The Time of Singing

The spring is so beautiful here. I really cannot get enough of the blue sky, and flowers and budding trees. I love how the Bible describes this season: The time of singing has come.  Also, the time of sneezing. I'm surprised the Bible doesn't mention that. Surely hay fever existed in Bible times.

My allergies haven't kicked in yet. I have a two week period when the oak and birch pollen is high when I have to medicate myself to live. Some of my friends suffer from the moment things start blooming. How terrible for them -- to associate all this beauty with misery. Allergies represent one of the strangest conditions of all creation -- bodies turning on themselves! There is no good reason to find oak pollen dangerous. It is not intrinsically dangerous...not the way a speeding bullet is. But when a wacky immune system decides it is dangerous, and begins to attack its own self...bad things happen, and it really is dangerous. Even life threatening.

The same thing can happen to families, churches, communities, nations...We begin attacking from within the very fiber of the structure necessary to exist at all. Then everything implodes, crumbles from within.

What a mess. We destroy ourselves. Spiritually, this is a constant danger to each of us. We're so filled with pride and self-deception, that we think the problem is not us...but everyone else.

2 Timothy 3 warns us of the symptoms:

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. ² For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, ³ heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, ⁴ treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, ⁵ having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

God gives us the solution: Acts 4:11-12
¹¹ This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. ¹² And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

There is no other hope, no other antidote to self destruction. oh-oh...I feel a sneeze coming on.
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