A Cool Guy in a Bow Tie and Theological McCarthyism

May your thoughts be provoked.

Gospel Wakefulness

An excerpt from Jared Wilson's book by this name:

Imagine you are driving down the road and your car stalls at a railroad crossing.  You are understandably nervous as you try to reignite the car's engine, but you become even more so when you see a train turn the corner in the distance and begin quickly closing the gap between it and you.  The train engine's horn is blaring and the engineer has thrown on the brakes, but you are too close and he's coming too fast.  You move from trying to get the car to start to trying to unfasten your seatbelt, but fear has made your hands stiffen and shake.  You can't get your seatbelt unfastened.  the train is rushing toward you, and you know you're going to be hit.  And you are.  Suddenly and from behind.  A man in a truck behind you has decided to ram into your car and push you off the tracks, even as he is destroyed by the impact in the very spot you once occupied. 

You get out of the car, shaken and still frightened.  You are terrified by the gruesome scene, in shock over your rescuer's sacrifice.  You are grateful in a way you've never been grateful before.  You wish you could thank the driver of the truck for saving your life.  Even in your terrified awe, it feels good to be alive.  You feel woozy, so you sit down on the trunk of your car, and as your trying to retrieve your cell phone from your pocket to call 911 and marveling at how little damage the violent shove did to the rear bumper, you hear a whimper from inside.

You didn't know that before you'd left the house, as your kids were playing hide-and-seek, your youngest son decided to hide in the trunk of your car.  As you open it up frantically and discover that he is miraculously unharmed, you suddenly realize the total greatness of the loss you almost suffered.  Your gratitude, your amazement, your new outlook on life takes a giant leap forward.  That is the difference between the gospel wakefulness of conversion and the greater gospel wakefulness that often occurs later.

This passage was powerful to me.  The book, which I commend, is about the difference between merely knowing the Gospel, and being gripped by it down in the heart so that it is the most precious truth in the world to you.  Christ steps in and takes the punishment that we deserved.  That is a simple truth.  But the beauty and depth of it will take whatever weight we put upon it, and as we plumb the depths of the Gospel, we will never grow bored, and its resources will never dry up.  God loves us so, so very much!  May we awaken more fully to him.  May we see his love anew in powerful ways!

Christian Identity as the Fuel for Christmas

Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  (Matthew 18:4)

Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.  (2 Corinthians 9:7)


Christmas is a very special time of year.  It is a time full of tradition.  It is a time filled with family.  It is a time filled with laughs and smiles.  The name of Christ is glorified when our celebration of his becoming human for us is marked with the deepest merriment.  Christmas is a time of giving.

Christmas shopping can be crazy business.  There are many people to buy for, lots of stuff to get.  If you want a headache, try going near a mall on the weekend.  Some people even get creative and make stuff for people... not me.  (And they are thankful for it.  Just ask Nicole or Michael Gilbert about my impeccable cookie decorating abilities.)  Christmas is indeed a time for giving.

And a time for receiving.  I believed in Santa Claus when I was little.  He brought me a ton of stuff it seemed.  My parents had already gotten me toys that were specifically from them, so the rest had to be from Santa, right?!  Well, I remember the days leading up to Christmas being marked by great anticipation.  I knew that I was going to be getting stuff, and if the pattern held true, lots of stuff!

You might expect me to bash Santa Claus as the Great Distractor, and materialism as the idolatry of stuff, but I am not.  I'll save that for another, less cheerful blog entry, one that I hopefully won't get around to writing.  Instead, I want to contend that Christians are best equipped to enjoy Christmas for several different reasons, the deepest of which goes to our very core, our very identity that we have been given.

I think there was something pure in our anticipation of Christmas as children, even when a large part of that anticipation was for Christmas morning when we would get toys.  Kids don't even know to hide this delight, and I think it would be rather Scrooge-like to make them.  As a kid, I had no money, and I had absolutely no way to effectively repay anyone for the gifts I was receiving.  I am sure that the best gift I gave was a huge smile and a genuine joy in getting to play!  I am sure my parents joy in Christmas morning was seeing the joy my brother and I had in receiving.

Joy is the best expression of thanksgiving, and thanksgiving was all I had to give.  Christmas, indeed, was a giant exercise in receiving grace, though I didn't have all the theological apparatus in my brain to call it that.  I know that we can be distracted by getting so much stuff that we neglect those who gave us the stuff, but as a kid, I wasn't even smart enough to make that distinction.  Analyzing things is okay, and it is even very appropriate in many cases, but we should never let our analyzing suck the joy out of things.  God calls us to love him with our mind, which definitely means using it, and he also commands our joy, so I know the two aren't mutually exclusive.  There was such joy in receiving as a kid.  (And I still anticipate Christmas for this reason, but sometimes I feel selfish for saying so.  This blog entry is calculated to rid some of us over-thinkers from unnecessary guilt.)

Christmas is time for receiving, which is something we practice as children, and it is a great grace.  But it is also a time for giving.  God loves a cheerful giver.  My wife is such a cheerful giver, and she gives such thoughtful gifts.  I am blessed to be married to her.

There are many pitfalls and ways to sin, soiling the beauty of God's creative purposes.  Within the context of Christmas, we can become selfish, we can covet, we can be stingy, we can fail to set our hearts on Christ's coming as the true meaning of the holiday... we can do a million different things.

The one I want to focus on is the way we can subtly turn Christmas giving into a mere checklist, a tug of war, a sort of graceless exercise in giving and receiving, a sort of Scrooge-like accounting system.  Once we are actually old enough to make money, we realize that we ought to be giving back as well.  We see that we have received from someone, and we try to give them something back.  Giving is a hugely beautiful thing when it is done out of love and not out of obligation.  Giving out of obligation is not cheerful giving.

I fear that many people try to make Christmas a zero-sum game.  We don't want to be in debt to anyone.  If someone gives us something, or if we think someone is going to give us something, there is an impulse within us to try to match that gift back if we can.  We want to be even.  But I think that if our motivation is to keep everything even, we have destroyed the idea of a gift.  If what we have been given is really a gift, it comes with no strings attached, and the only appropriate response is thanksgiving and joy.  Our response does not need to be that we go out and find something of equal value to give back.  If the gift we have given to someone is really a gift, it goes with no strings attached.  We are not expecting repayment.  Do you give expecting in return?  A particularly nasty way to twist giving is for a wealthier person to give to someone more than they can repay materially, and then the wealthier person will hold the other in their debt.

Christian identity is the fuel for Christmas.  First, the most obvious way this is true is that we are celebrating Christ at Christmas.  If we do not have faith in Christ, it is impossible to really celebrate the holiday in truth.  If we do not have faith, it is impossible to have joy at Christ's coming.

Second, Christian identity radically fuels our receiving.  As Christians, we have become something new, not because of our works or how smart we are or how effectively we repent or any such nonsense.  We have become something new because we have been made something new; we have received a new identity from outside ourselves as the Gospel is proclaimed to us.  We are now the forgiven, the freed, the sons and daughters of the Most High God.  The debt we owed, that we were unable to pay, was payed in full by Christ our Mediator at the cross.

The nature of Christian grace is this:  I have done absolutely zero to merit salvation.  I did not earn it.  I do not add to it.  My salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.  The moment I try to add to it, to improve my salvation, I distort it.  At the core of our identity as Christians is grace.  We see ourselves paralyzed, unable to move to improve our condition, picked up by our Savior, carried, given life.  We are passive, and he is active in this.  At the core of our identity as Christians is a radical dependence upon another.  Before we are ever givers, we are receivers.  We are always dependent on God, so we remain receivers.  Those who give and receive best are those who are on their knees in the morning confessing their absolute dependence on Jesus.

Third, Christian identity radically fuels our giving.  As we realize the fleeting nature of this world, stuff does not have a hold on us.  We no longer feel the need to get rich and cling to stuff as our identity when we are heirs of a Kingdom.  Therefore, we can loosen our grip on our stuff enough to give it away... joyfully.  Jesus was not stingy with his own blood, which he shed as a gift to us, so how can I be stingy with anything.  I cannot.  Nothing I own is really mine anyway.  It is all on loan to me for a time, and I am merely a steward.  Everything I have is for the glory of God, and I can often bring him most glory by being very giving with it.

Let me conclude and put all this together.  As Christians, we are radically freed to receive because at our core we are people who know we receive every breath as a gift.  We know we can never repay God, so we are freed from the need to repay others.  But we do!  Not out of obligation.  As Christians, we are radically freed to give, expecting nothing in return, because we have been shown such great love.  When we behold our Savior, we transformed into his likeness, and he is such a good giver.  We give like Christ gave, and we receive like little children - we must become like them to enter the Kingdom of God, right?  Grace is the great ocean within which the Church swims - the only reason it exists - and in that ocean these things flow freely in both directions.  The world knows only echoes and shadows of this great grace, but as Christians, it should be the center of who we are.

In our giving and receiving, may we have great freedom and great joy.  In that way, may we glorify our Savior who gave us so much when he freely came to take on the sins of the world.  Glory to God in the highest!!!

Plato, Marriage, and the Incarnation

Plato has had a large influence on the history of Christian thought.  Some of it has been good, and some of it has not.  Plato is known for his search for universals.  He came up with a theory of Forms, and these forms were universal in nature, and the things we experience in our everyday lives are simply temporal and limited instances of these eternal forms.    For Plato, the temporal and immediate bodily experience of things is inferior to these eternal forms, and the influence that Platonism has had on Christianity is to emphasize the importance of the soul to the exclusion of the body.  According to a Plato-influenced Christianity, the body is bad, and we long to escape it, so that we can live eternity as our perfected souls.  The immaterial superior to the material.  True Christianity, of course, recognizes the corruption of the body, but our hope is for a resurrected body like Jesus' resurrection body.  Heaven is not meant to be immaterial but a rescue of our material world gone bad.

I am not a philosopher, and I am sure the preceding paragraph includes some bad philosophy and gross oversimplifications.  Nevertheless, I have noticed a Platonistic tendency within myself, and I have noticed this as I have come to see the differences between my wife and I.  Let me explain what I mean.

In marriage two people come together as one.  It is an awesome and a scary thing.  I commend it.  No two people are going to be alike, and I think especially in the beginning months and probably years, those two people begin to see their differences.  You see the other person more clearly, and as you come to understand that person, you also come to understand yourself better, even and especially through your differences.

Nicole and I are different.  I think part of that certainly is that I am a man, and she is a woman, and by virtue of God's creative plan, we are different in distinctive ways.  Some of our differences are due to this gender difference, and some is due simply to the specifics of who we were created to be as different individuals.  What are some of these differences?

Let me describe myself.  In describing myself and what makes me tick, I do not mean to say that Nicole is disinterested in these things - only that they do not necessarily drive her in the same ways they drive me.  I believe I am driven by a search for universals, a sort of Platonism.  What are my passions?  First, I am a math teacher, and I am passionate about math.  I like the logic of it, and I like the way the whole structure of math can be reasoned forth from a few elementary self-evident assumptions.  Euclid's Elements are beautiful.  The structure of math is really beautiful to me because I believe it is describes something true about the universe, something that existed before man was around, and something that will exist after the world is over.  Two plus two equals four, and the same would be true for aliens, even if they used different symbols or language to describe this underlying truth.  In doing math, I am grasping for one of these universal Forms.

I enjoy physics for the same reasons; I am not as good at it.  I enjoy chemistry a little less.  I enjoy biology least of all the sciences probably.  I do not enjoy memorizing data.  I think I enjoy physics because it seeks to boil down physical reality to its most basic causes, and it gets the nearest to basic Forms.  I am not a materialist; however, I think my mind does work like a scientist and engineer.  There is a beauty in the idea that you can keep boiling things down to smaller and smaller constituent pieces.  Take an animal.  You can boil down the animal and what it does to billions of chemical reactions happening in its body and in its brain.  And those chemical processes can be boiled down into smaller processes, and if you get small enough you get down to the level of atoms.

In a sense, biology sits atop chemistry sits atop physics sits atop math.  Using math, physics holds out the hope of unification.  There are basic forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, and there is a sort of universal elegance to the way math can help explain the world.  Along this spectrum, I have noticed in myself a draw to what seems more universal, the math and the physics, and I am not as interested in what seems so particular, such as the biology of how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.  Part of this (slight) aversion to chemistry and biology is that as we move into these particulars, there is a ton more specific and seemingly arbitrary information to know, and it is simply more attractive to describe it in simpler terms if possible, even if we are describing more general (or universal) principles.

I enjoy doing traditional manly things, like playing and watching sports, but unlike many, I have absolutely no interest in their statistics.  In a sense, the sport itself is more of a universal, and the specific histories of people playing them are arbitrary manifestations of those universals.  These histories are literally trivial to me.  I get caught up in sports, though.  But the part I actually get caught up in is the story of pursuit and triumph and sometimes redemption.  I get caught up the story that is being told through the sports.  But I believe these stories are pieces and echoes of a bigger Story.  I feel and root for the characters in the story, but after the game, I will soon forget what happened in the bottom of the fifth inning or what happened on the 17th green.  Who won the NCAA tournament the last few years.  I honestly don't remember, but I watched them all.

I enjoy reading a lot.  I used to read fiction, but my tastes have changed over time.  I still do read some fiction, but I now read things to help me understand the Bible better.  I love the gospel story.  I believe that we ought not to waste our lives, and there is an eternity waiting, so everything I do I want to count in light of eternity.  Therefore, I have less and less interest in fictions, and I want to improve my mind in things that will last.  The gospel will last, and God's truth will last; therefore, I am interested in improving my mind in pondering those truths.  A very, very regrettable side effect of this pursuit of eternal Truth in relation to the Bible is that I attempt too much to systematize and boil down to more basic truths.  Instead of reading the Bible, sometimes I read others' organizing interpretations of the Bible.  I am much more ignorant of the Old Testament than I need to be because it seems so full of what seems to be the arbitrary particulars of the lives of different people.  I feel more at home in the logic of Paul than I do in the stories of the kings in the OT.

That is a lot of self-description, and I apologize.  I just want to convey the sense I feel of this search for universals as opposed to particulars within myself.  Nicole is different.  Certainly not in the sense that she does not care for truth.  On the contrary!  Instead, she finds it more readily than I do in the particulars of life.  While I spend my time pondering deep universal truths and searching more deeply the nature of the Gospel, she is showing practical giving and love to those who are near to her, giving hands and feet to the Gospel.  She cares deeply for her mother, her father, and her Mamaw.  She loves more freely and deeply than I do.  What does she like to do?  What gets her wheels turning?  Arts and crafts and decorations!  She is very good at that sort of thing, and I am definitely not.  Crafts was my least favorite Vacation Bible School station.  In my mind, all of that is arbitrary material stuff, and it isn't going to last into eternity, so I am not as interested in it.  Like Plato, I tend to skip over the particulars for the universals.

Nicole also gets into stories more emotionally and deeply than I do.  She likes to watch television and read stories, probably more than I do.  And she gets much more involved with the characters.  She empathizes with them more.  Not just in fiction, but in real life, too.  While I am loving the theoretical people I don't know in a foreign nation I haven't been to, she is helping and loving and sharing her particular creativity with people who need love right around her.

I want to conclude and bring these together.  The Lord Jesus Christ is God over all.  This includes the universals and the particulars.  Christianity should not be filtered through the lens of Plato.  Rather, Plato should be filtered through the lens of Christ's supremacy over all.  I think that Nicole and I both have pieces of the puzzle, and that part of God's sovereign plan was to bring us together to complement each other and help each other grow.  We both have much to learn from God and from each other.

Christmas is here, and the miracle of the incarnation shakes me out of some of this Platonic trance.  It humbles me, that a God so great would stoop down into the dirty particularity of a single life.  Jesus, eternal and universal, stoops down to take flesh and blood, humanity, parents, aches and pains, a Jewish identity, a single mother, and a road to a bloody cross.  We see stories in the gospels, not just an emotionless force walking around spouting universal truths.  We see particularity.  We see deep love for us in God's sovereign particularity.  Though we do not see his face today, we unmistakably know that God became a man and had a face.   Though we do not hear his laugh, we know he had one.  Though we know so little of his childhood, we know he had one.  From my point of view, I tend to focus on the divinity of Christ, his eternality, but this is lopsided if I do not also see his humanity.  In Christmas, the Universal becomes particular in a manger.

Every single topic and every single thing has significance because it is in God's world.  Everything is meant to glorify God.  This does not flatten out our choices into insignificance, but it is true nevertheless.  I think each of our prayers should be that God would open our eyes to our own blindspots.  How is God at work to glorify himself in the things that are not naturally as interesting to me?  God, please help me.  God, please give me the grace to listen and learn.  Jesus, may my mind and heart exult in the amazing unity of things as I ponder your eternal purposes, but may that worship of you work itself out into practical love in the amazing complexity of your creation, especially those in need around me.  Most assuredly, Soli deo Gloria!

Louie Giglio, Whales, and Stars

Ridiculous.

Zombies, Life, and Jesus

Over the course of my time in college, I have watched a number of zombie movies - some good ones and bad ones - thanks in large part to the diverse cinematic tastes of my good friend and former roommate Chris Cassidy.  I imagine that many in my reading audience may not have enjoyed this genre yet, but perhaps some of my musings may nevertheless prove stimulating for your thoughts.

Zombies are generally outside of the norm for the sort of thing my wife enjoys watching.  However, she has recently discovered a great interest in the television show "The Walking Dead".  I was invited by one of my fellow teachers who lives in our apartment complex to begin watching the show as a social thing with old friends one night each week; the show is off until February.  But as Nicole and I were looking through our Netflix options one evening, we saw the first season of the show.  I suggested we watch it to just check it out with the expectation that it would be too gross-sounding for her to want to watch.  However, we watched the first episode, and she was hooked.  We both enjoyed it enough that we watched all of the existing episodes, up to about halfway through the second season. 

Mild spoiler alert to anyone watching or wanting to watch... The show's main character is a cop who went into a coma for some amount of time and woke up in a post-apocalytic world in which nearly everyone had been killed or turned into zombies by a virus.  The world looks rough.  Real live people are few and far between who have actually survived, and over the course of the show, you see them fighting and sometimes making difficult and morally challenging choices to stay alive.  Keep a gun and be prepared to shoot; no mercy for the dead...

The cop, whose name is Rick, wakes up, and he journeys to Atlanta where he eventually finds his family alive with a small group of survivors.  During the second season, his wife, Lori, discovers that she is pregnant.  This introduces a moral dilemma for Lori, one that did not exactly endear her to us.  She tries to decide whether or not to have an abortion.  She begins to ponder... what kind of world will this child be brought into?  What kind of horrors will he face?  How long will he even be able to live?  Will he be eaten by a zombie before he makes it to his first birthday?  And even if he lives to old age, what will be his quality of life in such a world as this?  In pondering whether to have an abortion, she wallows in hopelessness.  You will have to actually watch to figure out what happens, but this dilemma caused me to think...  (It is not my purpose with this blog entry to make a comprehensive case for life, but that is certainly the only position I believe is warranted by Scripture.) 

Many of the questions she is wrestling with are the same sorts of questions that women face today.  I hear it from pro-choice advocates who talk about how horrible the kid's life would be if he were born into poverty.  How horrible to bring a child into such a hopeless situation.  The fetus is the result of rape, so it is unfair to the mother to make her have the child, and given the circumstances, the child wouldn't have a life worth living anyway... goes the reasoning. 

(An aside:  Though you often hear this reasoning, I am sure pro-choice advocates would actually like to keep the argument far away from thinking about the potential life of the child altogether because it is easier to kill something you don't think is a person.  It's a fetus, not a person.  Within the context of the show, that is how the characters must come to think of the zombies.  Though the zombies used to be their family members, the virus turns them into something else... something that can be killed.  The Holocaust could only occur because most of the Nazis did not believe the Jews were real people.  Brainwashing.) 

I believe that every pregnant couple or mother should feel the weight of this dilemma and decide joyfully in favor of life and hope.  But aside from just thinking about whether to bring a child into the world once you're pregnant, it might be instructive to consider when couples are deciding whether to try to bring children into the world period. 

The world portrayed in this post-apocalyptic vision is bleak and horrible; however, the world as we know it today is also bleak if we look it straight in the eye.  Consider that every person suffers.  Every person born will someday die; some will die painfully, and some will die alone.  Every person bleeds, and no one can go through this warzone of a world without physical and emotional scars.  When we come into this world, we attach to people around us that we will necessarily have to say goodbye to at some point, whether through a move or through the inevitability of death on our part or theirs.  And not everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; sadly, for many the horrors of this present world are a mere precursor to an eternity of judgment separated from Christ.  There is no guarantee that our children will find God, though we do everything in our means to help them; there is, however, there is a guarantee of suffering. 

Yes, in zombieland death seems imminent, but that is merely sped-up zoomed-in version of our own world.  In their world, the zombies are flesh-and-blood, and they can be shot in the head.  Simple, right?  In our world, we do face dangers that threaten physical death, like earthquakes, tornadoes, great white sharks, and cancer, but we do not need to fear those who can only do things to the body... we also face the essentially invisible, yet formidable three-headed monster of Satan, the spirit of the world, and our own flesh that pulls us into sin.  Oh my!  Worse than zombies, and like zombies, we basically don't believe these things exist.  No one is free from this warfare.  In the land of zombies, the people think more clearly about their own mortality than we do.  Indeed, let us seek the truth that will set us free and think soberly, rightly for the sake of our prayers and for the sake of the Gospel.

Why bring anyone into this world?

The answer the show gives is perhaps close to a legitimate answer you and I also could give.  It holds up, rather emotionally, the idea that there is still beauty in the world, and there is enough good in the world to outweigh the bad and make it worth it.  Most of the time, most of us in this world would say the good outweighs the bad.  But we don't always feel this way, and some of those who lose hope that the world could ever be good enough to outweigh the bad commit suicide and end their misery.  Several people in the show "opt out" as hopelessness overtakes them.  The good outweighing the bad is a compelling answer to some, but it is not the deepest answer.  (We are not always adept at judging good and bad in light of eternity.)

As Christians we believe that God is good.  We believe that God is all-powerful.  We believe that he knows everything.  We believe that he is eternal.  We believe that he has a plan for everything and that he is bringing his plan to pass.  Romans 8:28. 

Why did God create the world?  Let me state at the outset, that we cannot give a sure, clean, neat answer to this question.  But let us think about the problem of this question.  The problem of this question runs to the heart of the atheism of many people.  How could a God who is altogether good and altogether powerful create a world where there is so much suffering?  Can God and suffering co-exist?  If God knew what would happen with Adam and Eve, and if God knew that many would reject his Son and spend an eternity in Hell, why did he choose to create? 

Let me run down an answer that I know will leave many unsatisfied, but which I believe is profound.  Our God is in the heavens and he does all that he pleases.  Therefore, it pleased him to create the world, a pleasure that was not at odds with his attributes - love, grace, justice, holiness...  It pleased the Father to crush the Son.  The cross was at the center of God's plans all along, not as an afterthought to the Fall.  The cross is the center of the universe, the center of history because it elevates God's love and grace.  Christ's grace is magnified and glorified in his suffering for sinners.  God's glory and our good are not at odds but find their deepest intersection on that bloody tree two thousand years ago.  Therefore, God was pleased to create a world in which Jesus was crucified so that his love and grace might be displayed to completely undeserving sinners like us.  Christ is glorified in this way.  Though I don't understand it, I believe that God's glory - the apex of which is found in the cross - is at the center of God's purposes for this world he created. 

We do not see into the mind of God, into his essence, beyond what he lets us in on in his revelation.  We know some things for sure - God is passionate for his glory and he loves sinners, and he hates sin, and he hates suffering, and he suffered for us... but in the end, there is so much that we do not know.  Nevertheless, we know that God loves us, that God knows everything, and that he did indeed decide to create, in spite of the suffering in the world. 

In the end, God decided to create.

I think, therefore I am.  Or rather, I think, therefore I AM created me. 

Should life be brought into this world?  There is so much suffering.  Should I play God and choose to end a life that has already been started?  I think that the most profound answer to this question posed in the context of a zombie show, yet relevant to real life, is that we should trust the God who was pleased to bring life into this world.  Most certainly we don't see the whole picture.  And if our position is one of humble trust, we are relieved of the burden of playing God.  The miracle of life and birth is something of a pointer, a parable, a picture by us - who are in God's image - of his own creativity.  To bring a baby into this world in spite of it's dangers and difficulties is a powerful declaration of trust in the God who calls us to himself - the Way, the Truth, and the LIFE.

And all the pain I have described in this blog, roll it all up and see it on the bleeding back of Christ on the cross, enduring the righteous wrath of millions of hells in the stead of those who are found in him by faith, all for the joy that was set before him.  We look to the cross to see God's great love; we look to his resurrection to see his power.  And his resurrection gives us resurrection hope to take the next steps and pursue the joy that is set before us, even when the world seems so monstrous and zombie-ridden. 

We choose life because the one who gave us life did.  (The end.)

Apollo 13

My wife and I have gotten Netflix recently.  They have a lot of good movies, and this week I watched Apollo 13.  The basic plot of the movie centers around these three men who are on a mission to walk on the moon.  When they get into outer space, something goes wrong on their ship, and the mission drastically changes to one of rescue.  There are dozens of obstacles that must be overcome, and you find yourself rooting for the truly heroic engineering of the astronauts and the hundreds of people working around the clock to bring them home.

The movie just ended, and I am writing this as the credits are rolling.  They do indeed make it back!  The epic soundtrack is still ringing in my ears.  At the end of the movie, for over three minutes during their re-entry, there is radio silence.  The climax is the moment that you hear Tom Hanks voice as Jim Lovell break the radio silence letting Houston and the world know that they have made it.  Families rejoice!  The spell-bound world takes a deep sigh of relief.  Mission control cheers.  Joy!  Peace!  Comfort!  The director of mission control sinks back into his chair as emotions overcome him, and he rests in a job well done, NASA's finest hour, the failure that was a success.  No moon rocks, but in bringing the men home, they achieved the seemingly impossible.

It is a great story.  You find yourself rooting for the characters.  Even better that it's a true story.  (God wrote it, right?!)  What can we learn from this story?

From this true story I take several lessons regarding evangelism...

1.  This movie is a story about salvation.  These men's lives are at risk.  But so are the lives of many around us.  While the astronauts are threatened by death in the vacuum of deep space, those around us are threatened with being swept away into eternal damnation.  What is worse?  Harm to the body, physical death?  Or harm to the soul, spiritual death?  Do we root for and become as invested in the salvation of souls from hell as we do about astronauts from death? 

2.  This movie is a story about sacrifice.  The NASA community are committed to bringing their men home.  They feel duty bound to do so.  Those men in space are their brothers, and they will do whatever it takes.  They band together to see it happen.  Just like a marine will not leave a wounded man behind to be taken by the enemy, so NASA refuses to leave their men in space if there is anything possible they can do about it.  Do we feel such an intense loyalty to the people around us in the various and expanding spheres of neighbors we have that we will do anything to see them saved?  Look at what our Savior sacrificed in love for us!  True friendship and love is to lay down our lives for the sake of others, as our Savior did for us.  We carry around the death of Christ in us, and as we suffer for his sake to bring the gospel to others, we fill up what was lacking in Christ's afflictions, namely a flesh-and-blood picture of the sacrificial love of Christ to the community we happen to be in.

3.  This movie is a story about the commitment of community.  As stated above, the camaraderie of the NASA family was amazing and inspiring.  I want our churches to be like that.  We should work together and band together because we are in a life-and-death struggle for the very real lives of those around us.  Going to church should have an urgency and a weightiness and a brokenness over the lost.  We are on a mission.  During those days of Apollo 13, the seven days they were in space, the salvation of those men reprioritized literally everything for those who were connected to them in some way.  Church should be a time when we willingly submit to a radical reprioritization of our lives so that we are living worthy of the gospel for the sake of the lost and ultimately the sake of God's glory.

4.  This movie is a story about expertise.  Hearing the men in the mission control and in the space ship prepare for launch was like hearing a symphony.  Checking down the systems, they each call out that they are okay to go.  In the end it took everyone working on all the systems to get their specific job done.  Each person in the NASA team had a specific passion and gifting that they had given their lives to do.  They couldn't do everyone else's job, but they could do their own, and that was necessary.  A very necessary chain.  The Body of Christ functions this way.  We are called to be who we are and not anyone else.  If you're a pinky toe, be a pinky toe.

Additionally, I believe every single believer, because of the urgency of the gospel, is called to be a threefold student.  1.  We are called to be students of the Word and students of the Gospel.  And preaching the Gospel to others should simply be the natural overflow of daily preaching it to ourselves as the primary means and motivation of our sanctification.  2.  We are to be students of this age.  We are to be discerning about the world we live in, and we should know it and its pitfalls very well, so that we may warn and help the perishing.  3.  We are to be students of people.  We should invest far more time into knowing deeply those around us than we do in knowing fictional characters, pets, and other things.  Be an expert in people; they will certainly outlast the things that will not make it to the next world. 

Ultimately all of this is in God's hands.  After all that NASA did, the fate of the crew was still in the hands of God.  We can do nothing to save people.  Jesus died and rose to bear the sins of the world.  Jesus saves!  Jesus gets the glory as the Savior of sinners.  To him alone be all the glory.  But he gives us the responsibility to go.  We are to go as witnesses of a Risen Savior.  His Spirit alone can awaken dead hearts, but he has ordained that the preaching of the Gospel be the means by which he awakens those dead hearts, and he has entrusted the preaching of the Gospel to his Spirit indwelt Body.  What a privilege!  We preach repentance and forgiveness.  Paul, who spoke of the sovereignty of God over everything, including salvation, yet believed more than anyone that there was power in the preaching of the gospel, and he groaned and ached, even wishing he could take the place of his Jewish brothers, so that they might see Jesus and believe. 

Oh God, let us lose sleep, groan inwardly, weep deeply.  Help us become students of the Word and of our fellow man, and hear our prayers for the salvation of the lost.  Brothers and sisters, let us come together as the people of God and take seriously our call as a missionary Body in this world.  Let us not waste our lives... Soli deo Gloria!

Walking Through the Institutes - Introduction

It has been awhile since I have blogged.  And the more recent entries are more full of links and videos than they are of my actual writing.  I have been blessed by being able to write about my faith and the glory of our great God over the past year, and I have been encouraged especially by some of the stories of those who have read and been helped early on.  I do want to continue writing.

I am recently married!  My wife is wonderful, and we are learning how to build our lives together.  I also started teaching this semester.  Both of these take a lot of time, and that is a very good thing.  How lame if I only blogged all the time and never actually lived!  Nevertheless, writing is one of my passions, and sharing my faith is as well.  My writing pace at first was frenetic; then it slowed to a stop.  Now I would like to find a good place in the middle somewhere.

In looking for a writing project, one of the first places I look is toward what I am currently reading.  I have recently picked up John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Calvin was a reformer, and if you have not heard of him, he is a very polarizing figure in the history of Christianity.  Most Christians love him, hate him, or have never heard of him.  Usually that hinges on whether or not you believe you decisively chose God, or God decisively chose you for salvation.  This is not a debate I will resolve in this blog post.  Calvin's Institutes were basically his systematic theology.  Given his influence in Geneva and Europe at large, this book heavily influenced later Reformed theology and is prerequisite reading for his later commentaries on specific books.  It went through several revisions until he was happy with it and felt it was in a complete form, and today the book I hold is 1001 pages thick... I certainly have some reading to chew on. 

Today's world is thick with the air of tolerance.  Not the kind of tolerance that fights for your freedom to believe what you want and live according to the dictates of your conscience, whether right or wrong, but the kind of tolerance that refuses to say that anyone is right or wrong.  The very concept of truth is thrown to the ground and steamrolled like an antiquated novelty from a bygone time.  Our culture is permeated with an antagonistic distrust of truth or its personal response - conviction.

Today's church breathes in this air, too, and too often, in cowardice, we abdicate the concept of truth and the firm conviction that we have truth in God's revelation to us.  With no firm ground underneath our feet, Christianity becomes a religion about our experience, the way we feel when we sing songs or read the Bible or help other people.  A real God who is there and breaks into our existence, who rightly is worshipped as the center of all the universe is replaced by us and our subjective feelings as the center of things.  When Christianity wimps out on its proclamation of truth, and when we forsake our fundamental identity as witnesses of our risen Savior and Lord, we become just another voice in our postmodern world, indistinguishable from all the other voices. May it not be so!

We should not be allergic to true conviction.  The pattern of this world would tend to do this to us if we do not resist it.  Our conviction allergies, caught as we have gone out into the world to proclaim, tend to follow us back into the Church as we seek to minister to each other and proclaim God's Word to each other.  How often do you receive or give Biblical rebuke or correction?  If Church is mainly about my own personal entertainment experience - which is the case if don't really believe in truth - then rebuke and correction will be completely foreign.  How seriously do you take and how seriously does your church take the need to learn the full counsel of God in our discipleship? 

I am a Calvinist.  I am a Christian first, but I am also a Calvinist.  Just like I am a Christian first and also a Baptist.  To say I am a Christian means decisively saying some things that will be offensive to people who are not.  To say I am a Christian does not mean that I understand everything about God or the Bible or life.  To say I am a Christian does not mean that I agree with every Christian about everything, and it does not mean that I agree with everything Christians have done in the past.  But nevertheless, I do not shirk the label Christian because of any of these things.  Likewise, I don't want to shirk being called a Calvinist simply because of the negative connotations some have with that label.

I have felt the modern aversion to the concept of truth and the idea of having convictions and saying things that will offend.  I think that many will point to Calvinism and Arminianism, and they will rightly say that neither fully expresses the truth about God and his world, and that is true.  Our knowledge of God, even with Scripture, is limited.  (Limited though it is, I believe our knowledge of God through Scripture is sufficient, and he has given us what he means for us to know.)  Certainly, our attempts to systematize and see the unity and connections among Scripture will be limited, but that certainly does not mean that they are useless.  On the contrary!  Finding the connections among Scripture bring it to life so that our quiet times in the Word are not just random bits of information without context.  Our God is one, and he speaks with one voice through Scripture, and what a journey and delight it is to pursue that voice in all its variety and richness and truth!  May it come alive for you! 

