PDF Growth in Grace: Through Reason and Revelation

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Growth in Grace: Through Reason and Revelation file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Growth in Grace: Through Reason and Revelation book. Happy reading Growth in Grace: Through Reason and Revelation Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Growth in Grace: Through Reason and Revelation at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Growth in Grace: Through Reason and Revelation Pocket Guide.
Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Growth in Grace: Through Reason and. Revelation file PDF Book only if.
Table of contents

Helping others to grow is called ministry, and depends in part upon each individual's specific spiritual gift. The process of growth, on the other hand, is the same for all Christians. Although it is a broad topic, spiritual growth does have a single, simple focus: truth.

Navigation menu

To put the matter as plainly as possible: spiritual growth consists primarily of learning God's truth and applying it to our lives. Truth, therefore, is the key to the Christian life. Truth: So what is truth? To begin with, we can say that in the midst of the devil's world, God's truth is the one thing that can pull us out of our self-centered preoccupation with our own problems, and orient us to God's plan, to God's will.

Truth alone instructs us, comforts us, encourages us, and points out the direction in which we should go. More than any other principle, it is the knowledge and application of God's truth which distinguishes believers in the Lord Jesus Christ from the rest of the world, and Jesus proclaimed that the reason for His earthly ministry was to bear witness to that same truth. When He was being interrogated by Pontius Pilate Jn.

Yes, for this very purpose I have been born, and I have come into the world in order that I might testify to the truth. So how should we answer Pilate's question? What is truth really? First, all truth comes from God, for God is the truth. Jesus says in John , "I am the way and the truth and the life". To know Jesus Christ, then, is to know the truth. But how, this side of heaven, can we ever hope to fully "know" the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creator 1Cor.

In His grace, God has provided mankind with a specific body of truth for use in this life, a treasury of knowledge which is both knowable and usable. This body of truth is divisible into two broad categories:. Natural Revelation: God is the Creator of the universe Gen. Accordingly, the universe and all that is in it bears the mark of its Creator.

We can tap into this category of truth by observing the creation, and marveling at its magnitude and complexity. Now while there is admittedly much that can be learned about the nature of God in this empirical way, the scripture emphasizes two principle "truths" that God has designed for the unbeliever to derive from contemplating the natural world.

Growing Thru Grace. About Pastor Jack

Psalm states that "the heavens tell of God's glory" cf. That is, by contemplating the majesty of the universe, the beauty of the creation, men know in their hearts that a Creator has to exist. Paul also affirms this point unequivocally:. For that which can be known about God [from everyday experience] is obvious to them, because God has made it obvious. Romans Moreover, Paul's statement here advances the argument beyond what the Psalmist had to say.

In Romans , we not only see the fact of God's existence from the marvelous nature of His creation, but we also derive from studying His creation some idea of just what sort of God He is. He is just and righteous in addition to being all powerful. This concept is amplified in the second "truth" which men can learn from pondering nature. Also in Romans Rom. This is because God has implanted in the conscience of all mankind the essential ideas of right and wrong cf. For example, the model derived from Newtonian mechanics looked fine until cases could be tested at high enough velocities to require the Lorentz correction specified by Einstein.

I apologise for the late reply - I wish I could spend more time doing this, as it's far more interesting than my desk job. By the fact that an object behaves in regular ways.

2 Peter 3:17-18, Growing in Grace

But they do behave in regular ways - the scientific method takes it as a working assumption whatever some people pretend otherwise. The issue is not over how accurate a description model of the rule we posess; it's over whether the rule exists at all. Utterly random, inherently unpredictable behaviour would imply no rules; but we know the universe is not like that don't we? Your example talks about the possibility of previously unobserved behaviour. This would demonstrate that our model, our understanding, our simplification, of the rule is wrong; it most certainly does not demonstrate that there is no rule at all.


  1. Windows Forensic Analysis DVD Toolkit.
  2. The Dream Sprites.
  3. THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS CHRIST.
  4. God's Purpose for Mankind;

A model is a model of something ; it assumes the existence of a rule or tendency that governs an object's behaviour. As noted before point 4 fails because it ignores that the math models in our heads are based on observation and testing and have been empirically verified. We have every reason to be confident of them even though those math models are only in our heads. Our in-head math models don't even have to be "right" for us to be confident in them. For instance the simple Newtonian notion of gravity works well enough for most applications and is more than accurate enough for every-day use unless you're a physicist or engineer.

If a stone doesn't behave according to inherent rules, we have no way of knowing whether it will fall to earth or leap into the sky when we let go of it. Clearly you disagree. You're arguing against a strawman. Materialism doesn't deny that logic or other abstractions exist; it denies that they are things.

But the problem of induction is not specifically bound to the material.

Can one extrapolate from an "experience of god" on one day to future experiences of god? This may be true of some philosophers, it certainly isn't a position espoused by the majority of scientists. So, examples of prescriptive scientific laws please. Rather than descriptive scientific theories. If you follow Hume, the question becomes 'how do we know objects will continue to behave as they are? Science assumes prescriptive laws as part of its method.

The irony is that this makes Hume thoroughly anti-science. The 'problem of induction' only applies if you're a Humean; in other words, if you refuse to grant as Hume explicitly refused to grant that objects have specific tendencies of their own. Again no, the question is whether we are justified in reasoning from instances of which we have experience to other instances of which we have no experience.

Any regularity in nature you care to mention is a specific law though it would be worthwhile defining 'law' very carefully indeed - 'tendency' might be be better. So chickens that regularly receive feed from a farmer might regard that as a "law"? Perhaps not. How about "No sphere of gold greater than 1km in radius exists in the universe", would that count? Alternatively how about "No sphere of uranium greater than 1km in radius exists in the universe"? Hume did quite specifically deny final causes rules or tendencies in objects, even if it was in the context of a discussion about experience.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia:. Therefore, placing faith in the generalities proposed by science is only rational if we admit final causes. Chickens aren't intelligent enough to know whether this is a 'law' or 'something that just happened'. Now a human being, hopefully, would be intelligent enough to grasp that a farmer is an example of category 'man'; and hence decides to feed the chickens every day, but one day may decide not do; and furthermore, will cease to exist bodily in a few decades' time; and hence will one day cease to feed the chickens.

The sun doesn't decide to rise every day; it just does; it has, as inherent properties, 'rules' governing its behaviour. Outside of an astronomical event destroying the sun or the earth, or the sun burning itself out as it will in a few billion years' time, according to its 'rules' as we currently understand them , it will continue to do so.

You can surely see that these are factual claims about the physical universe for which we have no evidence either way.

Grow in Grace and Knowledge

Which rather undermines your second claim. It assumes that the laws exist, even if we can't state them entirely accurately. I just can't agree with you, specially if you commit to circular reasoning to support the idea that reason don't requires faith at all, even if your reasoning involves uncertainty: "Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe" said Saint Augustine.

I cannot stop thinking on what Chesterton says on Orthodoxy regarding this issue:. It might be stated this way.

What is grace and what are some ways people have defined grace?

There are certain sequences or developments cases of one thing following another , which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland who are the most reasonable of all creatures admit that reason and that necessity. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing.

I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened— dawn and death and so on—as if THEY were rational and inevitable. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.

These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.

We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five.

Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets.