Religion, Relationship, and Stolen Shows

Not too long ago I read an article that says that according to a new Gallup poll, confidence in organized religion has hit an all-time low. My reaction to that was: "I blog about the Bible, and I don't care much for religion myself!" When I think of the word "religion" I think of a set of requirements I must meet. I must go to church, I must pray every day, I must read the Bible every day also, and so on and so on. Basically, that's what a dictionary will tell you "religion" is. There is certainly a place for that, and there is value to it; if there wasn't, you wouldn't find me spending several hours of my week every single week hanging around my church. But I don't think the answers to the major questions that we all face... Why am I here? What am I supposed to do with myself while I'm on this planet? What happens to me when I die? Does anyone love me, really love me? ...those questions are not answered by going through the motions of religion.

And maybe that's why people have lost interest. Maybe after 9/11/2001 they tried the whole showing-up-for-church-making-everything-better route, but then they figured out that if they show up for church on Sunday, on Monday they still have problems and they still have questions and they still have doubts. Maybe they discovered that closing their eyes reverently when someone else prays only lasts as long as the prayer lasts. Maybe they wondered why reading some verses from a Bible promise box doesn't always provide much reassurance, or prayers issued in panic mode often seem to bounce off the ceiling.

The reason is because the actions without a real personal connection are just actions.

How long does a marriage last when the husband and wife have all of the motions down pat, but there is no passion? No spark between them? It doesn't last long. We found out last week that God clearly sees His relationship with mankind as something very similar to a romantic relationship (actually, my theory is that God created romantic relationships to give us a model of the relationship He wants with us) - if a romance doesn't do well when the participants are just going through the motions, why would a relationship with God do any better?

Don't get me wrong - although a human relationship may end in divorce, God has said in His word that He will not "leave or forsake" us (see Hebrews 13:5-6), so once you and God have a relationship, I'm confident that even if you turn your back on God, you can't really "walk away" (how can you walk away from someone who is omnipresent? How can you turn your back on someone who is in front of you and behind you? But just as a marriage that lasts until the death of one partner is empty and joyless if there is no love, no heart behind the actions of birthdays and anniversaries and holidays and Valentine's Days, your relationship with God can seem empty if religious actions are the only thing that you put into them.


Being present in a specific place, church or not, is not the answer all of those big life questions. Opening a book every day and reading it is also not the answer to those questions, and neither is speaking into the air to someone you cannot see. According to the Christian faith, any of those three activities might lead to you finding some of those answers, but if "religion" is the actions itself, religion provides no answers.  Religious activities are, in themselves, empty.

So if people are becoming disenfranchised with religious actions, maybe that's a positive thing. Maybe people are figuring out that the "religion" part of Christianity isn't the real thing. The real thing is that God loves you; Jesus gave everything He had for you; God accepts you into His family. And not only accepts you, but welcomes you with open arms! You are the object of His affection! It's about love, not about actions.

Even more mind-boggling is the fact that once you have lost yourself in that loving relationship with the Father God, the actions come naturally. When you understand how much God loves you, you want His will to take control. Check out this video from Christian rap/pop star tobyMac explaining the meaning of his song "Steal My Show":






What's your take on the whole "religion vs. relationship" debate? How much religious activity is enough? How much is too much? What do you do when going through the motions just doesn't cut it? Sound off below by clicking the "comment" link and join the discussion!

Evolution Is Not Science

Last week, as I'm sure you've heard by now, children's TV show host Bill Nye 'The Science Guy' released the following video, entitled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children":



The news media immediately jumped on it, and that's how I heard about it. Frankly, I was shocked at what I heard, not because I believe that God created the cosmos (although I do believe that), but that Bill Nye apparently has a few of his facts confused. He also clearly thinks that anyone who doesn't believe what he believes is an idiot.

Here are a few of the facts that Mr. Nye is getting wrong:

1. "When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back, really." How can he say this immediately after saying "I mean, we're the world's most advanced technological [country]... generally, the United States is where most of the innovation still happens"? Does he think that Americans never believed in creation until recently? Clearly it hasn't held us back yet. It could be argued, based on those two statements alone, that belief in evolution has held everybody else back.
   
2. "Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates." How is evolution fundamental to understanding biology? Is he saying that if someone chooses not to believe that one species can, over time, bring forth a different species, that that person is not able to become a biologist or a physician? He might want to discuss that with the excellent Christian doctor who has kept me healthy for many years now.
   
3. "Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution." What's more simple than "I think someone made these complex living things in the world around me"? I suppose "Over the course of millions or billions of years, directed by forces which we cannot observe or repeat, counter to the observable fact that organized things in our world tend to deteriorate instead of becoming more organized, simple creatures suddenly appeared out of nowhere for no reason and then slowly became more complex creatures, guided by no intelligence at all" is much simpler.
   
4. "...here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent" Bill here seems to misunderstand something about believers in creation. Not every believer in creation believes in the "young Earth" hypothesis which says that although the universe seems very old, it actually is only something like 6,000 years old (or maybe some other figure, but you get the picture.) In fact, there is no reason that someone who believes that an intelligence created everything can't also believe that that intelligence created it billions of years ago. Young Earth is not the same topic as evolution, although they may often be part of the same arguments.
   
   This is the first time in the video, by the way, that Mr. Nye implies that people who do not believe in evolution are not very bright. More on that later.
   
5. "And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems." Obviously, if you do not believe in evolution, you can not understand science, "build stuff" that requires understanding of engineering, or "solve problems." Hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, astronauts, computer programmers, and generally very intelligent people who doubt evolution would beg to disagree.
   
6. "You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I'm sure, will be, it just won't exist. There's no evidence for it." On the contrary, in recent years the evidence against evolution has been mounting... in fact, if there is anything that lacks evidence, it is the argument that simpler creatures can and have managed to change themselves into more complicated creatures. Human beings cannot even force evolution to happen, and to our knowledge, we are the more complex and intellectual creatures on Earth. The best we can do is make creatures mutate, but we can't make a Spider Man or a Wolverine... usually the mutations we create result in the death of the mutant. Mutation does not make creatures better. It usually kills them. It certainly doesn't turn one species of animal into a different species. And if even the most complex species on the planet can't make it happen, how can a one-celled microbe make it happen?

The thing I find offensive about Bill Nye's video, though, is not his inaccuracies, but his arrogance. He leaves no room between "smart like me" and "crazy people who can't understand the world around them." He implies that science and evolution are one and the same, but that's just not the case. Evolution is not science. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the Scientific method this way: "principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses." Did you notice how the scientific method involves observation and experiment? So far there has never been a bona-fide observed case of evolution. We haven't been able to turn cats into anything but cats, cows into anything but cows, daisies into anything but daisies, humans into anything but humans. Squirrels give birth to baby squirrels. Chicken eggs hatch and chickens come out. Evolution has as much scientific validity as Mary Shelley's story of Dr. Frankenstein giving life to an assembly of body parts by shooting them with lightning. Neither experiment, Frankenstein's Monster or Darwin's Evolution, has ever been repeated. Experimental results that are not independently repeatable are scientifically suspect.

And yet Bill Nye and others like him do exactly what they accuse creationists of doing: they shove their dogma down the throats of others. They pretend that something they cannot observe or make happen is a scientifically proven fact, and they call people names if they are disagreed with. I've even heard accounts of very qualified scientists suffering bullying within their professional circles for advancing ideas that exclude evolution. Some scientists who believe in creation actually remain "in the closet" because they fear that their career will suffer if they buck the party line on evolution. By using the word "crazy" to describe the views of creationists and by implying that they live in a dream world, Mr. Nye has shown that he has no respect for those who have views counter to his own. It's shocking that someone who aligns himself with the scientific establishment would show such disdain for the views of others.

