Become like children or you will not be admitted into heaven:
Matthew 18:3
And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 19:14
Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
Mark 10:15, Luke 18:17
“I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
Put your childish ways behind you and think like wise and reasonable adults:
1 Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 14:20
Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.
Ephesians 4:14
Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.
Tags: Bible, Child, Childish, Children, Conflicting, Faith, Heaven, Kingdom
April 14, 2009 at 9:24 am |
The Bible is not perfect. It is a collection of books. Paul, as an educated pharisee, valued maturity and reason. Jesus, as reported by the synoptics, was responding with a greater value placed on the virtues of childhood.
As with most anything in the Bible, context is everything. Jesus addresses his own disciples, who quarreled and indulged in narcissism at times. Paul wants those arguing Corinthian Christians to grow up and avoid immaturity.
Here’s a conflict from the world of physics: Why does light acts as both wave forms and as particles at the same time?
April 14, 2009 at 10:33 am |
The Bible is all we have to understand what it means to be a Christian. If it is conflicting and confusing, what chance do we have? I have to question how the creator of the universe couldn’t inspire a better book.
April 14, 2009 at 11:47 am |
“The Bible is all we have to understand what it means to be a Christian.”
Hardly. There is tradition for the churched, and the lived witness of Christians for the non-believers. Grant you, the example of some Christians is a mighty turnoff, but that’s both the plus and the minus for the Church–bed, make, sleep: you know the drill.
“If it is conflicting and confusing, what chance do we have?”
Well, it’s not simple, if that’s what you mean. You can’t just pull out quotes from a ctrl-F search and line up the sentences. You have to read in context. More challenging than romance novels, a bit easier than Dickens or Shakespeare, and a darn-sight simpler than differential equations. But there you have it.
April 14, 2009 at 12:13 pm |
“There is tradition for the churched”
Which church’s tradition am I supposed to follow? Every denomination has it’s own version.
April 14, 2009 at 11:50 am |
As Todd mentioned….you have to look at context here. Jesus is speaking about getting your heart right, become innocent like a child, then you will be able to seek, and inherit the Kingdom. Paul speaking to the Church in Corinth, was tired of the quarreling among those who called themselves believers….he was saying, grow up and think like adults! Jesus was talking about heart and soul, Paul was speaking about the mind. That is not conflicting.
April 15, 2009 at 5:30 am |
Today’s conflicting Bible teaching of the week comes from reading the Bible like a rule book rather than the library it is.
April 15, 2009 at 2:25 pm |
The bible is a book of rules, do this, don’t do that. Be this way and go to hell. So you can not read it as a library book, if you do the big down fall is there is so much room to “read” into what it speaks to each of us. At the end of it all the bible is by man for man and “god” had no hand in it.
April 15, 2009 at 2:35 pm |
Well said.
A book full of commandments and laws is meant to be read as a rule book. Rules on how to live and how to worship.
It may be a library of books, but itis a library of rules.
April 15, 2009 at 3:13 pm |
You couldn’t be more wrong. Scripture is not a library of rules. The Bible is a library of diverse material, some of which are rules. Most of it is not. The rules don’t all apply anymore.
April 15, 2009 at 3:27 pm |
The focus of the New Testament is belief in Jesus, but plenty of ink was used laying out the rules of being a Christian.
Jesus himself ridiculed the Pharisees for ignoring Old Testament rules which Christians considered to “not apply” today:
Mark 7:9-10
And Jesus said to them: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’
April 15, 2009 at 3:17 pm |
It seems that you have been hurt and disillusioned by what the Christian Church is today. You should read the book, “The Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne. It addresses how the modern Church has manipulated the Bible and doesn’t follow what it actually tells us.
Also you don’t have to follow traditions to belong to the Church. The Church is composed of all believers all over the world. We have just split up the church because we are egotistical and think that our version of the Bible is the best. I don’t have any particular denomination I decided to read the Bible for myself and do research on what I believe. That is what determines what “traditions” I follow and how I live my life. I don’t rely on a human structure to decided for me. I use the Bible to decide what it tells me to do. Also as others have pointed out I look at the context of the verses. There is nothing that bugs me more then the bible taken out of context, especially when christians themselves do it. Which happens far to often.
Anyway I don’t want to judge you I just want to open your mind to new ideas on Christianity. Hope that this can be an intelligent respectful discussion. And I hope to learn more about your personal views rather then just shallow critiques on Scripture. Peace and Love
April 15, 2009 at 5:18 pm |
The manipulation of the books that makes up the Bible got a good start in 325 AD at Nicene. When Constantine (a man) put togther the accepted books to make up what we know as the Bible today. How can anyone have a Church base on a book that man has put togther? Drop the work of man open your heart and look for God in there.
April 15, 2009 at 10:00 pm |
Yes, indeed Mark! It was but a short time after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, that the following edict was published throughout the provinces of the Roman Empire:
“O ye enemies of truth, authors and counsellors of death — we enact by this law that none of you dare hereafter to meet at your conventicles … nor keep any meetings either in public buildings or private houses. We have commanded that all your places of meeting — your temples — be pulled down or confiscated to the Catholic Church.”
The man who affixed his signature to this edict was a monarch, that is to say, a man who had the power to do as he liked. The man and monarch, then, who affixed his imperial signature to this first document of persecution in Europe — the first, because, as Renan has beautifully remarked, “We may search in vain the whole Roman law before Constantine for a single passage against freedom of thought, and the history of the imperial government furnishes no instance of a prosecution for entertaining an abstract doctrine,” — this is glory enough for the civilization which we call Pagan and which was replaced by the Asiatic religion — the man and the monarch who fathered the first instrument of persecution in our Europe, who introduced into our midst the crazed hounds of religious wars, unknown either in Greece or Rome, Constantine, has been held up by Cardinal Newman as “a pattern to all succeeding monarchs.” Only an Englishman, a European, infected with the malady of the East, could hold up the author of such an edict, — an edict which prostitutes the State to the service of a fad — as “a pattern.”
April 16, 2009 at 8:03 am |
“Drop the work of man open your heart and look for God in there.”
If you drop the Bible, there is no reason to believe in Jesus. It is all we have to know anything about his life.
But you are correct, these books are nothing more than the work of man that were later compiled by another “holy” man. I’ll gladly drop it.
April 18, 2009 at 4:44 pm |
You don’t seem very concerned with reading biblical quotes in context…