Purpose

"And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last."

Marcus Aurelius

For Christendom

We need Christians – reborn people who have accepted the life of the Sermon on the
Mount.
We need people who work – people who are capable and willing to work.
We need people who radiate the spirit of Christ – people who witness for Christ
with their entire being.
We are a working community of disciples of Jesus who give up everything to live
simply and solely for love and for productive work. We must testify that we are a
church of Christ, a Lord’s Supper fellowship.
We need Christ and the kingdom of God, protest and the call to repentance,
testimony and faith, a bold commitment to life and love. Witnesses are needed – not
self-idolization, not the right-eousness of works, not self-appointed goals, not prophets,
not leaders. We need brotherliness in forgiveness and grace, because each proclaims
not himself but Christ.

-Eberhard Arnold

Wisdom determines what simply must be done without consideration of other options.

Rachoff

An excerpt from a conversation in the book Rachoff:


“Little mother,” Rachoff asked her one day, “What are your
teachings? What are your beliefs about God, about the rich and
poor?”
“In my eyes they all live in bondage,” Irina replied, “the richjust
as much as the poor.”
“The rich!” exclaimed Rachoff. “How can they be, when they live
in such warmth and comfort?”
“No one is free just because he has possessions,” said Irina. “And
money does not necessarily mean wealth. Yes, even the richest man
is poor. And so is every other being. The whole creation moans under
the weight of a terrible sadness. The earth itself cries out as if
in pain. There is sighing among the animals and the trees, in the
springs and the rocks, in the fire and the stars. But Jesus will come.
He hears every groan, and he will come to rescue us from our grief.
His spirit heals and reconciles and blesses; it comes to us and dwells
in our midst, and it can – through grace and hard work – pry us free
from our bondage and make us like children.”
“Children?” Rachoff puzzled.
“Yes, children.” Irina repeated. “True children are joyous,
whether they are fed with a hundred rubles or three kopeks a day,
for the spirit of Jesus lives within them.”

Brokenness

"Only in this way will there be a circle of disciples around Jesus upon whom he can depend. He doesn’t need strong people, nor so-called confident, bold, trained, or courageous people who push things ahead in the world. He needs people who are broken, who fear lest they become disobedient to his command. Those are the people he needs, for they are servants. All the others who have a manufactured piety and feel themselves so secure in it, are for the most part hardly usable as servants. But those who fear and tremble, those who are shaken and shocked by the word of truth yet joyfully say yes and take action – these are his people."

-Action In Waiting

For Her

The sincere do not walk the face of the earth, they are driven by it.

We have learned the wisdom of cowardice...it's called non-confrontation.

You Cannot Have Faith in God and Mammon

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see."

Where we place the wholeness of our being is what we hope for and that which we are blind to is that which gives us certainty. How then can we have a surety of hope in anything the world here offers? How is it possible for a Christian to have that which is seen possess his conviction? Yet this is the experience of most. The people of faith live their lives with an egotistical concern for personal welfare to sate themselves in the indulgence of an easy life (no man finds fulfillment in the excuses of ease). This replaces their transparency before God, and substitutes it for an unsteady hope in monetary income and activities. That which would be faith by profession is nothing more than sedated conscience and conflagrated will because it's power is merely in diction unrelated to the exercised power of the Kingdom of God. Because men choose to live in a way which does not depend on devotion to the singularity of God, their faith is shattered into fictional proportions and they are undone before the grace of God being unable to recieve it.
It is a matter of either/or. Man will either have a sure hope in what he is blind to and certainty of what is not seen, or his hope will be in what is here and now and his conviction will be merely the extension of his ego.
To you who would love Christ and who would be aware of worldly security, here is a negative rephrasing of the prior verse for definitive purposes: "Now unbelief is being sure of what is tangible and certain of what is seen." Those who would pure of heart and be complete in devotion to God must keep the faith and never rest in the lure of wealth's tangibility. Place yourself in the hands of the Living God and seek His providence in all things. Substantiate your hope in what you do not see and be possessed by the convictions of the unseen Christ. He who does this will be among the nations richly blessed.
Amen.