my emotional health. I can’t feel good about myself if I don’t. And catching up, is almost impossible.

Whew! We need to take off for Woodburn soon…and I haven’t yet hit the shower after our earlier walk/jog.

Good bye. Blessings on your day.

Love, Dad/Ray.

If we force ourselves to think clearly, all of us will have to agree—it’s not entirely our fault we’re still here! Even those who “have no fear of God” (55:19) are made alive and kept alive by His sustaining design. There is simply no way that a bunch of mindless dirt could have self-created human existence. “Mother Nature” does not exist—“Father God” does. Is it not an amusing paradox that popular secular thinking will quickly dispel the notion of Santa Claus or “the tooth fairly,” but just as quickly give credence to mystical “Mother Nature?”—as though she offers the best explanation for all things? Adherents consciously or unconsciously worship her—a form of religion all its own—anti-God religion.

Friday evening, Becki and I rolled into the parking lot of Holiday Inn Express at Chehalis, Washington. (The event was in connection with her 50th High School Reunion…attended, of course, by a bunch of old people. So we were in good company.) At its entrance was a round-about. It seemed that the round-about served no other purpose than to display a big beautiful stone pylon composition with a large inscription at its base—IN GOD WE TRUST. It kind of took me back. It’s clearly “politically incorrect” these days. We are seldom allowed to see this kind of public message. There is clearly a current in our American culture that would wish to wash that notion away. But whoever designed and fabricated that monument wished to make a statement that reaffirmed and honored the Sovereign God and our traditional American roots. And I honor that effort.

The Psalmist David would applaud that statement. In fact, his recorded words in Psalm 56:4 may have inspired it: “In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust,; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?”

In my own attempt to take all this data into account as carefully as I can, I keep arriving at this bottom-line conclusion: THE MOST IMPORTANT LEGITIMATE FEAR IN LIFE IS TO FEAR AN INADEQUATE FEAR OF GOD. What conclusion do you draw? Best we understand that we are drawing conclusions every day that we are allowed to live on this globe with functional brains and beating hearts.