Christian Principles: Food for Thought

By J. D. German

This book is a collection of fifty-four talks given as devotionals to a group of men meeting once a week for a prayer breakfast. These are thoughts and ideas that have come to me – from God, I believe – to help us understand His word and what it means in our daily lives. Most are about things we have heard before, so I make no claim of originality in what I have written. What is different is how I cover the topic from a perspective that may be new to you.
Few, if any, of these writings are superficial; there is a depth of meaning that you will miss if you just skim over the words and go on to the next one. Take time to think about them and see how they might apply to you and your life. My goal in delivering these devotionals to the men’s group, and in publishing this collection, is to help you grow as a Christian, just as I did when I originally wrestled with these concepts myself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. D. German
• Release date: May 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311747303

J. D. German

J. Dee German, a retired physicist and engineer, spent much of his 43-year career in research and development of lasers for a variety of applications, including high power systems designed to destroy aircraft and missiles to low power personal protection devices. As part of President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ program he investigated the effects of electromagnetic pulses (EMP) and lasers on various satellite designs. Dee currently lives on a lake in southwestern Georgia and divides his activities between part-time consulting, writing, and serving God.

Book preview

This book is a collection of sixty-five talks given as devotionals to a group of men meeting once a week for a prayer breakfast. These are thoughts and ideas that have come to me – from God, I believe – to help us understand His word and what it means in our daily lives. Most are about things we have heard before, so I make no claim of originality in what I have written. What is different is how I cover the topic from a perspective that may be new to you.

I also make no claim whatsoever of theological correctness. These ideas are based on doctrine that is common to many evangelical denominations, which might not be shared by other churches. The underlying theme, however, focuses on fundamental principles straight out of the Bible:

God sent His son, Jesus, to die for the sins of everyone who will accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

Jesus rose from the grave on the third day after His burial and appeared in human form to many witnesses to demonstrate the resurrection that is promised for His followers, and to validate that all He said in life was true.

To those who accept Him, salvation comes from the grace of God through faith alone – no good deeds are required to get into Heaven.

These devotionals are written in a conversational tone because that’s how they were presented. So when you see grammatical errors or unusual punctuation, that’s the way I speak. You will also find some redundancies, where I repeat ideas from one devotional in another. Each devotional was written independently, sometimes months apart, so I often repeat important themes. Sometimes you will find two consecutive devotionals on almost the same topic. Although I wrote them months or years apart, I grouped them together in this collection because they covered similar subjects. Think of it as a 3-D object being viewed from different angles. Even though there is only one object (Biblical concept), the different views help us understand it more deeply than a single snapshot can.

Few, if any, of these writings are superficial; there is a depth of meaning that you will miss if you just skim over the words and go on to the next one. Take time to think about them and see how they might apply to you and your life. My goal in delivering these devotionals to the men’s group, and in publishing this collection, is to help you grow as a Christian, just as I did when I originally wrestled with these concepts myself.

CHAPTER 1

My Journey to Christian Belief

By J. Dee German

I was born an atheist. As a baby, my brain’s only function was to get organized and keep my bodily systems alive and growing. Before long, my brain got those systems working more or less on their own and began the lifelong process of creating a mind. By the time I was two years old, the mind was able to form simple thoughts and respond to the world around me.

At the age of five, my parents began my religious education by dropping my older sister and me off at Sunday school. I must have been introduced to God and Jesus then, but I don’t remember it. We sang Onward Christian Soldiers every day at kindergarten while we marched upstairs for snack time, but I didn’t know what it meant, other than we were about to get orange juice and crackers. I was still an atheist, not by choice, but simply because I didn’t know about God and Christ.

When I was six, I finally became a believer. In Sunday school we heard bible stories about God and Jesus and I knew for certain that God watched over me and Jesus loved the little children. I didn’t yet know about Jesus being God’s son or the meaning of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, but my simple mind had absolute faith that God watched over us from heaven and that, when any person or pet died, they went to heaven to be with God. My faith in Santa and the Easter Bunny was also rock solid.