I certainly think some conceptions of God are closer than others.  I think atheists are way off.  I think Hindus and Buddhists are a bit closer because they at least allow the supernatural.  Judaism and Islam see a single God.  Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are very close to Christianity, but they differ at massively important spots as well.  But eventually we move into denominations.  I would say that Catholics are Christians, but I would have some significant disagreements with them.  There are some first-order differences, which might place you outside the bounds of orthodoxy, and there are second-order differences, like what is the correct method of baptism, and for the latter it would be uncharitable and false to say they are not Christians over a minor disagreement.  (Not everyone would agree to which differences go into which category.)  When we abdicate truth and conviction, who cares about denominations anymore?  But if you care about truth, and if you investigate Scripture, inevitably you are going to disagree with other Christians at certain points. 

Admitting to the label of a Calvinist is a gentle rebellion against today's modern and post-modern aversion to labels and claims to truth.  I still believe in mystery and I do not understand everything, but on reading Scripture, I tend to agree with Calvin about the main points, though not about everything.  I do not believe that Calvinism is an extra-Biblical add-on that distorts Scripture.  Rather, I believe that it is the most accurate statement of what I believe to be the true interpretation of Scripture.  If I did not believe that to be the case, I am sure that someone else would have expressed a better overall interpretation of Scripture, and for shorthand, I would have taken the guy's name and said, "I follow Jesus above all, but I generally tend to agree with this guy."  I believe God chose me because I believe Scripture points me in that direction, and experientially and personally, I simply see God's grace toward me in my own case, and in my salvation I give him all the glory.  He drew me!  That is all.

Whew!  That was a bit longer than intended... But all that to say, Calvin is an important figure in Protestant history.  This book represents his thought well, and it is a primary source.  I want to read through it and blog my thoughts as I go.  I hope you are not turned off by the specificity of my journey.  But hey, many in the world are turned off by the specificity of God in choosing a particular people and being born as a Jewish baby at a particular time to a particular young family in a particular place.  We do not serve a vague force, but a personal Trinitarian God who descended to mankind and took on human flesh for our salvation in a rescue mission the beginning of which was called Christmas!  Hallelujah!

Michael Ramsden at Desiring God

Analysis of a Movie: True Grit

I have not had a lot of time to write on my blog lately.  I have been working hard at Coahulla Creek.  There just has not been much free time to pursue reading and listening to sermons and blogging and those sorts of things.  It is a different sort of season of life right now, one that involves a little less sleep than I would like, but God is sovereign over all my seasons and all your seasons.  I will give him thanks and glory even as I learn what it means to glorify him in this context.

Today I have had a bit of free time, and I stumbled across some resources on Mars Hill's website.  How might a Christian think about movies?  About stories?  About how these relate to God?  Questions abound.  One of the convictions of the church at Mars Hill is that films and entertainment in general make theological statements.  They make claims about reality.  As Christians we necessarily live in a culture and it is not an empty question to consider how we are to relate to that culture.  To exhaust that question would take a lot of blog entries... but this church believes it is edifying to collectively talk about the meanings of popular movies.  It is like training in worldview and the way to think.

I watched True Grit and enjoyed it, and they talk about it.  Perhaps you will enjoy or be edified...

Jealous

My eyes shed streams of tears,
      because people do not keep your law.
(Psalm 119:136)

Our Father in heaven,
       hallowed be your name.
(Matthew 6:9)

I read that first verse, the one from Psalms, and it revealed to me a lack in my own heart and reminded me of a sermon by John Piper on the second verse, the one from Matthew. 

When you and I think of the lost, those who are without Christ and destined for hell apart from a divine salvation, we usually have a reaction sort of like this... we know that their potential fate is terrible.  They will be in torment forever, and their suffering will be horrible.  To me, however, that is often more of a head knowledge than a heart knowledge.  Whatever it has been - perhaps just the anguish of sustaining that sort of emotion - I have become numb to the horror and reality of hell for those who will go there.  I know I need to feel more than I do.

When it comes to evangelism, this knowledge of the reality of hell is one potential motivation.  I even think it is an essential motivation, one that should not be minimized or ignored or denied (as some have done lately).  Indeed, love would move us to seek the alleviation of the suffering of our fellow men and women.  However, I believe there is an even greater motivation that should be the fuel of our evangelism.

That greater motivation is to see, savor, cherish, pursue, advance, and behold the glory of God!  When we share the Gospel with another, we do hope to save them from eternal punishment because we value their souls - indeed God has chosen to value our souls.  However, a twin hope is to see this effect in their salvation: another heart awakened to worship our holy God.  We rejoice because a soul is saved and because God is worshipped.  We are jealous for God's name, and we yearn to see him praised from more hearts because he is infinitely worthy!  Worthy is the lamb who was slaughtered!  Oh, to be covered by the blood of a Savior who would plan such a plan and save such a one as me!

What is worth more?  A human soul or the praise of God's holy name?  I would say God and his glory are worth more, but in his wisdom and love, he has chosen a plan that does not set his glory and the salvation of sinners at odds.  Thanks be to him for that!

We rejoice to see sinner's eternal suffering stopped; more so, we rejoice to see God worshipped in truth from another heart because he is worthy!  We do both.

When people do not keep God's laws, do I shed streams of tears?  I ought to.  When I read the verse, it hit me in this way:  people not keeping the law is the cause of the psalmist's sorrow.  Law breaking is the grounds of the sorrow.  While he may also shed tears because those people will suffer judgment, here it seems that he is simply sorrowful over the transgression itself.  Indeed, the law is to be treasured because it is given by God, who is to be our supreme treasure.  The law (and for us the Bible) is precious because it has been spoken by our God, and its promises have been purchased by his blood.  We should long to see it honored, beginning in our own hearts but also among all.  Just read the rest of Psalm 119 to see a testament of God's goodness to us by giving us his law; the psalmist loves the God's words and he eats, sleeps, breathes, reads, memorizes, soaks in, and keeps them as best he can.  What a tragedy when those words are trampled upon even in the least. 

We should be jealous for God.  He is jealous for us.  He wants our hearts, and he wants our ties to idols to be broken.  We should want the same thing; we should long for the smashing of our idols, even to the point of the amputation of our limbs and eyes.  But not only for us.  We should yearn for Christ to be lifted up in every heart, his praises to be sung from every tongue, every eye turned to heaven, every ear tuned to the precious Spirit-breathed promises of his Word.  This whole world is his, though it still currently stands in rebellion, and we should be jealous that God's kingdom be proclaimed and known through the whole place.  I think that is the cry of the first petition of the Lord's prayer (and also the second). 

"Hallowed be your name."  That means, "God, make your name holy to me.  Help me to honor it.  Your glory is worth all, though I have fallen so short.  Make your holiness known to me so that I treasure you more deeply, down to the deepest parts of me.  And make your name holy throughout this whole world.  Make your name a treasure among those hearts where it is now trampled.  Holy, holy, holy are you Lord!  Your name is greatly to be praised!"  I think that is what it means. 

Well, this has been my first rambling on my blog in awhile.  As always, I pray it is of benefit to you my reader, whoever you are, and I pray that God's name would be hallowed in your heart.  I guess I will be writing this blog less now that I have a real life job, but I am glad I still have it.  Soli Deo gloria!

Make God Known at Work

Tomorrow morning I officially begin the first day of my new job.  I will be a math teacher at Coahulla Creek, teaching freshmen and seniors.  I am excited and a little nervous, and your prayers are much appreciated.  I ran across a blog entry on Desiring God's website, where Piper wrote very briefly on ways to make Christ known at your secular job.  These are things I want to keep in mind, and wherever you are at, I am sure they may help you as well...

I have in mind at least five things—five ways to make God known through your secular job and all of them are important. When one of them is missing, the witness to the truth of Christ suffers.

1. The excellence of the products or services you render in your job shows the excellence and greatness of God.

2. The standards of integrity you follow at your job show the integrity and holiness of God.

3. The love you show to people in your job shows the love of God.

4. The stewardship of the money you make from your job shows the value of God compared to other things.

5. The verbal testimony you give to the reality of Christ shows the doorway to all these things in your life and their possibility in the lives of others.

Nancy Guthrie, Suffering, and the Word

Psalm 150

Praise the Lord! 
   Praise God in his sanctuary;
   praise him in his mighty heavens!
Praise him for his mighty deeds;
   praise him according to his excellent greatness!

Praise him with trumpet sound;
   praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with tambourine and dance;
   praise him with strings and pipe!
Praise him with sounding cymbals;
   praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!
   Praise the Lord!

Our God is infinitely worthy of all our praise.  He gives us our breath and heartbeat, so that we can give them back to him by living and praising.  This is by no means a complicated entry.  Just a simple reminder to stop and praise God that you are alive and blessed, even if things seem difficult.  There is deep joy to found in the Fount!  Go to him and drink!

