Michael's Arrow

 

Political and religious sectors are embedded with it, the negative effects being obvious. Perhaps the most acute fallout can be observed in social media, especially with the youth today.  This was brought home to my wife Beth and I as we were taking a bus trip around the city. Two young girls in the seat behind us, say 13 or 14 years old, were discussing matters relevant to their social group.  While we picked up snippets of their discussions out of context, I believe they are worth sharing here to make a point. “Weird Normal”, “Weird Normal people are still popular though”,  “Grunge”,  were some of the discussion topics being interacted by the group, such topic labels were new to Beth and I, and made us come to understand a little about the way social media is polorising our young ones in a manner that cannot always be healthy. They speak a language that is foreign to us, but is very familiar to them, and obviously part of their social reality.

 

How did we get here as a society?  What happened to our once Judeo-Christian social order that was not perfect, but had the structure in place to offer fair and measured outcomes. Could we have stood by as we watched bad actors applied their social engineering intent on deprogramming the minds of our young ones, replacing Christian ideologies with secular notions far removed from the certainties of the belief systems that their grandparents held dear? It seems this could be the case, and the slippery slope is becoming more greasy.

 

It is a truism that many civilisations have come and gone before ours. Our Creator God has a massive plan which we are privileged to be part of, should we chose to do so, but while we may think we are the centre of the universe, and everything revolves around us, the fact is our life is gift and our place in this creative magnificence is set by the master planner, our Creative God.

 

Individually we have a responsibility, to Know, to Love and to Serve.  To Know, we need to observe. If we observe with the promise “seek and you shall find” at the base of our search, the Spirit of of Creator God will touch our soul, and will reveal to us wonderful things that had not previously come to mind. Our Creator God is pure love, nothing else can exist within Him.

 

Our responsibility to Love must begin by abiding by the rules Our Creator God has revealed to us. We can be a rebellious people, and since the fall we have a natural inclination to work against God’s plan for us. In His Wisdom, our Creator God has gifted us free will. We have complete and utter freedom to choose our path in life. God will not interfere with our choices, even if, in the extreme, they lead to our demise. Of course, He created us for Love, to be in a state of perfect contentment with Him forever, but He wants us to chose to love Him out of our gift of free will, to freely chose His Love with our “yes” to Him above every other “yes to love” we may make along life’s journey.

 

When necessary God will act in radical ways. In the Old Testament He spoke to us through Moses, it was through the prophet that he delivered ten rules for life, the Ten Commandments. While some took these on board, many sadly ignored them and went their own way, on a path that led them away from the purpose for which they were created.

 

Rather than adore the one true God various civilisations worshiped their own notion of God. There were Gods everywhere, pagan Gods. In His Wisdom, God the Father sent His only begotten Son Jesus to earth as a supreme gift to the human race. While, on the surface, the impact of His life on earth ended in disaster with the crucifixion, His resurrection and ascension after His bodily death changed everything. Never before, and never since, has any gift of the Father to the human race been so powerfully enacted. Jesus came to redeem us, and by His great act of selfless Love He did just that. He didn't leave us orphans, He left us the Holy Spirit and commissioned the apostles and early Christian pioneers to spread His message of Love to humanity which slowly took root in society over 300 years when Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. At that point all other "Gods" became null and void.

 

Sadly, in our day and age, we see many "Gods" of the previous pagan era making their way back onto the world stage in a manner more brazen and obvious than ever. Many today have rejected Christianity as a way of life and have neglected passing on the Wisdom of Christ's message to their children and grandchildren. As created beings we yearn to find a reason for our existence. Many in our modern society, especially our younger ones, have no idea of the salvivific reality of Christ's message, sadly clinging to some godless entity of "the universe" as their deity. 

 

And so here we are, in a society that once was Christian, and now has reverted to ideologies of the long-past pagan era where many "Gods" are accepted in society as having value, while our Christian God is rejected as a religion of previous generations that is long past its useby date. "If only they knew", as a wise man once said; "if only they knew".

 

As Christians we are disadvantaged by the vast range of denominations that have evolved over the centuries. Unity, and a common understanding of an authentic Christian lifestyle has been compromised as a result. An unfortunate outcome for modern day Christians is diluted Christianity that lacks the impact available in living and authentic Christian Lifestyle.

 

Jesus Christ gave us the blueprint for authentic Christianity. That blueprint offers us His plan in its entirety. We cannot pick what we like and leave the rest, we have to take the whole package; for that is our challenge.

 

"How do we do this?", you may be asking, "who will show us the way?"  In our modern secular world there are so many "gurus" who offer answers, and now that the "gods" of a previous pagan era are alive and well in our culture, there are plenty of options to attract searching souls into their covens. This is the downside of the current culture, when we let go of Christ, we fall prey to His adversary, Satan.

 

While the majority of our modern culture may have forgotten Christ, He has not forgotten us. He is as alive today as He was when He walked our earth some two thousand years ago. Christ respects our free will, and will not force Himself on us, but if we ask Him into our lives He will respond in a most powerful way; for He is just waiting for the invitation.

 

 

Recognise the enemy within you, that negative voice that measures you against others, that tells you that you are no good, that you don't measure up, and you will never amount to anything. Take no notice of these negative whisperings; because they do not come from God. 

 

It has been this way since the beginning of time, anybody that has ever been born has experienced it. Some have let the negative voices control their actions, ending up on a road to nowhere. Others have cut through the negativity and found ways to make something of their lives, helping others to do the same in the process. This is our challenge, and it is helpful to remember we have an able assistant in St Michael the Archangel to help us in this quest. He is awaiting our call; all we need do is "ask".

 

Our Creator God gifted us life, and He has a place for us in His wonderful creative world, in an eternity that we cannot even immagine from our carnal state. This life we are currently living is a testing ground if you like, a place of enquiry as to the why, the what and the wherefore of our existance. Here we experience all the magnificence of God's creation, side by side with the destructive affects of a wilful rejection of a creator God by so many of our human brothers and sisters. We all have a choice to make; Archangel Michael, help us in our struggle.

 

God is looking for us to make a choice for Him, to reject the worthless promises offered to us by Satan and his entourage of demons, and to freely choose Jesus Christ as our saviour at the rejection of everything, or anyone else. Everything an enquiring Christian needs to know about choices can be found in Holy Scripture.