Souper Salad and Being a Disciple

My wife Krisann, aka Chez has this enormous like for the restaurant Souper Salad. To me, Souper Salad is more like a garden for rabbits; where's the meat? I'm not a rabbit. The extent of meat is little cubits of ham that I refer as 'hamlets' and then bacon bits for your potato. I'm sure to complain and hate the place but recently I have given in to the taste and can enjoy it as needed. So my main issue is I am a meat person, steak, burger, ribs, pork, t-bone, etc. and this place doesn't do it for me on that scale.

When I think about this introspectively I think about how in my personal life I like to get in deep into subjects. I love to learn, I have this innate desire to try and learn all I can do on a subject or experience or item. Some say I am argumentative, I conclude I am when I feel I have a strong foundation on a certain subject, BUT I see my argumentative side more as my passions, however I am trying to become more professional at how I demonstrate my passions. Sometimes it gets me in trouble because it can be a bit over the top. On another note I typically don't argue in areas I don't know much about, I tend to open my ear and look at this as an opportunity to listen and learn. Life offers so many opportunities to learn. We need to learn to listen more instead of always having the answer.

So what does this last dissertation have to do with soup and salad? Maybe not much except that I see soup and salad as a introduction to a meal, but certainly not as a meal. Hebrews 5:12 says, "In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!" If you consider yourself a follower of Christ, wanting to live like him and better yourself and the world around you then you need to be eager to dig deeper into the Bible and learn everything you can. Be a meat eater, even if you are a vegetarian!

I want to be a disciple of Christ, while eating my veggies. What are you doing to grow yourself, to learn and grow more?

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Is All Truth God's Truth?

Is all truth God's truth?
A pastor friend of mine argued that that this statement is not true. Let's discuss that for a moment.

"Epistemology" is defined as "the study or theory of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge." This is is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. When it comes to truth there is ZERO opinion. If your opinion happens to land on truth then great, your opinion is right. If your opinion does not align with the truth then your opinion is not true. You have a right to your opinion however you do not have a right to debate your opinion as truth if it is not true. Does perspective change truth? No. Perspective is how you may agree or disagree with truth, a sort of lens on how you view truth, but doesn't change it. What is comical about 'epistemology' is that can we really study knowledge? It almost seems like a paradox. But here is the main question, is truth a social construction or solely God's? I would relegate this to an absolute, I personally feel it can only exist wholly God's or man's. All things are created by God, He is the causality of everything. I process things through reductive reasoning, reduce this down to it's simple form, truth is God's or it isn't!

Truth is not subjective, truth is not opinionated, truth is not debatable, truth is not irrational even when you disagree with it, truth stands on it's own always remaining the same and being unchangeable. So I want to use a simile to look at truth; truth is to light as untruth is to darkness. There are verses like John 1:5 that says, the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Then Isaiah 5:20 NIV says, woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. So if dark and light cannot coexist then (un)truth cannot coexist. So truth and untruth cannot coexist then can there be truth that is not of God, if God is truth? This is commonly called the "correspondence of truth". This basically means that something is true only if it corresponds or agrees with factual reality. Again this is limited to our understanding of our universe and reality. So check this out, this basically presupposes a flow of logic called bivalence. In technical terms, bivalence is a very deep part of epistimology. Basically, any unambiguous, declarative statement must be entirely true or entirely false. So God is either wholly true or wholly false, we know he is wholly true, this is pretty declarative in studying God with the process of epistimology, again, only limited to how we interpret and understand what truth is, the absolutism of truth. For post-moderns I can stand firm upon their belief and say they are not human, based on their definition that truth is relative, they are a higher bread of mosquitoes (this is a joke based off their reasoning). Relativism is an attempt to not have to pony up to the admittance of self-responsibility, what a nice life. However that belief does not remove truth, ignorance doesn't create, again it is perspective.

Satan has no creative abilities, he can only use what God has created. He can manipulate truth, he can stretch truth, but he cannot tell the truth and lie at the same time, refer again to the rules of bivalence. Satan can borrow only. So the same rules apply, either Satan is a being of truth or he lies. We must understand his nature is evil so if he does tell the truth it is motivated my ill actions and will be used for bad. Now his truth is truly borrowed from God, not created. So even in this understanding we can say all truth is still God's truth. It either is or isn't. If it isn't all God's then whose else is it?

If God is true and God is the creator of all things then false is the lack of truth, just like darkness is the lack of light. Did God create evil or is evil the absence of Godliness and truth? Is there hate or is hate the absence of love? Thoughts?

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MADE Week 4

This is week 4 of RMCC's series based off the MTV show Made where Pastor Jeff will be discussing what is our purpose in life. We will be hitting several areas, lifegroups, where real life happens, worship encounters, where we get to experience God, and volunteer teams, where we get to serve the body and people of our community. Join us as I get to coach Cougar McSangston on life and how to get made into what God has him to be.


This week I get to coach Coug in the area of relationships. Of course like normal, he is terrified and freaks out at the thought of having to meet 'others'. He get's a first hand encounter of Lifegroups. Enjoy!

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