Rejoicing in Suffering

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.  More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.  (Romans 5:1-5)

I write and speak as quite a novice in the ways of suffering.  I know that others have suffered far more, and I know that others have more wisdom on this subject.  If you stop reading now and simply pray and soak in the quoted Scripture above, it will by no means be a loss!  But perhaps if you read on, you will test what I say and find it to be both true and useful, and if that turns out to be the case, all praise for it will be due to God and not my wisdom.

First, I want to recognize that suffering is real.  This passage presupposes the reality of suffering in our lives, and more explicitly in other places of the Bible suffering is actually guaranteed.  Psalms gives undiluted voice to the many groanings of our hearts in a great variety of sufferings.  God is incredibly realistic in his teachings about suffering and in his portrayal of it.

It is possible that many write off the Bible as cookie-cutter unrealistic because it bids us to rejoice in our sufferings.  What could be more unrealistic than that?!  If only the Bible knew of my sufferings...

I believe every other system of belief falls either into naive optimism or into hopelessness, while the Gospel of Jesus Christ alone recognizes the depth and gravity of our position as fallen beings and actually addresses it.  There are plenty of people running around who believe in the progress of man through the triumph of science or some other method of improving humanity.  In each case there is some Utopia held up as ultimate and achievable, and humankind (for the most part) is on its way to achieving it, as long as we can get along and get some things together.  These people want to have Heaven now (whether or not they believe in Heaven), which is what some academics refer to as an over-realized eschatology.

Those who believe in an achievable Utopia are the unrealistic ones.  (And even if their vision for utopia is not a universal vision encompassing all of mankind, they probably have at least a personal/private vision of utopia.  Once such-and-such finally happens, then I will be finally happy.  I may still have some problems then, but they will mainly be minor problems that are easily taken care of.  And I will be able to basically live happily ever after.  This is what I call the Grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side of Graduation/marriage/kids/retirement Syndrome)

A look at the news reveals the folly of utopia.  The twentieth century was the bloodiest century of human history.  Today there are murders, rape, systematic oppression, wars, and all sorts of evils going on.  The twentieth century has revealed that scientific progress does nothing to improve the human condition, but rather just magnifies it!  Science may help us to prolong our lives and give us conveniences, but it cannot give us fulfillment or peace, and for one who has no hope, this only means he will have longer to suffer without hope, but at least he will be sufficiently distracted along the way.  Indeed, our depravity spreads to fill whatever room there is, and technology has merely served to provide us a bigger room, not a cleaner heart.  And beyond news and history, if we look closer in amongst our family and friends, we see suffering in struggling marriages, addictions, sickness, and painful death of loved ones.  And perhaps you have suffered.  While you will go through seasons characterized by more or less of it, there is nothing in this life that simply takes it away.  Suffering is a part of being human in this world. 

The other error is to open your eyes and truly recognize the suffering in the world only to conclude that there is no hope.  This will lead only to despair.  If you are without hope, you will do very little in helping to provide hope to others.  You will be miserable.  Humans are often resilient and do find hope, but is there possibly an anchor or a true object for our hope that will not fail?  Christians dare to answer, Yes!  Jesus is our hope.

What you run to when you are having a hard time will tell you the idol that you have set in Jesus' place - alcohol, food, television, friends, Oprah feel-good philosophy, books, sports...  Idols are good things (though I don't place Oprah's philosophy in that category) that we have made ultimate, and if we are getting things (peace, hope, happiness, security...) from this substitute that we should rightly get from God, that is good evidence of the idolatry.  When you are hit with hard news, do you pray or sink yourself into some distraction?  Prayer is the realistic answer.  It is our various distractions that are avoidances of reality.

The Christian answer is not a fake and plastic answer.  If you have the courage to read the Bible seriously and believe it, it is very blunt and realistic about suffering and the depravity of man.  This world is not now as it was created to be.  The principle of death and decay and suffering entered the world through the sin of Adam.  The physical world around us felt it, as it began to decay and therefore groan.  And by our sinful nature we ourselves contribute to the problem as we sin.  In sinning we begin to personally unravel in different ways.  And when we sin against others, we reap death, not only in ourselves, but in others as well.  Everyone does this.  No one understands.  No one seeks for God.  All have turned aside.  Together they have become worthless.  No one does good, not even one! Sinning creates a vicious circle of futility and personal, social, and societal destruction, and it is truly the terrible and just wrath of God to give us over to this.

But the Bible also tells us that creation was not only subjected to futility, but it was subjected to futility (death and decay as our judgment) in hope!  It was subjected by a God who had a greater plan and purpose to bring about, even through what we had meant for evil.  I could talk about this all day, but the point I want to emphatically make is this: God tells us to have joy in suffering, but this is by no means an unrealistic perspective that ignores the reality of suffering.  Woe to us if we think we are more realistic about suffering than the Author of Reality!  This joy is not a fake or plastic joy, but a soul-deep persevering joy.  It is not an Osteen-ish overcoming-power-of-smiling type joy, but a Christ-like cross-bearing-and-enduring type of joy.  God is not blind to your sufferings, and he knows that they are real.  He does not bid you to ignore them, but instead to trust him in them.  If we believe the Bible, having joy and suffering are not mutually exclusive.

Second, our suffering with joy is linked in the passage above to a knowledge.  We know that suffering produces endurance produces character produces hope.  Our suffering is not senseless.  We are being molded by our difficulties and circumstances.  We are being made into better people.  We are being chiseled by pain into the image of Christ, and oh my, how much there is to be chipped away at on me!  Romans 8:28 is an anchor to hold onto.  Our sufferings are not outside of this.  God is using our sufferings ultimately for our good and his glory.

This takes a higher view of God's sovereignty than many do.  Some are unwilling to say that God is sovereign over our sufferings.  But this paints a picture of a rather weak and helpless God.  When the earthquake happened in Haiti, did God not know it was going to happen?  If he did know, was he just powerless to stop it?  Every tragedy could be measured the same way.  (Of course, atheists will take suffering as an argument against God, but when they recognize suffering and evil in order to say it is not right, they presuppose the existence of a real Right and Wrong, a real way that things should be.  And where can that standard come from but from God?  Some theologians like Gregory Boyd actually capitulate to these objections and say that God limits his knowledge of the future.  The evidence against this view is not the topic of this post, but suffice it to say that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the view that God's knowledge of the future is complete.) 

As an example, when Job suffers, he attributes it to God, and he is said not to have sinned with his lips.  But it was Satan who was afflicting Job, right?  Satan was doing it, but what Satan meant for evil, God meant for good.  Romans 8:28 says that God does things for a purpose.  If we are suffering, God could have prevented it, but instead he allowed it.  Whatever God allows, he allows for a reason.  God has purposes in our sufferings.  This is a truth that may take a lot of wrestling and a lot of Scripture-searching and even a lot of tears to come to grips with, but I am convinced that it is the truth, and indeed, the truth sets us free, even when it hurts.

So what can we know of God's purposes in our suffering?  A more general question: what can we know of God's purposes?  An even more general question: what can we know of God?  I think the same principles govern the answers to all three questions.  Our knowledge of God can be true, though it will never be exhaustive, and the infallibly reliable source of our knowledge of God is his self revelation in Scripture.  The same is true of our sufferings and their purposes.  There is so much that we simply are not going to know, at least for now.  However, we can have answers that are true, if not exhaustive, as long as they are tied to Scripture.  Part of that knowledge is given here in Romans 5.  More is given in Romans 8.

God is producing in us a hope.  But it is not a hope for that substitute utopia.  It is not a general and directionless hope.  It is a hope that is tied fiercely to Scripture.  It is a hope in God, and it is a hope that takes him at his Word.  That is really what I would call faith, and taking God at his Word calls attention to his infinite goodness, love, and inexhaustible riches as the Giver of all good things and the Keeper of promises!  Calling attention to these things gives God the glory!  When the cry of our hearts is no longer primarily, "God make me happy", but rather, "God be glorified", we will rejoice in his wisdom to do that by whatever means he deems best.  Often, God will get more glory from us when we have the kind of hope in him that comes only through suffering.  And our happiness will then be the best kind because it will not be the kind that we would have invented for ourselves, a kind of happiness that would necessarily include the minimization of all suffering, but will rather be the happiness that only the God who created us can give.  He knows us better than we know ourselves, and he himself is better than any other thing we could grasp for, and therefore this knowledge is a grasping by faith at this truth: God knows best how to give himself to us.

Knowing these things doesn't make suffering easy, but it is a pathway to celebrating God's glory!  Walking that pathway, we can find joy even with tears in our eyes.  

Third, it is both good and bad to compare sufferings.  Let me start with the bad.  When I am suffering, it will be very easy for my eyes to be focused on me and my own situation.  If I compare my sufferings with those of other people, it would be bad to conclude that their suffering is lesser and therefore unimportant.  How horrible if my suffering should actually be an occasion for a subtle form of pride!  It would be profoundly unloving for me to see where another is suffering and to call it fake or small or unimportant.  We must fight the temptation to rationalize why our suffering is real and rationalize why someone else should just get over it.  We ought to recognize the reality of universal suffering - that everyone goes through it.  Or else, we will cut off our own legs from ever being able to walk over to someone else to put our arms around them.  To magnify our own suffering in order to downplay everyone else's will leave us in a deeply lonely place, unable to be helped and also unable to be a help. 