Even if I believed in evolution, that's not the kind of attitude I want to teach to my children. Hopefully, the children of tomorrow will respect others' viewpoints, even if they disagree with them. Evolution or not, intellectual arrogance is definitely not appropriate for children.

War with the World, Part 2

In my previous post I outlined some thoughts related to the recent Chick-fil-A hoopla, and the response of the Christian community. This morning a detail fell into place for me in a way that put two and two together to make something that was more like "four" than anything I've heard yet. Maybe I'm turning into a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, but hear me out and maybe you'll at least see where I'm coming from.

Let's review the basic events that occurred that led to the controversy. On July 2, some comments that Dan Cathy made about traditional marriage were published in a Baptist newsmagazine. On June 16, he appeared on a radio show I've never heard of before and made similar remarks (source: http://www.ajc.com/business/what-dan-cathy-said-1484986.html via Wikipedia). Such a controversy erupted over these remarks that by July 22, the former governor of Arkansas had called for a special day for Chick-fil-A supporters to go eat there to show support for the chain (source: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/mike-huckabee-calls-for-chick-fil-a-day/). On August 1, supporters did as Mr. Huckabee had recommended, and even though Chick-fil-A did not officially ask for it or plan an event, they had a "record-setting" sales day (source: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/chick-fil-record-setting-sales-appreciation-day/story?id=16912978). The LGBT community planned a counter-demonstration "kiss-in" for the following Friday (see: http://bottomline.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/03/13104208-pro-gay-marriage-groups-have-chick-fil-a-kiss-in?lite). I doubt it cost Chick-fil-A much in sales, but Chick-fil-A does not publicly report sales numbers so nobody but their hairdresser knows for sure what happened for them financially on Wednesday or on Friday.

Since this thing started to percolate up into the brouhaha it eventually became, I've been puzzled over how a few comments in such obscure venues became such a big deal. I mean, who is this Ken Coleman with the radio show? I've never heard of him before now, and I'd guess I've at least heard the names of most nationally-known Christian leaders. (Actually, I'm assuming he is a religious speaker of some kind, although I don't immediately find anything specifically addressing that on KenColemanShow.com.) Best I can tell from his Web site is that he has a local show on a radio station in Georgia. And tell me: how many gay rights activists really read the Baptist Press? If I were gay and wanted to be part of a Christian church, I would most certainly NOT choose the very conservative Baptist denomination, and I would not read Baptist publications.

So here's the question to ask yourself. How did the LGBT community even know about these things Dan Cathy was saying? Are you telling me that gay people are spending their time reading Baptist publications and listening to Christian talk radio? Now, I did just do some quick research, and Wikipedia does report that Atlanta has a large gay population (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States) so it's possible that homosexual activists in that area might have stumbled across Coleman's radio show. But I've got to wonder whether that's really what happened, and here's why.

It appears that Chick-fil-A has actually been controversial within the LGBT community for at least a year and a half. Wikipedia reports that there was a flap over a marriage conference in January of 2011 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A#Controversy_regarding_same-sex_marriage_stance) and if you check the references in that Wikipedia article, you'll find several other instances of LGBT activists becoming upset over something Chick-fil-A did. So essentially, Chick-fil-A seems to have been in their crosshairs for some time. What occurred to me this morning was that it is very likely that they were actually looking for the right time to attack Chick-fil-A in the national arena. This public denouncement of Chick-fil-A wasn't really in response only to those two interviews.

Now, here's where Christians either won the day, or got pie on our faces, and I'm going with option #2. Sure, CFA had a great sales day, and my guess is that they are continuing to have great sales days - the Saturday after the big chicken-athon I was at a mall with a CFA in it and the line was still longer at that restaurant than anywhere else in the food court. But really, did the chain really need saving? It's not like CFA is an ailing fast food chain that needs our support to keep it from going under. We gave them our money, but all that meant was that we had some tasty chicken.

Here's how we failed: the LGBT community was trying to cause a division between themselves and Christians. Can't you see that that was the idea all along? They sought to show that Christians are mistreating gays, to consolidate gays against Christian organizations, to make sure that homosexuals would not seek to leave the lifestyle but would become more afraid and suspicious of organizations that would reach out to them.

I think we walked right into their trap.

I don't think that the LGBT activist community got things exactly like they wanted, because I think they really wanted to demonize and damage the chain and that just wasn't going to happen. But I do think that they've set Americans at each other's throats, and specifically I think they've set homosexuals against Christians. They've polarized people, shoring up their own power. Christians saved a fast-food restaurant that didn't really need saving, and hardline gay-rights activists built a stronger sense of "us-versus-them" community on both the gay side and the "religious right" side.

It's another row or two of bricks in the already towering wall between the Christians and the people that Jesus wants us to reach out to in love. And we laid the bricks ourselves.

War with the World

No time for being lazy
No sleeping until noon
The world is cruh-cruh-crazy
Don't you get the news?
Get up, put on your armor
Yeah, we're at war with the world
- from "War With The World" by DeGarmo & Key (listen: Spotify - ChristianBook.com)

Years ago there was a great deal of controversy over what was known in Christian circles as the "spiritual warfare movement." Christian rock bands with lyrics like this one (a different band called Petra even released an entire album called This Means War!) raised eyebrows with their use of combative language. War is a violent thing... should Christians be talking as though we are in some kind of battle? Isn't that what happened in the Crusades? Isn't that what we object to in radical Islam even today?

In the past couple of weeks, angry Christians have eaten thousands of chicken sandwiches in protest of people who protest at the Chick-fil-A founder's statements about marriage. Some say the controversy is about free speech (even though nobody restricted Dan Cathy's speech). Others say the controversy is about gay marriage rights (even though Dan Cathy denied nobody's rights to get married) or gay rights in general (although I have yet to hear any good solid evidence that Chick-fil-A has discriminated against anyone because of their sexual orientation). Others see the statements as a symptom of a corporate policy with which they disagree (the company has made charitable donations to religious organizations which seek to help homosexuals leave that lifestyle if they so choose, and the methods of some of these organizations have been questioned). In the Christian circles I frequent, I have seen a lot of defiance, some of it bordering on anger. Christians are frustrated, because they feel that homosexuals are trying to legalize something which they believe threatens their religious beliefs. Apparently, if homosexuals are allowed to call themselves "married" under the civil laws of the United States, it will be the first step in the crumbling of Christianity to dust.

But wait... is the Church really that fragile? Is Christ really not able to preserve his people if homosexuals quit eating at a fast food chicken place? Even if that place doesn't open on Sunday because of the owners' religious convictions? And, more importantly, are political ideas, even ones that are very important to us in America such as the right to freedom of speech, really a part of Christianity?

Are we at "war with the world?"

I think we've gotten our idea of what "the world" that we should be "at war with" mixed up. The second part of the song I quoted above is a little more specific:

The enemy's a liar
He wants to take your heart
The lure is the desire
That tears the heart apart
So don't go for the glitter
Yeah, we're at war with the world
- from "War With The World" by DeGarmo & Key

"The enemy" that the song talks about is personified under the name Satan, but really "the world" that we are to oppose is the sinfulness that surrounds us, not everybody in the whole world who is not a Christian. In fact, in the Gospels Jesus never attacked the people around him who were considered "unclean" and "sinners" (in first-century Jewish thought, homosexuals would surely fall into this category, if any of them happened to show up). The people that Jesus most vehemently attacked were the self-righteous religious people who thought they knew all the rules and wanted to force everyone else to follow them.

Sound familiar?

