Offered to God

• I write them as part of a life committed to God, who I believe came into the world as Jesus Christ.
• So I try to avoid sloppiness in thinking or motivation or presentation. But I might not always achieve this.
• All my writing is imperfect, and this is exacerbated by Asperger Syndrome (Autism) and some Dyslexia. So I struggle to express properly what I mean, often using words in a partial or one-sided way (and sometimes later I correct). My Autism fires passion and anger, so sometimes I express things more harshly than I really mean. All this writing is on-going work.
• Though I cannot achieve perfection, I do not believe God demands perfection, for the following reasons.

• It is often better to do something imperfect than to do nothing out of fear of being imperfect. God often graciously uses the imperfect in God's perfect designs.
• I believe that God wants us to work with him. These pages are offered to God, not as some kind of 'sacrifice' which becomes burnt up, but in the sense of being part of my work with him.
• But what right do I have to see what I do as part of my work with God, and worthy of being offered to God? I believe that those who are committed to Jesus Christ are indwelt by the Spirit of God and, to the extent that we allow the Spirit of God reign in our lives, what we do is at least partly influenced by him. As such, it is worth something. This is why I believe that I can treat these pages as worth something. (Christians call this 'grace'.)
• I myself might not understand what the worth is; indeed I might completely misunderstand. But I am content if God allows them to be worthwhile in some way. These two points preclude arrogance.

• Temptation: To see what I write as somehow more special than it really is; to allow arrogant attitude a foothold. We are never free from tendency to arrogance. This is why Paul urged us to keep 'sober' judgement of ourselves.
• Temptation: To take psychological ownership of what I write, to see it as pursuant of my own glory or applause, however unconscious this might be. Anything done for my own glory, or in pursuit of my own agenda is ultimately worthless.
• Answer to these: Recognising these (and other) possibilities, I 'confess' them to God (c.f. I John 1:9) and trust him to bring good and worth out of what I have written (c.f. Romans 8:28) if he so chooses.

• As such, all this brings me joy and meaningfulness in attempting to write things. This joy and meaningfulness is diverse (maybe best explained by Dooyeweerd's aspects which are spheres of meaning: aesthetic joy, social joy, moral joy, faith joy, joy of justice, joy of frugality, joy in communicating, joy in forming the pages, joy in distinguishing what is important for each topic, and so on?).

I trust you also will find joy and meaningfulness in these pages. God is (self-giving) love, and this implies that he wants those other than him (his creation) to find joy and meaningfulness. So in offering these pages to God, I offer them also to you.

This page, "http://abxn.org/offered.html" is part of Andrew Basden's abxn.org pages - pages that open up discussion and exploration from a Christian ('xn') perspective. Written on the Amiga with Protext, in the style of classic HTML.

Comments, queries welcome. or send message to:

       

In case you cannot read that, it is the letters "xn" (for "Christian") at "kgsvr" followed by ".net" (standing for knowledge server on the net"). Thank you.

Copyright (c) Andrew Basden at all dates below. But you may use this material for almost any non-antagonistic purpose (including commercial) subject to certain easy conditions.

Created: 1 January 2009. Last updated: 21 April 2014 rid ../ 9 February 2020 imperfection exacerbated by Asperger etc. 29 October 2024 canon, bgc, new .end but not .nav because this page is not a proper content page.