After watching a documentary warning him about this, that and the other thing, Brian looked for sources to corroborate what he had heard. He quickly realized that what he heard was only partially true. He also wondered for whose benefit the documentary was made.
He heard his heart advise him that a half truth is worse than a whole lie.
And that was when Brian began his fast with daily bread which he had been on now for over a year. The yokes broke, the bonds of wickedness were loosed and the oppressed, including Brian himself, were freed.
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Denise offers the prompt word “benefit” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Story.
Isaiah 58:6 NKJV – Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, To undo the heavy burdens, To let the oppressed go free, And that you break every yoke?
One day Jeremy decided to give Samuel a piece of his mind. His mind started off calmly enough, but then it entered the Land of Half-Truths where words were prized more for the pain they caused than for their clarity.
Seeing Samuel’s silence suddenly change into laughter, Jeremy demanded to know: What are you so happy about?
I’m watching that little demon run your mouth.
Realizing it was noticed, the demon fled. With the demon gone the bond of commitment to his own righteousness that guided Jeremy through fantasy land dissipated like a dream he desperately wanted to remember, but no longer could.
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Denise offers the prompt word “bond” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
A view from the Charles Bridge in Prague which has nothing to do with the story except for the contrasting colors.
Brian made a lot of mistakes which annoyed people who had to put up with him. Although a likeable guy that he annoyed people didn’t bother him so much as his suddenly realizing that what he was doing was actually wrong. Once he understood what he was doing was wrong he had the sense to immediately reject it resolving never to do it again.
However, some of those rejected mistakes would wedge their way back into his life. When that happened he’d have to repent all over again to the annoyance of the perfect ones who had to put up with him.
And that was the story of Brian’s life, a calm and joyful life, but one which annoyed people who for some reason didn’t need repentance.
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Denise offers the prompt word “wedge” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Story.
Matthew 18:21-22 KJV – 21 Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? 22 Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
They rolled a stone in front of His tomb. At the request of the religious authorities the stone was sealed and a guard placed by it.
The news was still spreading that He had called forth a man who had been dead for days and that man came out of his tomb. Since He Himself was now dead and lacking any agency to cause trouble, they hoped this would end the resurrection mania that He started.
Twilight darkened into night as the religious authorities wondered how the veil of the temple could have been torn from top to bottom.
Days later when some of His followers went to the tomb they found it opened and empty.
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Denise offers the prompt word “agency” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Matthew 12:40 NKJV – 40 “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
John 11:43-44 NKJV – 43 Now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” 44 And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”
Matthew 27:51 NKJV – 51 Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom…
Matthew 27:62-66 NKJV – 62 On the next day, which followed the Day of Preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees gathered together to Pilate, 63 saying, “Sir, we remember, while He was still alive, how that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise.’ 64 “Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest His disciples come by night and steal Him away, and say to the people, ‘He has risen from the dead.’ So the last deception will be worse than the first.” 65 Pilate said to them, “You have a guard; go your way, make it as secure as you know how.” 66 So they went and made the tomb secure, sealing the stone and setting the guard.
When Ryan visited his friends one evening he talked to their aunt who sat in a wheelchair with her heart wrapped in a web of bitterness so tightly that love couldn’t escape. Feeling a rush of reckless compassion for them he risked asking her if she’d like a prayer of faith even though he knew she wouldn’t.
Compelled by politeness she agreed sternly informing him that she knew what paralysis was even if he didn’t and he merely responded by saying, I command healing in your body in the name of Jesus. After a pause he spoke directly to the hostility in her eyes, The Kingdom of God has come near to you. When nothing happened, he told her to remember and expect her healing, but if anything was amiss it was his faith and not her lack of it.
Three days later she rose from her chair and walked wanting out of habit not to smile yet overcome with such joy she couldn’t help it.
James 5:13-15 KJV – 13 Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms. 14 Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: 15 And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.
1 Peter 2:24 KJV – Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
In trying to find out how far back the idea of the natural went the search engine offered a link to a paper by a naturalist philosopher, David Papineau, who described philosophers like himself as people who were committed to the belief that reality contained only what is natural, nothing supernatural.
Papineau wrote1,
They [naturalist philosophers] urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit”…
His argument could be easily rejected. All I’d have to do is reject any definition of natural that could exhaust reality. Indeed, I’m more inclined to feel that reality is exhausted by the supernatural rather than the other way around.