The problem with this whole Chick-fil-A thing... in fact, with the whole "gay rights" thing and the response of Christians to it... is that it serves to create a division between Christians and the very people we should be seeking to reach with the message of Jesus' love. When you post that pro-Chick-fil-A image on your Facebook profile, think about this: is your lunch really worth the soul of a gay person who might see your profile and become hardened against the message of the Gospel because of it? What about your right to free speech? Is that worth the price of a human soul? What if a gay person wants to become "married" in the eyes of the State, but does not want to try to force a church to call them married as well. Is your opposition to that person's actions worth alienating someone from Jesus?

I'm not saying we should "wink at sin" and say that it's OK. Homosexuality is not OK. Neither are any of the other sins that most of us commit every day. If you break one part of the law, one rule, one sin - you've sinned just as thoroughly as the homosexual. There are no sins worse than others: every sin is a capitol offense without Jesus. But what I am saying is that we should pick our battles wisely. Even Chick-fil-A immediately tried to separate themselves from the controversy over gay marriage; maybe Christians en masse ought to take a cue from that and do the same. Free speech and chicken sandwiches are not worth anyone going to Hell over.

Movie Smackdown: The Hunger Games vs. October Baby

I'm annoyed, and a bit offended, by something that just showed up in my inbox. It's an ad for a movie I've never heard of called October Baby. Obviously it's a "Christian movie" about abortion. Now, I am totally 100% opposed to abortion (because I think that human beings are human beings from the moment of conception, and I oppose the killing of innocent human beings), but the copy of the first paragraph of the email got under my skin. Here it is:

This weekend, when the biggest box-office hit is expected be a film based on a popular book about young people being forced to fight to the death, OCTOBER BABY hits theaters with a resounding message about the sanctity of life. Talk about a culture in need of a wake-up call!

I'm annoyed because that paragraph unfairly implies that The Hunger Games is against the "sanctity of life" (which is almost the diametric opposite of the truth), and I'm offended that whoever wrote it either decided to take a pot-shot at a movie they haven't seen and don't know anything about, or thinks that I and every other Christian out there is too stupid to know baloney when we see it. The whole message of The Hunger Games (which, full disclosure, I have not seen yet on the big screen, but I've read the book series and from all accounts I've read, the movie is remarkable in its fidelity to the book) is that life is too precious to be manipulated and exploited for the entertainment of others. The story does not glorify the fact that the kids are killing each other in an arena; the arena combat is absolutely painted in a negative light. You might as well say that Star Wars is a story that celebrates the idea of blowing up whole planets full of people. Ridiculous.

The cherry on the ice cream sundae is the crack about "...a culture in need of a wake-up call." Ironically, The Hunger Games IS a wake-up call. The underlying themes are about a too-strong totalitarian government manipulating their population into complacency by using "reality TV" as a propaganda tool. Over the past half-century, real governments have become better and better at using the media to spin the facts to their own advantage; take a look around in an election year and see for yourself. At the same time, "reality TV" becomes more and more outlandish. Government-sponsored and approved violence could, given the right set of circumstances, become reality one day in this or any country. Just ask first-century Christians, who, depending on who was in charge, might wind up getting eaten by lions in public. Cruelty of man against man, heightened by the fact that the persecuted persons are children, is totally, unequivocally condemned by The Hunger Games. When we wake up to the fact that although they are not physically cutting each other's throats, many times the players in "reality TV" programs are mistreating each other publicly for their own ends, and we watch it and call it entertainment, then we will have learned the lesson of The Hunger Games.

According to reports on the Internet today, The Hunger Games has already sold fifteen million dollars worth of tickets, even though it doesn't actually open until tomorrow. It's obvious that some marketing person at October Baby is somehow trying to get a piece of that. I'm not sure what the exact idea is (viewing their movie as a protest against another movie?), but it's not going to work. The millions of Hunger Games fans are not going to say, "Oh my goodness, you are RIGHT! I will throw away the ticket I stood in line for and now buy a ticket to see YOUR movie instead!" In fact, the only thing I can see this kind of advertising accomplishing, if it accomplishes anything at all, is to put the idea in the head of a parent who is too lazy to really find out what The Hunger Games is all about that it is harmful to their teenagers, and forbid the teenagers to see it. What's that going to do but drive a wedge in families? The kids will either sneak out and see it anyway, or miss out on what could actually be a highly positive message for them (violence is bad, and so is believing that everything you see on TV is okay). Shame on you, American Family Association.

AFA, if your film is any good, you don't need to slam other good movies to sell it. Especially not films with a positive message. I won't be wasting my time with October Baby, but I will see The Hunger Games. Because I enjoy a movie with a positive message.

Passages in Oklahoma City

Today we drove to Oklahoma City for the second-to-last weekend of the Passages exhibit. It's a positively huge collection of ancient manuscripts, manuscript fragments, Bibles, and artifacts related to the Bible. The exhibit is arranged more or less chronologically, starting with some incredibly old Torah scrolls and some ancient oil lamps (Because the Word of God is "a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path") and following the Bible down through history. It's a fascinating story; to see it unfold right in front of you is an experience that you won't soon forget.

There are dozens of rare, precious copies of the Bible in the exhibit. They have a collection of early 1600s copies of the King James Bible (including a first edition or two), not to mention many translations that preceded it in English, Latin, and a few other languages. There is a copy of a letter written by Martin Luther shortly before his execution, complete with his signature. There is an actual fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls; I was surprised at the emotion that I felt looking at a piece of a page of a copy of the Old Testament that was in existence when Jesus walked the Earth. There's a working printing press like Gutenberg's (which is demonstrated every few minutes). There are video presentations that take place between characters that are in separate physical "windows" having a conversation with each other, which is very unique and fun to watch. There's even a room with a number of interesting misprints; I got to see the "Wicked Bible" I've always heard about (the one that says "Thou shalt commit adultery" in the Ten Commandments), one that says that Judas called the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane (it should say "Jesus" instead of Judas), and several others.

We got to see a Bible which is printed in ink made of real gold. We got to hear the stories of Jerome, Tyndale, Luther, and other important people in the history of the Bible, dramatized and told in their voice using animatroincs. It was an amazing ride; three or four hours had gone by before we knew it. My eleven-year-old son said, as we were leaving, that it had changed his life (wow!) If you have a chance to get to Oklahoma City in the next week or two, come on out and spend a day. If you love the Bible, you'll be glad you did. We were moved.

Here's a quick video about the exhibit:



The Web site is ExplorePassages.com; there are some other great videos about the exhibit on the Passages YouTube channel. The Oklahoma City exhibition ends on October 16th; after that the exhibit goes to the Vatican for an engagement. The Vatican! That's how important this thing is historically. We would have gone months ago ourselves if we hadn't had such a hectic summer; I almost wish now we had, because I'd like to go back!

Epicenter

"You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire."

"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

-Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28 ESV

But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

-Romans 10:8-10 ESV

This week we've been hearing a lot about the earthquake which occurred in Virginia. There wasn't a lot of damage (the picture accompanying this post is from a different quake last February), but there was a little bit... things falling off shelves in homes. A plumbing rupture at the Pentagon. Some pieces falling off the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Walls and foundations cracking. Nuclear power plants shut down as precautionary measures. The earthquake was of historic strength, yet we were lucky enough that it really did very little damage. But one place that it did do some damage was a little town in Virginia with the unlikely name of Mineral, population 450. Mineral got a pretty good shaking, and they've got some pretty respectable rebuilding to do.

The reason that Mineral, VA got shaken worse than Washington, D.C. is that Mineral is geographically quite close to a place called the epicenter. Earthquakes occur because layers of rock, usually deep underground, suddenly slip past one another. Places near the epicenter feel rumbling and movement, but the actual earthquake didn't occur in Washington D.C., or Richmond VA, or even in tiny little Mineral. All those places and many more could feel the effects of the earthquake, but the earthquake itself, you could argue, actually occurred underground, and nobody really knows exactly where.