However, when I am in a place of difficulty, and I am preaching the truth to myself, comparing my sufferings can be a good thing.  It is healthy for me, at least, to realize how blessed I am.  There are people in the world who do not have food, shelter, water, a livelihood, health, and plenty of other things.  I am filthy stinking rich in comparison to most of the world.  And not because I earned it, but because of who I was born to.  When I went to Haiti, I saw overwhelming devastation of all sorts.  One of the things that sticks with me is a man who lost two children, but rejoiced that his third was alive!  In Haiti, especially in the worship services, I saw that suffering and joy were not mutually exclusive.  And the relative bigness of some of their sufferings in comparison to mine allows me sometimes to take a deep breath and know that it's not the end of the world.  It is good to be invaded by realities bigger than the small world I allow myself to be focused on when I am focused only on myself.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.  (Romans 8:18)  What is coming for us is so much bigger than what we are going through now.  The glory that is to be revealed to us is going to be awesome in the strongest sense of the word.  Take everything you are going through right now and place it on a scale against God's eternal glory, and it is not even feathers!

The flip side of this comparison - and it's so lopsided that it's apparently not even worth the comparison - is a very sobering reality.  Some humans will die and enter eternal damnation separated from Christ in hell.  God's wrath will rightly visit them for eternity.  Millions slip unexpectedly over this waterfall into eternity every year, and none of our sufferings compare to the sufferings of hell.  When I believe I am suffering here and now, it is good to consciously bring before my mind that I really deserve an eternal suffering that is a trillion trillion times worse than this, but that by God's grace alone I have been saved.  Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Hallelujah!

Since suffering is ultimately a consequence of original and ongoing sin, I think our sufferings can be taken as a clue to the seriousness with which God takes sin, and our sufferings are occasions for repentance.  They remind us that God's wrath is real, and therefore we should take the reality of hell seriously, to avoid it ourselves and to have urgency in warning others (within the context of the whole Gospel).

While the earthquake in Haiti may not have been God's specific judgment on Haiti for a specific sin committed, it is nevertheless evidence of God's judgment on sin, and our response should be repentance, not an investigation into the sins of Haiti.  When the Tower of Siloam fell on some unsuspecting folks and Jesus was asked about it, his instructions were simple: repent.

Fourth, our God knows suffering as an insider.  This is more comforting than anything I have said thus far, I believe.  God did not exempt himself from the sufferings of his children, but he allowed himself to undergo them all.  He is a High Priest who can sympathize.  He was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.  He was homeless, mocked, betrayed, spit on, deserted, rejected, laughed at, and crucified.  Physically and emotionally Jesus suffered greatly.

Yet there was a suffering far greater than these.  Spiritually, Jesus was separated from the Father; he cried out, "Why have you forsaken me?"  Jesus had known perfect fellowship with the Father from eternity past; for the first time that fellowship was broken, as my sins were laid on his back, and he bore God's terrible wrath toward my sin in my place.  I deserved crucifixion and worse, but he took it.  He deserved blessings and fellowship, which were rightfully his all along, but he gave those up to shoulder the cross, and I got those blessings and that fellowship, instead.  That is what the Gospel is about!  But oh, the suffering Jesus endured!  It is a suffering that we cannot comprehend, and it is one that bids me to silence in the presence of our holy God.

And now Jesus is resurrected.  He is alive.  He is at the Father's right hand.  If we are in him, because he has been raised, we receive forgiveness and justification.  The price has been paid.  Jesus knows us intimately, he formed us, and he has placed his Spirit within us.  He pours his love into our hearts through the Spirit!  I do not believe that the great martyrs of old and today were extra-super-spiritual or full of superhuman strength.  I think that they had grasped to the heart this magnificent truth: God loves us!  Oh, that we might really know that!

Some people have a hard time believing God would send people to hell.  I have the hardest time believing he's not going to send me.  I understand - though not as much as I ought - God's wrath.  I have a harder time understanding his grace and love.  I am so deserving of eternal suffering, but I believe he foreknew me, predestined me, justified me, and that I will one day reach glory.  Each step is not dependent on my works or inherent goodness but on the gracious gift of a persevering faith that produces works.  My boasting is eradicated by the blood of Jesus!

Let yourself be understood by Jesus.  Let yourself be known by Jesus.  Let yourself be comforted by Jesus.  He does love you, and he does understand you.  Many people feel alone in their sufferings.  They are unable to be comforted because they believe no one understands.  No one has gone through the exact same things.  If you get in a habit of shutting people out who try to comfort you because you don't believe they understand, you may end up hardening your heart to the love of any other in general, and you risk shutting out the God who actually understands perfectly and who stands there by your side to comfort you and give you joy in suffering. 

Finally, one of God's purposes in suffering is the spread of the Gospel.  We are filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions.  Christ's sufferings on the cross were sufficient to pardon sinners, but what is lacking is a very real portrait of that to the nations in each generation.  As the Church we are the Body of Christ, indwelt by the Spirit.  Just as Christ suffered bodily on the cross, his Body now suffers for the same ultimate purposes - that Christ would be glorified through the purchase of sinners into his family.  Christ went to the cross for the joy that was set before him - many sons coming to belief.  We find real joy, too, when we count our lives as nothing compared to knowing Christ, and in so doing, proclaim the Gospel which is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.  It is the mark of true believers when, having given up everything, they deny that they have given up anything because they really have caught the Philippians 3:7 logic.  And the spread of the Gospel through sufferings and deaths of saints should not hold up only those very visible actions of self-denial but the thousands of smaller daily dyings to self that serve as the necessary foundation.  May Christ be our treasure!  Soli Deo gloria.

We will be able to rejoice in sufferings when we get ourselves caught up in bigger realities than our own lives, namely the glory of God.

To summarize, you can suffer with joy because God is in control and he loves you.  Wiser men and women may have written a far more helpful account, but it is my hope that this will have been of help to you.  Thank you for sticking with me in such a long and meandering pondering on a deep and heavy subject. 

Joshua and Blood-Earnestness

I am reading the book of Joshua.  There is no way around it.  Joshua is an intense book, and there is some uncomfortable material in it.  The Israelites have wandered around for forty years because of their disobedience, and they are finally going into the promised land.  God commands them to go in and wipe people out.  Don't just kill the soldiers in battle, wipe out everything that breathes.  Why?

God, why do we have to kill the women and children, too?

I think people who read this and aren't bothered by it either don't have a heart or they don't believe Scripture.  I was bothered by this, and then I was bothered by how often the times are when I have not been bothered.

I read of Achan's sin to take some of the things devoted to destruction when they went to battle at Jericho.  God told them not to do it.  Joshua and the Israelites found Achan out after experiencing defeat in the next battle.  What did they do?  They stoned him, then they burned him.  And not just him, but his whole family!  Let that sink in if you dare.

I draw some pretty basic conclusions from these things that may seem just glaringly obvious to you but useful for me to realize...

1.  It is a grace that anyone is not killed.  Scripture is clear that God is a just God.  Therefore, he is not unjust to take these men, women, and children.  It is grace alone that I have not been stoned and burned.  That is basically what I deserve. 

2.  God's commands are serious.  Too often my obedience and repentance are done when they are convenient to me... when I have time to properly repent.  (A ridiculous thought.)  No one takes God as seriously as they should.

3.  I hope not to overspiritualize in this analogy.  I view Israel's taking possession of the Promised Land like my own Christian walk.  God promised victory and possession of the land.  God promises me that, having been justified, I am on my way to a glorified resurrected body.  God commands that the Israelites take full posession wiping everyone out.  I am commanded to let Christ have full possession of me, crucifying all my sinful tendencies, for my good and for his glory.  Looking at Joshua this way, I receive a new gravity about how seriously I should take this business of dying to myself.  There are no small sins, however harmless they might look.  God did not have the Israelites spare the Canaanite women and children.  Likewise, I can give no harbor even to the smallest bit of sin, else I am harboring the enemy as a traitor of Lord.  The bloodiness of Joshua bids us to come to Christ and to do battle with our sin in blood-earnestness.

Be a Radically God-Centered Pastor (or Person)

I Have a Dream

I hate, I despise your feasts,
   and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
   I will not accept them;
And the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
   I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
   to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
   and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
             (Amos 5:21-24)

If we live in willing ignorance or resignation to the injustices of our age, the quality of our worship becomes repugnant to God.  Let us long for and work for justice and righteousness, knowing that in this time we will never achieve a perfect world, but bit by bit, we can make the Kingdom of God known to a world thirsty for what God alone can give.  To the Christ of our righteousness be all glory, forever and ever!



