It is not always easy to distinguish the purposes of God from mundane living.
In this book are some examples of how to distinguish the purposes of God from everyday living.
It tells just some of the stories of the people who believed and ran with the law written in their heart. Some were rich some were poor, some were kings some were slaves, some are well known and some you may never of heard about. My hope is it will help train the eye of insight into what to look for as you journey through life.
Foreword
I envy those with a good imagination. I guess envy is a sin but what else can you do if you desire a good imagination? You can't steal it. If you could, that also would be a sin. Of course there are dangers that come with imagination, so perhaps I should be grateful I don't have too much of it.
Psychologists tell us every human being possesses imagination. But like those possessing money, some are richer than others. Theologians are more incline to warn us of imagination's dangers. The King James version of the Bible references at least fourteen verses to the imagination of the heart. Most of these are referred to as wicked. One in Luke 1:15 reminds us that Jesus came to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts. But for all this, the imagination of the heart is a link into the spiritual world and, provided the heart is pure it is a beneficial attribute for seeing God.
Of course Jesus came in the flesh to dispel the false imagination encouraged by the teachers of the law. But it has been a long time since Jesus came and we are inclined to use our imaginations to visualise Jesus and his character. So once again we need to look to a pure and accurate imagination so that we interpret Jesus aright.
This is only the foreword so, enough of the discussion around Imagination. Except to say this book is a record of a lifetime of questioning that has forced me to examine time and again the difference between what I have been taught as doctrine, what others have tried to tell me Jesus is like and what I have experienced for myself about God.
The Christian life is a journey and in it imagination gets modified by experience and expectation. As the prophets remind us, imagination is close to the longings of heart and is not always accurate. It picks and chooses what it wants to hear and can be dangerous. But it is necessary in a journey of faith because we would not start this journey if we had no picture of what we thought might come at the end.
So, as you can see from the contents list, this is a book of little insights I have accumulated on my journey of faith. It questions the heart more than the imagination. It is dangerous to shape imagination just through culture, education, or peer pressure. It has to be based on a relationship with God Himself. The best way I know of doing that is to examine how biblical characters related to God and test my relationship around that.