Spirit

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Elie Wiesel, French-American writer and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner

Jack and Elizabeth are in their mid seventies and love life. They had fulfilling careers and raised three children who now have families of their own. There aren’t enough hours in the day for all they like to do. Walking, swimming, traveling, volunteer work, community service club activities, family gatherings, hobbies, and reading keep them very busy. Jack has been taking a few university courses in religion, philosophy, and literature. Elizabeth has just been certified as a master gardener. When they can squeeze it in (and they feel emotionally up to the challenge), they try to help out their neighbors, the Reddens (who are about 10 years younger).

Howard Redden is practically a shut-in with his ailing heart and numerous other health problems. He and his wife, Sylvia, spend most of their waking hours watching television and snarling at each other. Their children visit or call just often enough to feel that they’ve fulfilled their family duties. Conversations with the Reddens are filled with bitterness, vicious gossip, complaints about their health and boredom, and lots of blaming governments, their kids, and fate for their many problems and ailments.

It’s inspiring to be with those optimists in their 60s, 70s, 80s or even 90s who are excited about some new venture or interest. Too many people let their disappointments and cynicism slowly extinguish their life spark. When they reach their senior years they are bitter and jaded. Their dead spirits rattle in bodies that haven’t been laid to rest yet. It’s sad to see people who are putting in time until retirement. They hate, or just tolerate, their work, as they bide their time waiting for life to begin. They put off living and slowly die in the process. If they reach retirement, they’re left wondering, “is this all there is? Is this what life is all about?”

“How long have you worked here?” “Ever since my boss threatened to fire me.” Far too many people have retired, but still show up for work. Others have resigned but still go through the motions and are on the payroll. Some people who complain that they aren’t paid what they’re worth should be thankful. On-the-job-retirees who waste their lives in a ‘dead-end job’ they don’t enjoy aren’t making a living, they’re making a dying. They are slaves no matter how much money they make, status they achieve, or power they wield.

Studies of thriving people and their successful career paths show that the type of jobs they have had is much less important than the type of person they are. There are no dead-end jobs, but there are dead-end people. Less successful people in unfulfilling jobs often make the mistake of thinking that they are working for someone else.

Apathy and cynicism usually take root early in life. If unchecked by middle age, they lead to bitterness, lack of energy, health problems, depression, and related difficulties. A public opinion poll taken by the National Opinion Research Center found that over half of all adults in their twenties rate their lives as ‘exciting.’ Once people reach their forties this slips to 46 percent. At sixty it falls to 34 percent. The Noble Prize winning French philosopher, physician, and musician, Albert Schweitzer, fervently believed “the tragedy of life is what dies inside a person while they live.”

As the years slide by, a growing number of people don’t really live, they merely exist trapped in their lives of quiet desperation. Just getting by is as dangerous as resting in the snow on a frigid winter night; our passion and spirit dozes off and dies in our sleep.

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It happens all the time: A tense, stressful situation at work, then an offhand remark,
followed by laughter and perhaps a knowing nod. The tension is reduced. Such
spontaneous humor can maintain morale or it can reinforce feelings of despair and
helplessness. It all depends.

Working as a hospital chaplain, I often wondered about the spontaneous humor
generated in this stressful environment: areas like the emergency unit, intensive
care, neurosurgery, and coronary care. The flippant observations, verbal shorthand
expressions that are quickly understood by those sharing the experiences.

People acquainted with such settings know that this humor has a distinct flavor.
Simply stated it’s crude, so crude that it is “for staff ears only.” Its conveyors are
fully aware of its offensiveness, should it be overheard by others. More often than
not the humor victimizes the patients and, when taken at face value, it conveys
insensitivity,even though this is never, never the intent of the purveyors of such
humor.

Actually, my interest was more on what wasn’t said than what was. I had some
understanding of the need of what I then called “negative humor.” But the glaring
absence of positive humor, how come? I reasoned this way: if the humor inherent in
these settings was negative, then some essential quality was absent. What that was
or how to express it, I had no idea.

Then sometime later, while examining American frontier humor, I found similar
dynamics but from a more comprehensive viewpoint. This viewpoint gave me a
systematic way to consider this negative-positive humor phenomenon.

My categories now became “coping” and “hoping” humor. Here are examples of two
different humorous treatments of a single theme. This gives an “experiential” basis
for understanding the distinctions I make between these two.

The theme is aging. Aging is a fact of life, one that has demoralizing possibilities.
The following examples are from contemporary birthday cards:

Feeling old? Don’t. We know someone your age…and on good days he can still feed
himself.

Another in this same vein:
(Woman on the telephone) Your birthday today? Really? How old? No?…Have a nice
yesterday.

Then this one:
Happy birthday
It’s reassuring to know that, while growing older, worn out cells are being cast off
and replaced by new ones…Think of it as a giant garage sale going an all over your
body.

Now the first two are examples of “coping” humor. This humor laughs at the
hopelessness in human life. The third is humor celebrating the hope in human life.