It's a day late, but I hope you enjoy this bit of history as we celebrate the anniversary of our declaration of independence. 

How to Disagree - Keller, Horton, Chandler

Courtesy of a link provided by Andy Sellmann.  Again, thanks for bringing the legit-ness, Andy.

Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World

I think my outlook on life and on Christianity has been significantly shaped by about a dozen people.  There are obviously more than that who have had some influence, but the list is probably about that long of those who I am very indebted to for some fundamental aspect of the way I think about things.  On this list there are those who I know and have been personally discipled by, and there are also those who are preachers or teachers I have found online.  I have benefited greatly during my college years from the Christ-centered use of my ipod.

David Blevins has helped shape my thinking significantly through numerous conversations over multiple years and also through the taking of his worldview class.  Here are a handful of the things pressed on me by the worldview class...

1.  There are good reasons for believing in God.  Christianity is not a blind leap of faith against all evidence, though that is what many in the church today seem to do.

2.  God wants me to love him with my mind, not just my heart.  Therefore, I need to think deeply and well about God.

3.  There are many forces in the world and many college professors who disparage the Christian message, but we need to be prepared to give a defense and a reason for the hope within, instead of lying over and just taking everything.

4.  The Bible isn't simply a collection of true things, but it has a true unified message that speaks into a million different subjects.  Jesus is Lord over all, not just church-y things.   Jesus is even Lord of art.  It is legitimate to wrestle with questions - while having humility about the answers - such as, what would God think about government?

5.  Everyone has presuppositions.  Everyone has a worldview.  Everyone believes something.  Everyone operates on some morality.  It is better to live an examined life of intellectual and moral integrity.  Christianity can put together the puzzle pieces the best out of all worldviews. 

Thank you, David, for your heart for true discipleship, your commitment to the local church, and your counsel and challenge over the years.  I am deeply indebted.  I know that other worldview graduates - the category with which we self-identify - will join me in expressing that indebtedness.  What an awesome picture of how the Body is meant to function, each part serving as God has gifted.  Thank you!

I write all of that as preamble to a very interesting resource.  David is currently doing a summer book study through Tim Keller's book "The Reason for God".  Tim Keller is one of those who would make my list of highly influential people, though he is one from a distance.  David Blevins and Tim Keller definitely do not agree on everything, though both definitely love Jesus, and they seek to love Jesus with all their minds.  It is good, I think, to read a bit outside of your comfort zone and listen to teachers who don't just say all the things you already believe.  In that way, I think it is good for me to prayerfully think through those areas where my significant influences disagree, and I bid you to do the same while always relying on God through his infallible, sufficient Scripture. 

The first place I want to send you is to a course that Tim Keller co-taught with the late Edmund Clowney on "Preaching Christ in a Postmodern World".  This is essentially Tim Keller's philosophy of preaching, which will add significant depth to what comes across in "The Reason for God" if you have time to listen to these talks.  I have listened to probably about two thirds of them.  These talks bring you back to Tim Keller's presuppositions about a lot of things, and I believe it is applicable even to people who are not called to preach because it basically comes back to what the Gospel is and how it is to be best communicated and given to people, topics relevant to every Christian. 

The talks by Edmund Clowney are also interesting and worth a listen.  He deals more directly with how Christ is to be exposited from all of Scripture.  For instance, how do you preach Christ from wisdom literature or the story of David and Goliath or from Leviticus.  The idea is that all of Scripture is unified, everything is summed up in Christ, and Jesus was constantly interpreting Scripture (which was just the OT when he was walking around) in light of himself.  Very fascinating.  The whole Old Testament, not just random bits, is a testimony to Christ.

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/resources/category/courses/a/series/preaching_christ_in_a_postmodern_world/

I am also including a link to the syllabus for the course.  Syllabus is probably not the right word.  It is more like a book, but they refer to it as a syllabus.  Reading parts of this may be more effective for some than trying to listen to all of the talks. 

http://www.endangeredleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/keller-on-preaching-syllabus.pdf

As always, I hope you are helped and encouraged, and as always, to God be all the glory!

Chariots of Fire Clip

"...when I run, I feel God's pleasure."

My parents are watching the movie "Chariots of Fire" in the other room.  It reminded me of this scene, and the awesome quote in the middle of it.  I love the truth that our God, while angry at sin, is an exceedingly happy and joyful God.  Indeed, he is far happier and takes far greater pleasure in things than we do because his capacity for it is infinite.  And I believe God delights in and sings over his creation and creatures.

Friends, let God into every inch, every nook, every cranny, every light and dark space of your life and heart and soul.  Give yourself wholly to him, and whatever you do, in word or deed, do it as unto the Lord.  God will meet you in unexpected places and in unexpected ways, and I pray that we would all find our joy in Christ alone.  When we hold fast to Christ and lose to everything else (like winning races), we will then be able to worship ever more freely and enjoy God ever more fully, even in things like races.   The different things populating God's creation make horrible gods when we depend on them as gods, but they make for great opportunities to worship when they are seen as grace gifts of the God who is really there.  The Giver of good gifts is then glorified.  To God alone be all the glory!

Bono on Grace, Karma, Jesus

The following is an excerpt from a book called Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas. I think having a conversation with Bono would be interesting; though I wouldn't always agree with him, he is challenging.  Here towards the end of this particular interview he gives a good present-day incarnation of CS Lewis's trilemma (Liar/Lunatic/Lord).  Enjoy.

Bono: My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don't let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sighs] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that's my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now that's not so easy.


Assayas: What about the God of the Old Testament? He wasn't so "peace and love"?

Bono: There's nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is. I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable. But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend. When you're a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules. But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

Assayas: Speaking of bloody action movies, we were talking about South and Central America last time. The Jesuit priests arrived there with the gospel in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Bono: I know, I know. Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. [laughs] A list of instructions where there was once conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. Why are you chuckling?

Assayas: I was wondering if you said all of that to the Pope the day you met him.

Bono: Let's not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. The physical experience of being in a crowd of largely humble people, heads bowed, murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows

Assayas: So you won't be critical.

Bono: No, I can be critical, especially on the topic of contraception. But when I meet someone like Sister Benedicta and see her work with AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, or Sister Ann doing the same in Malawi, or Father Jack Fenukan and his group Concern all over Africa, when I meet priests and nuns tending to the sick and the poor and giving up much easier lives to do so, I surrender a little easier.

Assayas: But you met the man himself. Was it a great experience?

Bono: [W]e all knew why we were there. The Pontiff was about to make an important statement about the inhumanity and injustice of poor countries spending so much of their national income paying back old loans to rich countries. Serious business. He was fighting hard against his Parkinson's. It was clearly an act of will for him to be there. I was oddly moved by his humility, and then by the incredible speech he made, even if it was in whispers. During the preamble, he seemed to be staring at me. I wondered. Was it the fact that I was wearing my blue fly-shades? So I took them off in case I was causing some offense. When I was introduced to him, he was still staring at them. He kept looking at them in my hand, so I offered them to him as a gift in return for the rosary he had just given me.

Assayas: Didn't he put them on?

Bono: Not only did he put them on, he smiled the wickedest grin you could ever imagine. He was a comedian. His sense of humor was completely intact. Flashbulbs popped, and I thought: "Wow! The Drop the Debt campaign will have the Pope in my glasses on the front page of every newspaper."

Assayas: I don't remember seeing that photograph anywhere, though.

Bono: Nor did we. It seems his courtiers did not have the same sense of humor. Fair enough. I guess they could see the T-shirts.

Later in the conversation:
Assayas: I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?

Bono: Yes, I think that's normal. It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.

Assayas: I haven't heard you talk about that.

Bono: I really believe we've moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Assayas: Well, that doesn't make it clearer for me.

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics; in physical laws every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I'd be interested to hear that.

Bono: That's between me and God. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Assayas: The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.

Bono: But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there's a mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let's face it, you're not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point. It should keep us humbled . It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven.

Assayas: That's a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it's close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world's great thinkers. But Son of God, isn't that farfetched?

Bono: No, it's not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn't allow you that. He doesn't let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I'm not saying I'm a teacher, don't call me teacher. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying: "I'm the Messiah." I'm saying: "I am God incarnate." And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You're a bit eccentric. We've had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don't mention the "M" word! Because, you know, we're gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you're expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he's gonna keep saying this. So what you're left with is: either Christ was who He said He was the Messiah or a complete nutcase. I mean, we're talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we've been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had "King of the Jews" on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I'm not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that's farfetched

Bono later says it all comes down to how we regard Jesus:
Bono: If only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my s--- and everybody else's. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that's the question. And no one can talk you into it or out of it.