A Miraculous Raising From the Dead
Besides Papineau, I was also listening today to Curry Blake give a testimony during his Divine Healing Technician Training lectures. Before he was involved in his healing ministry his first daughter died when she was three and years later another daughter fell over twenty feet onto concrete. He could tell she was dead, but he carried her and then stood her up against the wall commanding her over and over again: In the name of Jesus you will live and not die.
And then she came back.
She said she was hungry. He gave her only a small piece of bread, because her mouth was crushed in the fall. When he took her to the hospital they said she had been dead for 45 minutes.
Blake made an interesting comment (about 52:50 in the video) explaining why he didn’t take his daughter to the hospital when he realized that she was dead:
Now I didn’t rush her to the hospital cause any time you take a dead body to the hospital they take them away from you and you don’t get to be with them anymore. Right? That’s why we don’t see many dead raisings in the States. Soon as somebody dies they take them away and they start cutting on them and taking pieces out and you’re not with them and you can’t get to them again until the funeral. Whereas in other countries they, a lot of times they, keep the body in the house and different things go on and you can get to the body. That’s why there are so many more dead raisings in other countries. You know, we’ve civilized ourselves out of the power of God most of the time.
In my mind I took Blake’s testimony back to Papineau. I had a few questions to ask the naturalist philosopher.
If dead bodies are part of a reality that is exhausted by nature can commanding them to live and not die in the name of Jesus bring them back to life?
When dead bodies do in fact come back to life, how does that fit into the deterministic natural laws that supposedly rule a universe closed to the supernatural?
He didn’t answer, but then I only asked him in my mind. In my heart I was beginning to see how our philosophical commitments to what we think of as natural keeps us from seeing what is truly real.
Sam knew he couldn’t get there from here, at least not on his own smarts, but he agreed to go.
The still small voice told him to move to Colorado, then Florida and then Maine. Although those moves made no sense, he moved anyway, since he knew he didn’t have the smarts to know what to do next. At every turn he took the time to listen and then do what the voice told him to do.
One day Sam was overwhelmed with joy to realize that he and the still small voice had been living, seemingly for years, in a wonderful dwelling paneled with righteousness and furnished with goodness and mercy.
The still small voice said, “I told you we’d get here when you agreed to go with Me.”
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Denise offers the prompt word “panel” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Tim didn’t know the minister, Daniel, nor most of the other people at the small church gathering in his neighbor’s home. He was surprised when a young woman collapsed to her knees in tears and then lay on the floor as Daniel spoke words of blessing over her.
When Daniel asked Tim to tell them how he first met Jesus, he wasn’t sure how that happened, but knowing it must have, he stood, held Daniel’s hands and began telling his story, a type of incoherent, shaky narrative that went from repentance to repentance to finally moving next door to them. While speaking he thought to himself that he so wished his testimony were better.
The next thing Tim knew he was looking up at Daniel apparently from having fallen over backwards to the floor caught on the way down by a man standing behind him, just in case.
An older woman who had attended many of these meetings rushed to Daniel saying Do that to me! even though, or maybe, because, both she and Daniel knew he wasn’t the One who made Tim fall like that.
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Denise offers the prompt word “type” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
I found this song on Greg Doles’ blog, Chasing Light
Steve realized that by giving in to temptations, symptoms of his ailing heart, he invited demonic critters to claw their way in and smother his mind with gooey addictions. Nonetheless, he kept giving in—over and over again—and the critters got so used to being in his head that they took up residence.
Someone asked Steve if he wanted to get rid of the critters. By that time he wasn’t sure if he did, because he didn’t know if he could tolerate life without the excitement the temptations brought even though afterwards they made him feel miserable. Steve’s heart, however, had enough sense left in it to scream, I WANT THEM GONE!
And just like that the critters were gone which Steve found hard to believe, but there wasn’t any other way for them to leave except just like that.
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Denise offers the prompt word “claw” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Mark 5:18-20 NKJV 18 And when He got into the boat, he who had been demon-possessed begged Him that he might be with Him. 19 However, Jesus did not permit him, but said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them what great things the Lord has done for you, and how He has had compassion on you.” 20 And he departed and began to proclaim in Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him; and all marveled.
As James was wallowing in his favorite garbage someone called his name. When he saw that no one was there he went back to making a wreck of his life.
Then James heard the same voice that called him earlier tell him to become a minister of the Gospel. Fat chance that was going to happen, he thought, but the voice interrupted him with You’re goofing off on holy ground! The voice had that je ne sais quoi that made it too real to be unreal even for a garbage connoisseur like James.
His friends were shocked as they watched James take out the garbage and turn that fat chance into a sure bet that he would do something with his life that he had never suspected.
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Denise offers the prompt word “wreck” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 