Pleasure in God

Our recent Sunday School classes have been enlightening and deeply thought provoking. We've been studying the pursuit of God and the ultimate pleasure found in this pursuit. A couple Sundays ago we discussed the general contemporary church's response to sin which seems to fall under three catagories:
1. Portray sin as so ugly and unappealing that we will choose not to pursue it
2. Come up with a lengthy list of dos and don'ts, taboos and such
3. Consider the yearning to sin as the problem

From personal experience and from reading of the lives of others, clearly none of these are fully effective against sin. The answer: to make the pursuit of God so pleasureable that earthly pleasures will pale in comparision.

Other thoughts:
1. Holiness ought to be pursued because it leads to joy.
2. Pursuit of God leads to superior pleasure.
3. Low-grade daily addictions rob us of true pleasure in God alone. (daily addictions include but not limited to...eating, t.v., computer use, exercise, shopping etc.)

(Many of these thoughts are the product of the speaker's reading Jonathan Edwards' works: Personal Narrative and Youth and the Pleasures of Piety.)

I ran across this quote for a project I was working on and I'm posting it here because I've always thought that just because someone is viewed as an 'expert' or just because someone has a lot of letters after their name this does not mean they have a corner on the truth. Oooh, I've met too many in lots of fields that believe this. So here's the quote:

Our research has yielded (and we have systematically catalogued and footnoted for the first time) thousands of examples of expert misinformation, disinformation, misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, booboos, and occasional just plain lies. And based on our preliminary findings we can say with some confidence that the experts are wrong without regard to race, creed, color, sex discipline, speciality, country, culture, or century. They are wrong about facts, and they are wrong about theories, they are wrong about dates, they are wrong about geography, they are wrong about the future, they are wrong about the past, and at best they are misleading about the present, not to mention next week.

Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, "Introduction to the Original (1984) Version," The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, rev. ed. (New York: Villard, [1984] 1998, xxvii.

I can almost see you nodding your head and hear you saying "You got that right!"

Just a little reminder to each of us that summer will come again, the sky will dazzle us with blue, the zephyr will kiss our cheeks, the birds will sing for pure joy, and we will smell the rich earth beneath our feet.

Morning has broken, like the first morning.

Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird.

Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for it springing fresh from the Word.

Turquoise waters...emerald islands

Okay, so I've never physically been to the Caribbean. Nevertheless I have mentally traveled there on several occasions via James A. Michener's book, Caribbean. I recently reread this stirring tale, due primarily to the recent earthquakes in Haiti. If you want to know the history of this island and other tales of this once-Spanish, once-English Lake, pick up Michener's book.

Following completion you will have a much greater understanding of the why's and wherefore's of the great saddness that hovers over Haiti...without end.

And its profound need for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.