Jesus told us, in the "Sermon on the Mount", that the sin of murder actually starts with anger, and that sexual sin actually starts long before the sex act occurs. In fact, Jesus said that the sin of adultery occurs, not when the man looks at the woman with lustful intent, but before he even looks at her. When he looks at her, he has "already committed adultery with her in his heart" (emphasis mine). The sin occurs in the heart, deep inside. The actions that we see are the result of the sin which has already occurred.

Romans says that we will be saved as a result of confessing the Lordship of Jesus with our mouths, but we have been justified long before that... when we believe in our hearts that Jesus rose from the dead. Salvation occurs later on, when we say something out loud that people can hear and see us say, but justification, being made effectively sin-free (or, more precisely, free of the guilt of our sin) before God, occurs because of something that happens deep down, where nobody can see it but God. Once again, the actions occur because the event has already occurred inside the heart.

At the epicenter.

When the dishes fell off a shelf and broke in someone's house in Mineral, VA, it wasn't because the earthquake happened in that house; it was because an earthquake had occurred somewhere else, at the quake's epicenter, and that house was feeling the effects of the earthquake. When your life naturally begins to reflect the grace of God, when you start to do things God's way automatically without having to drum anything up, it's because something has occurred in your personal epicenter, in your heart. When the Word of God begins to transform you from the inside out, the world around you begins to see the effects!

The more things change...

In 1956, a very unusual wedding took place. The groom was C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia books as well as many other works of Christian fiction and apologetics. He was nearly 60 years old, and had never before been married. The bride in the hospital bed next to him was a 40-year-old American divorcee to whom he had, in the eyes of Great Britain, been married for quite some time. It's not unlikely that you've heard this story before; it was written about by Lewis himself after her death a few years later from bone cancer several years later, and the story, under the name "Shadowlands", has been made into a movie twice.

It turns out that the woman in this story, Joy Davidman/Gresham/Lewis, was an amazing thinker and author in her own right. I learned this when, out of curiousity, I checked the catalog at the library to see if anything she had written was in the collection. Sure enough, there was one book, These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity, which contained her autobiography up to a few years before her divorce from Douglas Gresham (his story is in the book as well), and a book she wrote called Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. I checked out both (they were so old that the library had them in storage!) The former, which is a compilation of the life stories of a number of people who came to Christ later in life (Joy and Douglas had previously been atheists and Marxists), really opened my eyes to some of the ideas and attitudes of Christians midway through the 20th century. Joy's chapter especially stood out to me, not only because it was the part of the book that I initially checked it out to read, but more importantly because she wrote with passion and emotion that I didn't feel in the other authors' chapters. I was hooked!

But even though her chapter in that book knocked my socks off, the idea of reading a book about the Ten Commandments sounded dry at best. In fact, for that very reason I had left both books on my "to read someday" lists for quite some time before I finally requested them. Frankly, I thought that her book about the Ten Commandments was going to be BORING. But boy, was I wrong! Smoke on the Mountain is anything BUT boring. It is interesting, challenging, and amazingly current... especially considering it was first published in 1953!

Joy takes each of the Ten Commandments, one chapter for each, and examines it in historical context to try to determine what the command might have meant to the original listeners... ancient Arabs, recently freed from slavery, wandering around in the wilderness. They didn't think the same way you and I do. As someone from the middle of the United States, I don't even fully understand the mind of a modern inhabitant of the Middle East, much less one that lived over 3000 years ago. Joy does a great job of providing that background, and then translating those ideas into a modern context.

The fact that her interpretations hit amazingly close to home proves, however, that people haven't changed as much in the nearly 60 years since her book was written as you might expect! Ms. Davidman, a Jew by nationality but (by this time) a Christian by religion, thought things through thoroughly and reached sometimes startling conclusions. For example, in the chapter on "graven images" (idolatry) she brings a hypothetical individual through several levels of idolatry... from a non-churched worshipper of things like the nice television in his living room, to a church attender whose idol becomes the idea that he can "save the world" through buying a TV for the youth room at his church, to a person who sees the church not as an instrument of social change, but as something that is valuable in and of itself.

"And I [the hypothetical person who has made this journey] am still an idolater," Joy Davidman writes. "I have fallen into the last and subtlest trap; I bow down to wood and stone, in the shape of a church building. Through regular attendance, through handsome financial contributions, through raising the minister's salary and redecorating the altar and improving the organist's technique and encouraging the foreign missions, I expect to be saved. To put it bluntly, I have forgotten that the church itself is not God."

Have you ever thought that your church itself might become an idol to you? I never have before, but that is a pretty interesting perspective on why ministers and church volunteers become burned out. They are serving their idol, and idols are cruel taskmasters.

How about the prose-poetry of this passage about giving up your own desires and plans and "loving the Lord your God with all your heart": "...we fear that if we give up the self nothing will be left of us but a dry, empty husk like a dead snail shell. It seldom occurs to us that the Holy Spirit is only waiting until the self is out—waiting to rush in and fill us with luminous splendors. Throwing away the self is like squeezing the water out of a half-drowned man's lungs, not because you want his lungs empty but because you want the air to get in so that he can live. For the self is asphyxiating and killing us; the only air we are designed to breathe is God."

Have I squeezed enough "self" out that the Holy Spirit can fully enter in? Well, I hope I've squeezed enough out that He feels comfortable as the central figure of my life, but I know there's always more work to do. There's always just a little bit more heart to love the Lord with! Joy Davidman's way of expressing spiritual truths is often as much emotional as intellectual, and I like that a lot... it makes the whole thing so much more vivid and memorable. It's the reason I liked the book. It's the reason I wanted to share it with you here!

I had to give the book back to the library (after renewing it the maximum two times and letting it go overdue a couple of days!) but I plan to buy a copy of it for my own library and study each chapter for a whole week. It's available in paperback from ChristianBook.com and from Amazon.com (if you insist on a hardback copy, you may wind up paying "a little" more!) The ideas are startling and potentially life-changing. I highly recommend it!

X

Jesus came to Earth with a futile task.

Wait just a second... let me back up. I'm reading a book called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It's a novel, I guess, but it really comes off as a series of loosely-related short stories rather than as a unified whole. The reason it's written that way is because the theme of the book is the isolation, aloneness, and helplessness that young people in their 20s and 30s were feeling in the late 80s/early 90s, when it seemed like Baby Boomers ruled the earth and would rule it until their children, the "X" generation, were too old to enjoy it. The term "Generation X" was invented for this book, but since it seemed to describe the group of young people which I belonged to so well, the term was subsequently adopted by other authors, the media, and the culture at large. A few weeks ago a Tulsa radio station converted over to a "Gen X" format, meaning that they are playing the hits of the 80s and 90s, catering to the generation that thought they would be forever invisible. It's incredible how short-sighted we are when we are young!

The music and the novel have got me thinking about how hopeless and impotent we, as a group, seemed to feel back then. The characters in the novel have isolated themselves from their families, from corporate life, from caring what happens to the world (actually they care very much, and think the world is headed for a bad and imminent end, but they don't think they can do anything about it), and moved to the desert to try to get their heads screwed on straight. I remember as a child watching The Cosby Show and thinking how cool it was that the Huxtables were such a close-knit family, and then a few years later watching Seinfeld and Friends and thinking how cool it would be to be on my own in the big city of New York, with nothing to tie me down, able to basically do whatever I wanted to do. That was a naïve illusion, of course; we all have responsibilities (for example, if you you enjoy such activities as eating and getting to sleep inside, you probably want to have a job!) but I think that kind of thinking drove much of my generation. We had spent our childhoods fairly convinced that someone somewhere (probably the Soviet Union) was going to push a button, probably a really big red one, and blow the whole world to pieces, and the last thing any of us was going to see was a mushroom cloud. After all those years of fear, no wonder we grew up slightly sullen as a culture.

