RATIONAL, REAL TIME, and with INTEGRITY

[A Monday / Wednesday / Friday Devotional Feature of the First Road Blog]

A friend asked me: “What would it take for you to accept evolution?” I answered, “I would have to become irrational.” 

God is necessary, His creation requires His active presence and a sovereignty which allows for supernatural intervention if and when he chooses (miracles). It is saturated with information which implies an overarching purpose and begs Him to communicate an explainable (although not necessarily welcome) reason for order and chaos, joy and suffering. The existence of love, hope, and a sense of justice in the human heart give reason to think such an explanation would include hope or despair or both; and hope would need to be understandable in order to be desired and attainable for those who want it.

This rationality is the heartbeat of biblical conversation. The God who made us has given us his Word. It is real time, not speculative theory. That is, it lives and moves and has its being in daily life. And its content has integrity – it is understandable and applicable in any direction a conversation takes. 

Consider the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. While God’s Spirit takes the Word of God and brings it home to the heart, we have a responsibility to handle it rightly (rationally), give the sense (real time), and seek to know what someone thinks he heard us say (integrity). 

For example, are you aware of the look of glorifying God, or is it just a catch phrase? Is your conversational use of God's glory rational, real time, and a matter of integrity? How can God's glory be explained, imagined, and highlighted in conversation without going into preacher mode? How do the heavens with their clouds, stars, planets, and dangerous meteors “glorify him”? How does knowing this relate to being equipped for glorifying God through faith and good works in real time and with integrity in the neighborhood? Jesus demonstrated a remarkable skill in bringing these things together in his conversations with his disciples. 

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