It was two theories advanced to explain the creativity and vitality of the frontier
humor that suggested these distinctions. One came from Mark Twain’s biographer,
Albert Bigelow Paine. He understood frontier humor to be the result of despair,
explaining it this way, “…all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers
in order to survive the stress of its warfare. The fight was so desperate, to take it
seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep, men laughed
when they could no longer swear.” This theory has many adherents. But historians
Bernard De Voto and Max Eastman advanced another. According to it, optimism and
enthusiasm were the dynamics of frontier humor, not despair. Hope, not
hopelessness, was its underlying factor.

In considering these saw no need to choose between them for the human condition
embraces both. Hopelessness and hope are both realities of human life. For
example, mortality is a fact. It is therefore hopeless to try to live forever. But there is
hope for achieving the fulfillment of life. This too is reality.

Laughing at the hopeless is what I call “coping” humor. An illustration from frontier
life, a story inspired by the successive grasshopper plagues that continually
threatened the settlers. Sometimes they were so thick their weight broke trees when
they lighted on them.

A settler was plowing his field. He went to his house for a drink of cold water from
his well. While pumping he saw a heavy cloud of grasshoppers drop over the spot
where he’d left his team of horses. He ran back as fast as he could. When he got
here the grasshoppers had eaten his team and his harnesses and were pitching the
horses’ shoes to see which got the farmer.

Coping humor, then, does not build morale. Rather it generates an energy that
allows a person to “hang in there.” To become refreshed enough to have another go
at the impossible, or in our terms, at the hopeless. But to restate: it doesn’t free one
from the demoralizing facts or from the awareness of the continued presence of the
hopelessness in our lives.

In hoping humor we find different factors at work. Compare this next frontier story
to the one about the grasshoppers.

A Texas ranger and his Indian scout were riding across the sand hills in a fierce
wind storm. To their surprise they saw lying on top of one of the sand dunes a
man’s hat. They dismounted and the ranger picked it up. Underneath he found a
man’s head. Frantically the ranger and the scout began scratching away the sand
from the man’s eyes, ears, mouth. The man said, “Get a shovel, I’m on horseback.”

In this, laughter at the man’s helplessness in the face of nature’s overwhelming
forces is not reinforced. Rather, the humorous element is the indomitableness of the
human spirit. It is a humor of hope.

Thinking in terms of mood rather than content, contrast TV’s Archie Bunker in All in
the Family with the old Bill Cosby Show. Their basic treatments, premises and foci
are not the same. Audiences found a different “feel” in their laughter. All in the
Family fell into the coping variety while The Cosby Show into the hoping type. I
would also include Norman Rockwell’s paintings, and Garrison Keillor’s “Lake
Woebegon” stories in the hoping type.

This point should be underscored: A humor that will sustain spiritual and emotional
well being require a dynamic relationship between the hoping and coping. The two
need each other.

What I’m saying is that coping humor alone cannot sustain the human spirit. When it
becomes the predominate fare, this humor, in time, turns back on itself. It become
sarcastic, cynical, destructive and even vindictive for it anticipates nothing but the
hopeless.

Nor can hoping humor go it alone. What’s it to do with the hells of life; those times
when all that can be heard is the wailing and the gnashing of teeth? When life is just
too much for us with no end in sight, when darkness comes but the enemy will not
break off. In these times a Rockwell painting or a “Woebegon” story just won’t cut it.
Surely there is sound reason for the second- most-used expression in church
liturgy, “God have mercy.”
(c) 2006 Cy Eberhart
Author’s note: This article is a revision of his Keynote Address at the
International Conference on Humor at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

As a hospital chaplain Cy Eberhart, (now retired) was a firsthand witness to the
entire spectrum of human emotions: personal successes and failures; the deepest
despairs and the great peaks of joy. Two questions remained foremost in his mind:
How was it that some could find inner strengths that brought courage and hope and
others could not? What was to be learned from these experiences that would have a
positive and creative effect for daily, routine living?

His lectures, writings, workshops, book In the Presence of Humor and his living-history
performances of America’s famed humorist
Will Rogers offers some of the
answers.

* You may republish this article in it’s entirety, provided you leave the author’s note
and web-site hyperlinks intact.

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Then, what is the real Holy Spirit?

Christianity is not just a religion but it is a way of Life. None of us could remain a Christian if it wasn’t for someone, always with us, to help us thru this walk. Our understanding of Prophecy nor Scripture would be complete without someone teaching us what the truth was.

Beginning with Genesis thru the Book of Revelations the Holy Ghost {Holy Spirit} has always been with God for He is Gods Spirit. The Holy Ghost is mentioned 89 times in the new Testament alone. The Holy Ghost is our comforter and He leads us into all truths of the Bible. To say that the Holy Ghost has not yet arrived, would be saying that Jesus did not do what He said He would do. John 14:26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

Without the leadership of the Holy Ghost, the Bible would never have been written. Lets talk a little about the Baptisms of John the Baptist. If you’ve noticed in Scripture, the passages that speak of our salvation, the Holy Ghost when instructing what is to be written, He never speaks of Himself, as was promised by Jesus. [Eph_3:5; 1Pe_1:12.] John 16:13-14; Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.