Much of the music of the 90s has that same helpless, hopeless feel about it. There are the dance songs and the rock songs, but the big-party hair-bands were gone, replaced by the alternating sad groans and angry screams of bands like Nirvana and the plaintive melodies of groups like Blind Melon and Dave Matthews Band. I'm not sure if popular music reflects culture or if it influences it (probably a little of both), but I always find it interesting to look back and see how a decade seems to match perfectly with the prevailing music of the time. The let's-ignore-reality-and-party music of the 80s collapsed into the sullen, reality-sucks-and-we-don't-care-anymore music of the 90s, much as the optimistic hippie idealism of the music of the 60s had collapsed into a low, fluorescent corporate buzz of the music of the 70s two decades before.

I think that we-can't-do-anything-anyway apathy still prevails in my generation. I think the very positive rhetoric of the Obama Presidential campaign was successful in part because it managed to somehow shine a glimmer of hope into a group of people who had felt helpless and futile for a long time. And I think that without hope, we wither and die. I think the words "Yes we can!" were like a drink of cold water to those of us who are now moving out of our 30s and into our 40s.Can Barack Obama fix everything that is wrong with the world? Of COURSE not. Nobody can. Nobody will ever be able to fix everything. Show me the person who could have prevented the tragedy that is going on in Haiti right now... nobody could have stopped it. There will always be evil in the world. This is the thing that frightened, discouraged, and I think deep down, angered Generation X in our youth. We wanted to fix things, just like our parents had wanted to in the 60s... it's just that our parents thought they could do it with music, flowers, and tie-dye, but we thought that we couldn't do it at all. Both extremes are wide of the truth. Each person can do some good. I can't help everybody, but I can help somebody. And I should.

Back to Jesus. Like I said before, Jesus came to Earth with a futile task. The desire of God's heart is that everyone would come to repentance, but God also knows that many will choose to die in their sin. So Jesus came to Earth, in a sense, doomed to fall short of what God wished would happen. Now, Jesus succeeded fully in what He came to do Himself, which was to make Salvation available to all, but since the other part of the fulfillment of God's desire depends on our acceptance of His gift, that part can only succeed as each of us makes a decision to receive Salvation. Jesus' Salvation is only received by a portion of those He seeks to reach, and with our human limitations we can only help part of the people we might desire to help, but it didn't stop Jesus from doing what God had called Him to do, and it shouldn't stop us, either.

The word "Christ" is the English version of the Greek word pronounced "Christos" and spelled "Χριστός". Christos... with an X. Let's seek to have a heart like Christ... today let's be "Generation Xristos". The generation that seeks to do good, regardless of the impossibility of fixing everything. That's the "Gen X" I want to be a part of.

To Live or To Die

The past few months we have become faithful viewers of TV's The Biggest Loser. The reason we've become so enthusiastic about the show is that a friend of ours, Danny Cahill, is a contestant this season! Danny started out at nearly 430 pounds, and by now he's right around 200. In something like 3 months, he's halved his size! It's amazing what the contestants on the show are able to do with the help of great trainers and a lot of motivation (the winner of the contest gets a big monetary prize in addition to the new life they've made for themselves!) In the course of the season you get to witness the emotional battles that the contestants face, many of them long-standing hurts or fears or both, and those things have to be overcome in order for the contestants to reach their goals. It's very eye-opening, and quite inspiring.

Early this season, they took all of the contestants to a doctor for a medical evaluation (they are monitored by medical staff during the course of the show for safety, also, but this was an on-camera thing). The very first day during a short foot race, one of the contestants actually collapsed and had to be airlifted to the hospital; during the doctor visit, the other contestants got a serious reality check about the health issues related to being so overweight. One thing that Danny said several times over the course of the season, and other contestants said similar things, was that he wants to not die young... he wants to survive and be around for his wife and kids for many, many years.

Last week as I was reading through Romans 8 at the from-the-pulpit suggestion of our pastor, I spotted a Scripture that reminded me very much of Danny (who we know from being on the same worship team in years past, and who goes to our church now):

For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. -Romans 8:13 ESV

The season finale of The Biggest Loser is tonight. Danny has made it into the top 3 finalists; tonight if he has lost more weight than the other two finalists, he wins the season! The man is a weight-loss machine; the other finalists must be quaking in their boots. Good luck, Danny! We are TOTALLY rooting for you! We have talked to Danny several times during the past few months, and we have heard him speak publicly in church a couple of times about what the TBL contestants consistently refer to as their "journey," and it's clear that Danny's "journey" from obese to athletic and fit was one he made with help from the Holy Spirit. He is a living example of Romans 8:13.

Hope you'll be watching!

UPDATE: Danny WON IT! Yay for him! Check out his new Web site: TheDannyCahill.com

Holidays and Possibilities

I was thinking this morning about people who dread the holidays.

I have a good friend who is in the middle of a separation from his wife. He can't be looking forward to this holiday season too much. Others have lost loved ones this year, like my father-in-law did a couple of years ago; everybody in the family misses Linda during the holidays. For many this year money is tight, and maybe they are wondering how they can afford gifts for their families... particularly for children. Maybe they are trying to figure out which faction of family members to spend time with this year. There are so many reasons why people might have lost their enthusiasm for this time of year, and I pray that if you are reading this and you are one of those people, that God will bring peace to your heart, peace to your situation, and joy to your holidays this year.

But there's another reason why people may have lost their enthusiasm for this time of year, and I know I've been struck by this one before: the "oh no, here it comes again" thing. Where the holidays seem like just another part of the year to be navigated safely. Where you feel like the season is a truck that hit you last time, and there's no chance of getting out of the street in time this time either. Extra responsibilities. Uncomfortable family relationships in close quarters. Expenses. It can seem like all you're trying to to is get prepared to withstand the punch that didn't knock you down last year, but might this year.

Children don't generally have that problem. Kids who have the advantages of loving families (and even sometimes kids who don't have that advantage) lofe Thanksgiving, Christmas, the whole deal. Why is that? Because they don't see the holidays as a challenge. They see the possibilities. They see that there is no school, nothing but playtime. They see that Aunt and Uncle Whoever will be in town for the first time since last year. They see that Mom and Dad will have a gift for them, and then so will Santa! They see getting to sing Christmas carols, and if they're lucky in their part of the world, they may get to throw a snowball or two. Kids see potential. They see what could be, while we adults sometimes tend to see what has been. Actually, I guess what we adults tend to do sometimes is to look into the future and extrapolate disaster. We're looking at what "could be" as well, but we don't see potential; we see heartache, or embarrassment, or tears. We are allowing ourselves to be gripped by the fear or failure or calamity, while our children's excitement grows because they believe that everything is going to be wonderful!

When God is in your life, when Jesus is your Savior, faith means what? It means looking into the future with our mind's eye and seeing that God will make all things work together for our good (see Romans 8:28). The negative version of faith is called "fear" and when we look into the future and forecast doom, we are running away from faith and toward fear. Is that the right attitude for a Christian to have? I think not.

Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't plan for the holidays and try to make sure nothing bad happens; we want everyone to have a great time. Foreseeing things that need to be taken care of ahead of time is part of that. But once everything is thought of and you've done your best to make everything perfect, trust in God this holiday season to fill in the gaps in your plans. This is a perfect opportunity for us each to exercise his or her faith and show God that we trust Him to work in our lives.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Rewind

If I knew back then what I know right now,
You know I'd be the king of the ladies!
And if I knew back then what I know right now,
There'd be no ifs, and buts and no maybes!
     - Extreme, "King of the Ladies" from Saudades de Rock

A few days ago my wife and I were watching the movie 17 Again. It's about a late-30s guy (about my age) named Mike O'Donnell who has made some mistakes in his life and wishes for a chance to do it all over again. George Bailey-style, he is granted his wish by an old crackpot guy; suddenly Mike is the age of a high-school senior. Of course, it's not 1989 any more; it's still the present day, and Mike winds up in school with his own daughter and son. He finds out some things about high school, about his daughter, and about his son that he probably would rather not have known; hilarity ensues, lessons are learned, and Mike gets to be is real age again, reconcile with his wife (who had been on the very edge of divorcing him), reconnect with his kids, and live happily ever after.

A few weeks before I had discovered the newest CD by an old favorite band named Extreme. The lyrics to one of their songs (quoted above) got me thinking: if I could take my 39 years of understanding of people, life, and particularly teenagers, back with me and get back into that high-school-age body, what would I do? Well, I certainly would do a better job with girls than I did then, because I've always been impossibly shy with females (my wife is the happiest exception to any rule that I've ever found in my life!) If I had the self-confidence that I have now instead of the self-doubt I had then, I imagine I would have had any number of girlfriends. It would be easy pickin's, I imagine... having the understanding of human beings that four decades brings, and unleashing it on unsuspecting teenage girls. Not a particularly fair match-up.

Mike in the movie did not to that, to my surprise. In fact, several girls pretty much threw themselves at him, making it clear that he didn't have to "respect them in the morning" or even, in one case, "...remember my name!" He didn't jump at the chance to use those very-available girls for pleasure. Instead, Mike spent all of his time on two projects: pursuing his adolescent dream of getting discovered by basketball scouts, and helping his kids get out of the messes that the kids had gotten themselves into (his son with getting picked on by peers, and his daughter with getting mixed up with a no-good boyfriend).

And that got me thinking... what would I really do if I could go back? Probably much of the same stuff I did at the time... I would probably still drag my Bible to school, go to school, go to youth group. Play trombone in the school band. But there would be a difference, because I would be different on the inside. On the outside I would be a zitty teenager, but on the inside I would be an adult. I would be inside the teenage world, like Mike O'Donnell, but I would not be a teenager. I would be an adult. I would be "other." If something happened that would have crushed me as a teenager, I would be able to laugh it off, knowing that as an adult, I probably wouldn't even remember it.

I would be "in" the teenage "world", but not "of" the teenage "world." Sound familiar?

So often I don't do something because of how it will affect me. I don't say something that I should say, because I'm afraid it will affect my social standing, or my career, or just my self-image. The Word makes it clear, though, that this world is very temporary (James 4:14) and that we should not consider it our home. One day I, and you too if you are a believer in Jesus, will "graduate" from the world in which we now live, and go on to the things God has in mind for us for eternity. I am no more a permanent resident of this world than a high-school senior is a permanent resident of his high school. Why should I care any more about the ins and outs of life pre-eternity than I would care about the social jockeying for position if I were 17 years old and back in high school?

Let's do what God has called on us to do, today, without reservation or timidity. Whatever age you are right now, and wherever you are socially, jobwise, schoolwise... you can't go back ten years from now and be in that exact same situation again. God has a job for you to do right now, right where you are. If you take yourself out of the picture, that job may not get done. God has a call for your life! Are you going to follow Him today?

Romantic language between us and God, revisited

Forgive me now, 'cause I have been unfaithful
Don’t ask me why 'cause I don’t know
So many times I’ve tried, but was unable,
But this heart belongs to you alone

Forgive me, I’m ashamed; I’ve loved another
I can’t explain cause I don’t know
No one can take your place, and there is no other
Forever yours and yours alone
          -Skillet, "Forgiven" from Awake

How the faithful city
     has become a whore,
     she who was full of justice!
Righteousness lodged in her,
     but now murderers.
          -Isaiah 1:21, ESV

Several days ago I linked to a video where Matt Redman had some interesting points to make about "blokes" (guys) not necessarily being comfortable using "romantic" language in worship to Jesus... kind of a vaguely homophobic squeamishness to saying that you "love" another man. I think Matt has a valid point in that we as songwriters need to be sensitive to the kinds of things that the casual worshipper may not be comfortable saying as part of worship, but God has no problem with talking about us as though we were His wife.

- Isaiah chapter 61 was quoted by Jesus in Luke 4:18-21; He clearly proclaimed that He was the fulfillment of that Scripture passage. If you look back at verses 3 and 10 of Isaiah 61, there is clear wedding imagery between Messiah and His people.

- Ezekiel 16 is a description of the relationship between God and Israel which is beautiful and erotic, heartbreaking and tragic, and finally quite brutal. Israel is portrayed as a woman who was rescued from death when she was born by God, grew up and became a beautiful woman, was married to God, became very loose and began sleeping around with anyone she could find, ultimately earning the accusations "adulterous wife" and "brazen prostitute" from God Himself.

- In Jeremiah 3:1-14 God again bluntly accuses his "wife" (Israel) of sleeping around like a whore. I am NOT making this up, and I am not exaggerating at all... take a look for yourself!

- Many Theologians see the Song of Solomon as not only a story of a love between a man and woman, but as an allegory of the love between God and His people.

- The book of the Revelation speaks of Israel as a woman (for example, Revelation 12:1-6) and the people of God, dwelling at that time in the New Jerusalem, as God's "bride" (Revelation 21:2).

- In Ephesians 5:25-27 it is made clear that the relationship between a man and wife is intended to be a picture of the love between Christ and the Church.

Men who are uncomfortable with the idea that they are loved by God in a way that closely resembles the way that a man loves his wife... well, they had better get used to it. I've read in C.S. Lewis that "What is above and beyond all things [God] is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it." Should we as songwriters shy away from saying "I love you" to God, or saying God is "beautiful?" I don't think so, although "beautiful" has been used in contemporary praise and worship music so much that probably different words would inspire a clearer picture at this point. I think that we should be sensitive to the congregations we are asking to sing our songs, but approaching God with a feminine frame of reference to me is like approaching a knife as if it is sharp, or approaching a campfire as though it is hot. God thinks of us as though we were his fiancé. We are loved, dreamed about, protected, and the inspiration of jealousy when we are "unfaithful" (isn't it funny that we use that word about our relationship with God all the time, but it never occurs to us how serious a charge of unfaithfulness in a marriage truly is?) We need to remember that when we betray Christ by willful sin, it is as though we have slept with another man on the eve of our wedding. That's how serious it is to God.

Praise God that He forgives us in our unfaithfulness, and dreams of the day when we will be finally and forever faithful to Him!

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
          -Jeremiah 31:31-33, ESV, also quoted in Hebrews 8:8-12

Now I’m in our secret place
Alone in your embrace
Where all my wrongs have been erased
You have forgiven
All the promises and lies
All the times I compromise
All the times you were denied
You have forgiven
          -Skillet, "Forgiven" from Awake

Left Behind: antichrist and anachronisms

This morning I suddenly came to the end of the original book #1 of the "Left Behind" series, which is of course titled Left Behind. You may remember my post from a few weeks ago stating my disappointment in the three prequels. That disappointment in the series evaporated when I got into Left Behind. Now I understand what people were so excited about back in 1995! The story is interesting, the pacing is fast and exciting, you care about the characters. Characters that came off as one-dimensional in the prequels gain depth in the original novel. I watched the movie version a long time ago, and I remember hearing that the book authors were disappointed in the result... now I think I can see why. If I remember the movie correctly, an awful lot of story was left out for the big screen.