But then my mind began developing enough reasoning to separate real things from imaginary things. First the easter bunny, then santa claus were revealed as frauds, and our parents as liars for telling us they were real. But my reasoning mind didn’t quit there. It continued on to question other things for which I had never seen any evidence – among them god, jesus and their miracles. At that point, I became an agnostic; my mind had learned to doubt.

As the ability of my mind to reason grew stronger, I saw with perfect logic that the Bible was just a collection of ancient legends written by ordinary men over thousands of years. God couldn’t have be talking to all of them - he never talked to me or anyone else I knew. And there were so many other stories and legends that men had created and believed in – tales of ghosts, trolls, witches, magicians, vampires, and evil ones who ate little children. I could easily see that the bible belonged up on the shelf right there beside the Brothers Grimm.

To gather strength for my growing agnosticism (I hadn’t even heard that word yet, but I fit the definition perfectly: One who, based on what he or she knows, is unable to affirm or deny the existence of God), I turned to those around me. I asked the smartest man I knew, my father, who he believed Jesus was. He replied that Jesus was a great philosopher and religious leader, but he didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Then I turned to my older sister. Since she was studying Bible history at her boarding school, she must know about these things. She told me that, like the Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods, God with a capital G was something early men made up to help them deal with their fears of a world they couldn’t understand or control. After that, I went back to being an atheist for awhile.

By now I was in my early teens and my mind had developed a hunger for knowledge that I satisfied by reading about everything. I read novels, magazines, science books, encyclopedias, and some of my father’s philosophy books. In this mix, I came across several things that caused me to doubt my disbelief in God. Maybe God was a cosmic consciousness, a master switchboard that connected all human minds together. That would explain things like mental telepathy. And later I thought that maybe God was within each of us, a part of our minds - the embodiment of the goodness of mankind. At this point, I began attending Sunday school on my own in a conservative Christian church. I also was full of the idealism, skepticism, and judgementalism that bursts forth at that age. I listened to the Sunday school lessons and church sermons, but saw in the leaders of the congregation those rumored to be dishonest or who cheated on their wives, all the while feeding their egos with their importance in the church. This was my first encounter with hypocrisy and it angered me enough that I quit going to church. I didn’t realize that I was confusing the behavior of the imperfect people in the church with my idealized vision of what Godly people should be like.

But there was a ray of hope. I had begun praying to God nightly, even though I wasn’t sure what or if he was. I asked him to help me be a better person, to keep me from doing things that I knew were wrong, to help me control my growing anger. I kept this up for some time, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t overcome the lying, disobedience, anger and other behaviors that made me dislike myself and disappoint my parents.

At the age of 18, I finally gave up on God. I didn’t go back to atheism though. I made the conscious decision to be an agnostic until I had time to reason it all out. I noticed that older people seemed to be more religious than younger ones and concluded that, as people aged, there must be some mechanism that makes them more willing to believe in God. (I didn’t realize it at the time, but the mechanism is called LIFE). I would be content to remain an agnostic until I was older.

But things kept happening that seemed to have God’s hand in them. As I matured into my early twenties, I occasionally reflected on things I did as a teenager that should have been disastrous. I was a bright, adventurous kid who was always doing dangerous things, like making a flame thrower out of a hair spray can and a match, or building Molotov cocktail gasoline bombs and pipe bombs. When the U.S. space program started, I made my own rocket fuel and tried to launch a few rockets, but they all failed. Looking back on these and dozens of other reckless things I did, it seemed to me that someone up there must have been watching over me. All this youthful experimentation turned out to be beneficial, though. I went on to become a research scientist, first for a 20-year Air Force career, and later for several aerospace companies.