1Co 2:10-13; But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. 1Co 2:10-13 tells us that without the guidance of the Spirit, man would only know the things of man, carnal things. The Bible cannot be understood by the carnal mind, why, because the carnal mind is at em-empty with God, it is not subject to the laws of God and neither can be.

Mans wisdom and knowledge is limited to the carnal, the things of the flesh. We must separate the flesh from the spirit and start thinking in the spiritual and not the physical. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. “Comparing spiritual things with spiritual”, This is where many find trouble with Bible interpretation, they try to compare Spiritual with the physical, the temperial with the immortal. Now to understand who the Holy Ghost is, in John 16:13-14 & 1Co 2:10-13, the Holy Ghost is called “The Spirit Of Truth, “The Holy Ghost”, “The Comforter”, “The Holy Spirit” & “The Spirit of God.” This tells us that all these are one with God, for the Spirit spoken of, is God. He is part of what we call the “Holy Trinity.” Many dispute this assumption, but its hard to kick against what the Scriptures are stating. Mat 3:11 I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: The Baptisms that John performed were a prelude to the real Baptisms under the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.

John Baptized unto Repentance, but under the name of Jesus we are Baptized under Salvation. Jesus emphasized great importance on the Holy Ghost. Even John the Baptist mentions His importance, not for Himself but for the Testimony from Him of The Christ. Mat 28:19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Why? Because these three are one, you cannot have one without the other. The Holy Ghost gives power unto the Believer, to perform the things of the Christ. This is where the end times Church is missing out on all the blessings of God, because of their belief that the Gifts of the Spirit were for an earlier age. Acts 1:8 But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

A Director of Man; Act 13:4 So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus. Act 15:28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; The commission of the Holy Ghost; John 16:7-15; Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
“Reprove”,

1. To blame; to censure.

2. To charge with a fault to the face; to chide; to reprehend. Luke

3. To blame for; with of; as, to reprove one of laziness.

4. To convince of a fault, or to make it manifest.

5. To refute; to disprove.

6. To excite a sense of guilt. The heart or conscience reproves us. I’m not to fond of the word, “conscience” for what people call conscience, is the spirit within the man.

7. To manifest silent disapprobation or blame. [The vicious cannot bear the presence of the good, whose very looks reprove them, and whose life is a severe, though silent admonition.

The Holy Ghost is the one who convicts us of our sin.] Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.
All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you. Part of the commission of The Spirit is to also help us thru our many infirmities . Rom 8:14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. Sin is the fault of man, who has chosen to sin. Sin was not forgiven under the Law but were only put off for another year. Even David and the prophets of the Old Testament were directed by the Holy Ghost{Spirit} Mar 12:36 For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. Mat 12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. What is the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost? An indignity offered to God by words or writing; reproachful, contemptuous or irreverent words uttered impiously against Jehovah.
Blasphemy is an injury offered to God, by denying that which is due and belonging to him, or attributing to him that which is not agreeable to his nature. In the middle ages, blasphemy was used to denote simply the blaming or condemning of a person or thing. Among the Greeks, to blaspheme was to use words of ill omen, which they were careful to avoid.

1. That which derogates from the prerogatives of God. Mark
2. To speak of the Supreme Being in terms of impious irreverence; to revile or speak reproachfully of God, or the Holy Spirit. 1 Ki 21. Mark 3.

2. To speak evil of; to utter abuse or calumny against; to speak reproachfully of. 1. To arrogate the prerogatives of God. This man blasphemeth. Who can forgive sins but God? Math.9. Mark 2.

IMPI’ETY, n. [L. impietas;in and pietas, pius.]
1. Ungodliness; irreverence towards the Supreme being; contempt of the divine character and authority; neglect of the divine precepts. These constitute different degrees of impiety.
2. Any act of wickedness,as blasphemy and scoffing at the Supreme Being, or at his authority; profaneness. Any expression of contempt for God or his laws, constitutes an impiety of the highest degree of criminality. Disobedience to the divine commands or neglect of duty implies contempt for his authority,and is therefore impiety.
Impiety, when it expresses the temper or disposition, has no plural; but it is otherwise when it expresses an act of wickedness, for all such acts are impieties. Here Jesus tells His Deciples not to think about what to say but that the Holy Ghost would direct their words. Mar 13:11 But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.
Luke 1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb. Luke 2:26 And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. Luke 3:22 And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. This next verse is the reason why we can preach and testify of God.

John 20:22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Act 1:2 Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen: Act 1:8 But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

Act 2:38 Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Act 4:8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, John 16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

2Co 13:14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen. 1st Cor. is giving the difference between Charity and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit to man. Gifts will eventually cease but Charity will never cease.

These are just a few verses that teach us that the Holy Ghost came to us as was promised by Christ.
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