One thing that kept striking me as weird on my way through the book were things that were commonplace in 1995 but are dated now. A reporter on a plane when the rapture happens tries to get through by communicating with his home office via a modem in his computer... who has a modem in a laptop these days? Some people, but these days Internet is so prevalent that I doubt the home office would even have a modem pool to dial into. A college student is out of touch with her father as she tries to get home because there is no way to reach her... what college student these days doesn't have a cell phone? A pastor makes a videotape explaining what has happened, and after the rapture his left-behind parishioners view the tape... who even has a VCR these days? A man knows he is receiving telephone calls even when his phone ringer is turned off because he can hear his answering machine clicking... who these days even has an answering machine, much less one with mechanical parts? Everybody these days has voice mail from the phone company. It was kind of weird running into those things, knowing that it's because the book was written 15 years ago, but also knowing that the story is supposed to be about the end of time... dated technology kind of throws you out of the narrative when you bump into it.

What is definitely not dated is the human story... the way the characters themselves feel and interact. The panic of learning that millions of people are gone without trace or explanation. The horror of learning that you're not as great of a Christian as you thought you were. The agony of people who are struggling with their decision for Christ, wanting to be true to themselves but slowly coming to the recognition that they do believe. The joy when they accept Jesus into their hearts, even though they know that very hard times are ahead for them. The terror when the reporter is face to face with the man he knows to be the antichrist, and that man is holding a gun, killing people in cold blood. The story certainly draws you in! I enjoyed it as much as any book I've read in quite some time.

For Christians, the book has the added effect that it presents a scenario that, we believe, will quite possibly match future events pretty well. It reinforces an idea that maybe we don't think about very much... there are going to be masses of people left on the Earth to suffer through the seven years of the tribulation. The little technological glitches are nowhere near serious enough to distract from the true message of the novel: the time to get ready is NOW. The time to make sure your family is ready is NOW. If you are a believer and you are gone, there is no guarantee that your loved ones will be exposed to someone who will know enough about the Bible to be able to reach them, and Satan's persuasiveness during the Tribulation will be strong. Our chance to share Jesus with those around us is now; once we're gone, we can't do it any more. There will be no ten-minute warning. If the prophecies of the Bible are true, one day there will be a generation of Christians who will disappear without warning or trace. If that's us, let's use the time until then wisely.

Meekness, not Weakness

A few days ago I was letting my baby girl play with my sunglasses. Knowing how easy it is to break plastic sunglasses and knowing that she's still a baby and might not know how careful she needed to be, I used one of our buzzwords on her: "Gentle, Hannah! Gentle!"

She patted my sunglasses like a puppy. :)

Sometimes I wonder if we grownups understand the proper application of gentleness any better than she did! Yesterday in Sunday School we were talking about the fruit of the Spirit, and specifically gentleness, which is also called meekness (depends on which translation you're reading). The gist of the lesson was that despite the fact that they rhyme, "meekness" and "weakness" aren't the same thing. Meekness/gentleness actually means that you refuse to manipulate someone, but you act within the will of God to someone else's advantage. Jesus always acted in meekness, even when he was at what some might consider His most violent, bodily driving moneychangers out of the temple; He was not acting in his own self-interest, but in God the Father's interest. And of course, the ultimate example of meekness is that the creator of the World and everything in it became part of His own creation in order to save it through His own death. That was a gentle act, but it took great power to accomplish!

And to me, that's the crux of what gentleness is. I think about parenting my kids. Right now they are both little, and I can pretty easily overpower either of them physically. I'm big and loud to them, and if I yell at them, I can reduce either of them to tears if I want. That would be abusive, and would be acting in my own interest, not theirs. Gentleness is when Mikey wants to talk to me and I want to read, but I put down my book and listen to him tell me about the new video game he played. Or when I'm playing blocks with Hannah, and I stack up a tower but she knocks them down and I let her. It's also when you're telling someone about Jesus and they put up some resistance, so you back down and give them time to process before broaching the subject again. Meekness is when you have the power to control someone, but you choose not to.

On the way home from church I was telling Mikey about that lesson, and he said, "That was just like the show we were watching yesterday!" And he was right... that same thought had come to me during class! The show we were watching (actually I was watching it and he was catching little bits of it while he was doing something else) was an episode of Legend of the Seeker which requires a few sentences of back story before I can explain why it's an example of meekness. The show is based on a series of fantasy books called The Sword of Truth. In the story, a young man named Richard Cypher is known as The Seeker; his destiny is to free the world from the dominance of an evil despot named Darken Rahl. Richard is traveling with a wizard named Zedd and a beautiful woman named Kahlan Amnell who happens to be what is known as a "confessor." Confessors have a magic power: they can touch a person and make that person fall in love with them, to the point where the confessed person will do anything the confessor asks or needs, to the point of giving their life for her.

In the episode, Kahlan decides that because of a prophecy that she would "betray" Richard, she must leave his party (she is sworn to protect him at all costs) and find another confessor to go with him. She goes to a village which is under the protection of a friend of hers who is also a confessor; Kahlan asks her friend to join Richard and allow Kahlan to take over protecting the village. It turns out that the friend has brought peace to the village by confessing every single person who lives there and having them drive out Darken Rahl's soldiers. Kahlan is aghast; she only uses her powers in battle because she believes it is wrong to force people to do your will, even if it is for their own good. Mikey recognized that as an example of meekness, and he was very right!

The episode goes on to contrast Kahlan's gentle touch with the touch of another woman, Denna, who is what is known as a "mord sith." The mord sith force people to be devoted to them by torturing the people with magic and playing mind games with them; it's sort of a Stockholm syndrome kind of thing. Denna nearly breaks Richard, but then Kahlan shows up to rescue him. She has a chance to confess him, which would in theory make it impossible for Denna to break him, be she (in meekness) refuses to do so, and ultimately Richard finds it within himself to resist Denna's magic and kill her. The mord sith control people by demanding their love and loyalty by magical force; the confessors control people by inspiring their love and loyalty by gentle magic. The moral of the episode is that stealing someone's love, whether by gentleness or by force, is wrong.

Richard is able to resist Denna because Kahlan has earned his love, not because she has put a spell on him. When Kahlan's confessor friend, who is about to direct her village to attack the temple where Richard is being held and save him, is herself killed, the spell is broken on everyone in her village except one young man, who throughout the episode has shown that he truly loves her. The spell does not break on him because it wasn't a spell. As he cradles her dead body in his arms, his fellow villagers run away. The ones she controlled by force flee, but the one she controlled with love still loves and stays with her.

My Sunday school teacher mentioned some time he spent as a young man street witnessing, and how when they went out and just told people about Jesus in an effort to convert them, their success was limited, but organizations around town that meet the needs of the people... feed them, clothe them, help them find real jobs, etc... those organizations have lasting results. If we as Christians can learn to share the Gospel with meekness, with a heart of giving ourselves for the sake of others instead of trying to manipulate others into making a confession of faith, we can obtain results for God's Kingdom that we never imagined possible.

Left Behind prequels: "Countdown to the Rapture"

Yesterday I finished reading book 3 of the "Left Behind" prequel series. The prequels, called "Before They Were Left Behind," detail the lives of Nicolae Carpathia, Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, and other characters from the popular series in the days directly leading up to Left Behind. Book 1, The Rising, details the sinister circumstaces surrounding the conception and birth of Nicolae, and also tells the story of the childhood of Rayford Steele. Book 2, The Regime, continues the rise to power of both men (Nicolae in business and government, Rayford in college and aviation), and book 3, The Rapture, brings things right up to (and past!) the time of the actual rapture, which occurs partway through the book.

