Men's bible study, Feb. 1

Beatitudes, Matthew 5:
-That the list of how to go through life is about relating to God and God to each person. It is BE-attitude, in which attitude or perspective is the connective tissue between what you know in your head (knowledge; what is right) and how you act in the world (seizing opportunities now that you can see them right in front of you)

-Human weakness makes us scale our ambitions, expectations, and sense of insult or irritation in relative terms ("at least I'm better than..." or "at least I'm not as much of a sinner as..."). However, in God's eyes, such mortal preoccupations is just like "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." In other words, there are much, much bigger things than the puny jockeying relative to one's neighbors. When it comes to God's working and relating to each person, that is an absolute (not relative) thing. So much of our experiences are relativistic that it is counter-intuitive to our lived experience to perceive differences with our fellow children-of-God and accept that we are equally sinful, blessed and loved.

-Just as life experience allows us to actually understand the significance of things like disability, children's care, in-laws, mortality and so forth, the same is true of the Beatitudes: by moving from head-knowledge (logic; logos) to heart-knowledge, the full meaning hits home. It becomes part of who we are; our identity; what we claim as our own. As such, we carry it out in daily decisions and actions.
Lived experience, both the sweet and the bitter, does make things come alive for us; makes the concepts real. As such, the things that surround us (opportunities, temptations, obligations) suddenly become visible. They were there all the time, but somehow we never could "see" them. God's grace is there; His righteousness is there; joy, mystery, glory and power for ever and ever are there. But until we are prepared to see this, no matter how many times to go to places to see God, we won't really see Him.

-Hungering and thirsting for righteousness is not only a "pull" (positive attraction), but also a "push" (negative repulsion): we resonate with being Righteous (but not Self-righteous) much like a radio that moves from out-of-tune into clear tuning, but we also rankle at being un-righteous. There is pleasure in being Right with the Lord at the same time that there is pain in being not-Right with the Lord.

-Just as "People don't care what you know until they know that you care," so too, for people to accept that God's Word is relevant and hunger for this, first of all they need to feel that God cares.

=-= Why does it matter to seek more knowledge, then incorporate into one's working understanding and vision, and finally to act in consonance with that improved stature?
Take the example of reading an owner's manual versus just trial-and-error. For having wrestled with the word, then applying this to one's working method the resulting improvement in vision (acuity, finer distinctions, ability to make connections that were not apparent before) means that you can see farther, wider and deeper when faced with the same circumstances than ever you could before. Whereas the trial-and-error or lucky-guess person bumps into all sorts of troubles, the person with the Big Picture or map can navigate the intermediate obstacles to most readily reach the point they seek.