Flesh-And-Bone

His Mind Over Our Matter
June 11, 2023
Chris Seidman, Lead Minister, The Branch

Bill Bryson, A Short History Of Nearly Everything
No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids … in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word.

For example, to make collagen you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence … . The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn’t going to happen.

To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about ninety feet, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid).

How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively forever. Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to two hundred, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all two hundred coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10 to 260 (that is 1 followed by 260 zeros).

Yet we are talking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy you.

Psalm 139:14 (NIV)
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

Romans 1:20 (NIV)
… God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made … .

Galatians 2:20 (NIV)
The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Romans 12:1 (NIV)
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship.

Romans 12:2 (NIV)
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Eat. Pray. Love. By Elizabeth Gilbert
You have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from where you can find it and you keep moving toward the light.

God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are … . The best way to remedy our heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment is to get in contact with the supreme self who is eternally at peace. That supreme self is our true identity, universal and divine. So we must honor the divinity that resides within us.

Romans 3:23 (NIV)
… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God … .

Romans 3:24-25 (NIV)
… and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith.

Hebrews 10:5, 7 (NIV)
“… a body you prepared me … . ‘Here I am, it is written about me in the scroll – I have come to do your will, my God.’”