Looking for Blessings on Father's Day
Happy Father's Day to my fellow fathers. I hope you are as blessed by your families as I am with mine. I got to relax today and feed my kids tonight. That means I read the Bible to them. This is important because of what I was reminded.
Have you ever spent all day with small children and no other adults? At the end of the day you are hungry for adult interaction. The children have no clue as to what you need with other adults. For the sake of comparison lets use the simple definition of IQ as being your mental age (times 100) divided by your chronological age. That means that the average IQ for your age (and other demographic categories) is 100. For the sake of comparison If you are 20 and dealing with 5-year-olds, the difference from your age is a 75 point difference. In other words, most 5-year-olds have an IQ of about 25 from the standpoint of most 20-year-olds.
Beyond 20, the age formula doesn't work very well. How, for example, do you test an exceptionally intelligent 50-year-old? His elders are increasingly geriatric and starting to have short-term memory loss. Statistical trends are calculated for adults of varying ages and scores mapped on the good old fashioned bell curve.
So, among adults, what's the difference between an adult of average IQ and one of exceptional IQ, of perhaps 175+. (The statistics become exponentially inaccurate the farther you get from 100. 90% of all people have an IQ between 90 and 110 and only 2% of the people have an IQ above about 132) The difference in intelligence is the same 75-point spread. There's a difference of maturity, for sure. However, the average adult could not understand the need for socialization among the exceptionally intelligent any more than 5-year-olds can understand the need for an adult to interact with other adults.
God challenges His children on the level we need to be challenged. You don't give a 2-year-old a polynomial equation to salve, much less a vector field to analyze. You show him an animal and teach him what the animal sounds like. A physicist has the problem of developing formulas in an attempt to reconcile macroscopic physics and quantum mechanics, which could result in a new cosmology. God challenges His people with giving up sin. For the pre-teen, his may be an attitude of respecting his parents that may be foremost on God's agenda. For an older believer, it may be despair in seeing a certain ministry fail. For the very intelligent, it may be a conflict between having faith soteriologically, but lacking it ecclesiologically or ministerially through the juxtaposition of dubious intentions.
The lesson tonight was from Exodus. We read how God hardened Pharaoh's heart against the Israelites. Luke asked why God had to harden his heart. Why couldn't He just make Pharaoh let them go? I replied with a question: Why would they want to leave?
Well, I'm not going anywhere - except to the beach next weekend before my family leaves for Venezuela. I did consider leaving all activity in a ministry I care deeply about today. But the lesson from the passage was that trials will come. We are to look for the blessings in the trials rather than the curses. The Hebrews complained about Moses and Aaron talking to Pharaoh because things got bad for them. God had His blessing for them and they were on the verge of denying the answer to their prayers for the difficulty they had to endure in the fulfillment of those prayers. All they saw was the curse.
Trials will come. God will not test us beyond what we are able. Let us remember to look for the blessing rather than the curse.
Have you ever spent all day with small children and no other adults? At the end of the day you are hungry for adult interaction. The children have no clue as to what you need with other adults. For the sake of comparison lets use the simple definition of IQ as being your mental age (times 100) divided by your chronological age. That means that the average IQ for your age (and other demographic categories) is 100. For the sake of comparison If you are 20 and dealing with 5-year-olds, the difference from your age is a 75 point difference. In other words, most 5-year-olds have an IQ of about 25 from the standpoint of most 20-year-olds.
Beyond 20, the age formula doesn't work very well. How, for example, do you test an exceptionally intelligent 50-year-old? His elders are increasingly geriatric and starting to have short-term memory loss. Statistical trends are calculated for adults of varying ages and scores mapped on the good old fashioned bell curve.
So, among adults, what's the difference between an adult of average IQ and one of exceptional IQ, of perhaps 175+. (The statistics become exponentially inaccurate the farther you get from 100. 90% of all people have an IQ between 90 and 110 and only 2% of the people have an IQ above about 132) The difference in intelligence is the same 75-point spread. There's a difference of maturity, for sure. However, the average adult could not understand the need for socialization among the exceptionally intelligent any more than 5-year-olds can understand the need for an adult to interact with other adults.
God challenges His children on the level we need to be challenged. You don't give a 2-year-old a polynomial equation to salve, much less a vector field to analyze. You show him an animal and teach him what the animal sounds like. A physicist has the problem of developing formulas in an attempt to reconcile macroscopic physics and quantum mechanics, which could result in a new cosmology. God challenges His people with giving up sin. For the pre-teen, his may be an attitude of respecting his parents that may be foremost on God's agenda. For an older believer, it may be despair in seeing a certain ministry fail. For the very intelligent, it may be a conflict between having faith soteriologically, but lacking it ecclesiologically or ministerially through the juxtaposition of dubious intentions.
The lesson tonight was from Exodus. We read how God hardened Pharaoh's heart against the Israelites. Luke asked why God had to harden his heart. Why couldn't He just make Pharaoh let them go? I replied with a question: Why would they want to leave?
Well, I'm not going anywhere - except to the beach next weekend before my family leaves for Venezuela. I did consider leaving all activity in a ministry I care deeply about today. But the lesson from the passage was that trials will come. We are to look for the blessings in the trials rather than the curses. The Hebrews complained about Moses and Aaron talking to Pharaoh because things got bad for them. God had His blessing for them and they were on the verge of denying the answer to their prayers for the difficulty they had to endure in the fulfillment of those prayers. All they saw was the curse.
Trials will come. God will not test us beyond what we are able. Let us remember to look for the blessing rather than the curse.
Labels: blessings, Christian, curses, Father's Day, trials
posted by Jim Pemberton at 9:43 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks so much for your wonderful blog - the insight and understanding of God's Word really touches me. I just came across it and found your thoughts and studies of supreme quite inspirational. I'm an Evangelical Christian into Theology and Apologetics. (You oughta check out a couple sites of really great heroes of the faith - Dr Gary Habermas. Also, there's also the original, late 'Bible Answer Man' Dr Walter Martin too! Google them - I think you would enjoy their sites!:)
God's grace and blessing on you and your family and ministry~
Your sister in Christ,
Gina
Thank you, Gina!
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