More evidence of God’s hand kept appearing in my life. When I was in my early thirties, my wife and I had a son who almost died in the few weeks after his birth from an undiagnosed liver problem. The problem apparently cleared up and my son grew into a normal, healthy child. When he was six years old, a routine blood test showed that some of his liver readings were a little high, but the pediatrician didn’t think it was anything to worry about. I called my father, who was a surgeon at a university hospital, and asked him what we should do. He referred us to a gastroenterologist who said that we should bring our child to the university as soon as possible for a liver biopsy. The biopsy revealed that my son had a rare condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency that could eventually destroy his liver and his lungs unless we took steps to protect him from liver stress and air pollution. This wasn’t just a simple medical case correctly diagnosed by a competent doctor. Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency only strikes 1 in 10,000 Americans, and the gastroenterologist, who just happened to be a friend of my father’s, was one of very few specialists in the country who could recognize the liver abnormality associated with it and diagnose it. To me, the probability of all these things falling into place without some help from God seemed unacceptably low.

These things weren’t enough for me to give up my agnostic position entirely, but it made me think a lot about how to reconcile my doubts about God and the Bible with his apparent intervention in my life. I had become a searching agnostic – looking for evidence that would allow me to believe in God.

Then an opportunity came up that I hoped might help me resolve this struggle. I was asked to join a team of U. S. scientists visiting Turin, Italy to perform tests on a church relic called the Shroud of Turin, traditionally viewed as the burial cloth of Christ. When I joined the project I thought the Shroud might provide the evidence I was looking for. I expected, or even hoped, that when I first saw the Shroud, I would feel something – an aura of the presence of God maybe. But I felt nothing, and was disappointed that I hadn’t. After several months of research on the Shroud, I was still an agnostic. I had seen, touched, and studied what might be the only physical evidence for Christ’s existence, and I still couldn’t believe in God. The problem was that, as a scientist, I was looking for the only kind of evidence I thought I could trust – scientific evidence.

I’ve since found out that belief in God doesn’t come from science or the intellect – it comes from the heart, from an inner spiritual core in each of us; a part of me that I refused to acknowledge until, in my mid-forties, a personal crisis forced me to turn to God. I went through a dozen years of deep, suicidal depression. For the first couple of years, I responded in a typical man’s way - by telling no one and trying to fix it myself. But as the depression got worse, I was in constant emotional pain. I frequently thought about killing myself to end the unbearable pain. I finally reached a point when the pain was too great; when I realized that I couldn’t handle it on my own. I had to turn to God for help even though I was doubtful that He existed. So I asked him to help me deal with this, to show me what I needed to do to get better. I was still in the grip of the delusion that I would play the major role, with just a little help from God.

Fortunately, God wasn’t put off by this. Apparently it’s a common problem on the journey to fully trusting him. He led me first to a Christian friend who had been through a similar depression. His help led me to seek psychological counseling and enroll in a five-year men’s bible study program, where God’s hand became even more obvious.

Up to that point, I had refused to take anti-depressants. I still believed that, with God’s help, I could fight back the depression with the strength of my own will. One night the bible study speaker, a pharmacist, was covering Chapter 20 of II Kings, where Hezekiah was healed by placing a fig poultice on his infection. At that point the speaker stopped, looked out at the audience of 200+ men, and said Notice that God used medicines of the day to heal the king. Some of you men out there need to be taking medication for blood pressure, cholesterol, or other problems. Go see your doctor. Let God work through him. That hit me like an arrow straight from God. I called my doctor the next day and started on Prozac.

Even with antidepressants, it took God several years to get me over the depression and bring me close to him. It’s been a long uphill road, with my inner self and scientific mind fighting God and me at every turn. But every time I got stuck, He would lead me to a Christian radio program, a friend, or a pastor who would address the very issue that was troubling me at the time - who provided just what I needed to overcome the latest roadblock my intellect had put up.

One of the most powerful things I heard on the radio was that "Each of us is born with a God-shaped hole in our heart. Most of us spend our lives trying to fill it with something else – work, hobbies, sports, human relationships, power, money, alcohol, drugs – but no matter how many things we try to fill it with, we still have a sense of emptiness, of something missing in our soul. Like a unique puzzle piece, only God