I have to say, I approached the prequels with some interest. Although I've seen the movie version of Left Behind, I've never read any of the novels before now. But frankly, I've been a little bit disappointed in these prequels. It's not that the story isn't interesting... it's more like there are too many stories going on at once! Every chapter, and sometime several times within the chapter, for all three books the perspective shifts between characters and often between countries, and they never dovetail (actually, Buck winds up on Rayford's plane at the end of book 3, but the stories don't intersect until then). I actually found it difficult to invest myself completely in any of the stories, because we never stuck with the same story long enough. Sort if like trying to watch TV with someone who keeps switching channels.

And you know what? I think I should take back what I said about the story being interesting, because sometimes it's as dry as a bone. Particularly the first two books have a distinct "prequel" flavor, kind of like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. In both cases it's interesting enough to learn the backstory, but the story itself isn't that interesting. So Nicolae was a test tube baby. So he had his mother and fathers (!) killed. So he has a lot of people killed. So what? He's a cold sucker. He's the ANTICHRIST, for goodness sake. We KNOW he's a bad guy!

One thing I will give the series... when the rapture happens in the story, suddenly things come alive! I almost felt like I had been raptured myself! Except for the parts where the authors describe stories of real people in detail (come on... we know the Through Gates of Splendor story already, and we know Billy Graham is a cool guy, and we all probably feel pretty sure they'll be getting rewards in Heaven) and pretend that Bible characters will somehow quote themselves stright from King James when they meet Jesus in Heaven (how corny! Mary will recite The Magnificat to Jesus? Really?)... except for those parts, the post-rapture Heaven scenes are pretty great! I love their ideas of how Heaven might be, how it might feel to have a glorified body, what might be in the place that Jesus has gone to prepare for us. I kind of wish that LaHaye and Jenkins had kept it in the realm of fiction, though, and not tried to teach us so much church history. There are a plenty of good books for that. I would have preferred made-up characters and rewards rather than the Bible school lessons. How about writing some interesting people into the story and then telling us about their rewards? That would have been more fun than stories of the Church Fathers, even though I highly respect those saints who have gone on to be with Jesus and in other contexts I am riveted to their stories.

It would have been pretty hard to write those scenes without including Bible characters, it's true, but I think it would have been more interesting to give them words to say that weren't directly from the recorded Word of God. When someone only speaks two or three times in the Bible, doesn't it stand to reason that they might have other things to say than those few lines? Ironically, the characters that are given more to say... Peter, for example... are generally the ones who had more lines to choose from in the Bible. (An exception would be Joseph, earthly father of Jesus... his scene is quite touching. I wish other characters would have been handled that way.)

I've been reading LaHaye's book Revelation Unveiled, which details what he believes about the end times; his theological ideas form most of the basis for the entire "Left Behind" saga. I found that book to be much more interesting than these prequels. But you know... maybe the problem is that I haven't read the original series yet. Maybe I should have started with Left Behind like the rest of the world. Maybe then this batch would have had more "Oh yeeeeah! Now I understand!" moments. So I'm looking forward to starting the regular series very soon. But I don't think I would recommend the first two books of the prequel series very highly for the uninitiated... they honestly might scare people off. I think The Rapture might be a good entry point into the series, but maybe save the others until you've exhausted the other parts and can't stand to leave the series quite yet.


POSTSCRIPT: This morning I read the first chapter of the original book, Left Behind. I was disappointed to find that most of the good parts from The Rapture are actually repeats of the first chapter or so from Left Behind, almost word for word! I expect some repetition in chapter 2 as well, judging from what was in the other book. How disappointing.

King

Yesterday at this time I was watching the memorial service of "the king of pop." There has been an incredible outpouring of grief and love in the wake of Michael Jackson's death, and I have personally come to have a much more positive view of him than I've had probably at any other time in my life. I think Michael was a person with a compassionate heart who did much to relieve suffering wherever he saw it. I also think that among his friends were a number of very vocal believers in Jesus, and I feel certain that he had many chances to hear the Gospel and hope to see him in Heaven one day.

As I was watching the ceremony, a few things impressed me. One was the sight of the coffin... basically a "king" in a box. It's humbling to think that a person who shook the world with his music and dancing and humanitarian work, the person who spawned what might almost be considered a music empire... that person was right there, in a metal box, and would never leave it again. Funerals are always a sobering thing, and this one maybe more than many because of the impact that Michael had on the world.

I was watching the coverage on CNN's Web feed, and along the side of the video was a place where people could post comments via Facebook. One person posted that Michael is "the King of Kings". Presumably that person did not know that saying that is near blasphemy, because "King of Kings" is a title reserved for Jesus Christ (see 1 Timothy 6:13-16, Revelation 17:14, and Revelation 19:16). Michael Jackson was extremely influential, and putting all opinions about his personal life aside, the man made some catchy tunes... and he had the whole world moon-walking! But he wasn't a political leader at all, and I have no idea which "kings" the person considers him "king" of (the king of the king of rap? the king of the king of dancing?) I know the person was expressing appreciation for Michael's accomplishments, but it kind of shows how easily people will appropriate religious imagery, even names of God Himself, when they feel emotionally moved.

Something one of the commentators mentioned stuck with me. She said that the memorial service might possibly be "the most viewed event ever." In this day and age, television signals go around the world, both via satellite/wires/TV signals and Internet streams. There are places in the world where people could view this memorial where they would not have been able to view the funeral of the King of Rock & Roll, or even the funeral of Princess Diana which occurred much more recently. The Internet has basically made it so that people almost literally everywhere can watch an event unfold. It seems like prophecy is on its way to being fulfilled in ways never before possible. Revelation 13:1-4 tells us that in the last days, the person best known as "the Antichrist" (represented in those verses by a "beast") will have a "mortal wound" on "one of its heads," but instead of dying, the "beast" is healed, and "the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast" (emphasis mine). When in history has it been possible for "the whole earth" to experience something at once?

Another incident in the book of Revelation where the whole world participates in an event at one time occurs in Revelation 11:7-13, where two witnesses who are speaking of the true God are killed (by the "beast") in the streets of Jerusalem, and left to lie there for three and one-half days. During that time "some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies." The whole world will know what's going on (and presumably the whole world will know it when, at the end of the three and a half days, God raises them both from the dead!) It is only relatively recently in history that the whole world could actually even know about a single event within three days... in the time of John the Revelator it would have taken longer than that to get word of an event from one end of the known world to another.

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm equating Michael Jackson to the Antichrist, because I am absolutely not. Michael was a good guy, and in the wake of all this, I wish I had gotten a chance to know him personally. But the "spirit of antichrist" (which is actually just rebellion against God) is out there now, and the person who will become the Antichrist may well be out there too... the pieces are falling into place. Maybe the event that will one day eclipse the memorial service of the fallen King of Pop will be the memorial service for a world leader who died of a bullet, a blow, or slice to the head, or a brain aneurysm... but then gets up out of his coffin! If you see that day come, I pray that you will turn to Jesus Christ and make Him your Lord; the days that follow that event will be a lot less fun than the days following the funerals of beloved rock stars. Will people call him the "King of Kings" when that happens? Will they believe it when they say it?

Will that day supplant yesterday as "the most viewed event ever?"

All Through The Year

This morning I came in early and was taking down the Christmas tree in my office, and I got to thinking about something. I remembered a song by Christian artist Terry Taylor (the evil genius behind Daniel Amos, The Swirling Eddies, and one of the evil geniuses behind The Lost Dogs) about holding on to "the season's inspiration" and letting the birth of Jesus stay part of your life 12 months out of the year and not just one. There are tons of CCM Christmas songs along those same lines. Then I realized that there are tons of non-CCM songs out there with similar themes:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year;
When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.
These precious moments, hold them very dear
And keep Christmas with you
All through the year.

Okay, so that one's the Muppets, but you get my drift.

What is it about Christmas that seems to make people want to hold onto it, but they never do... so the next year there is melancholy about the Christmas they left behind and a new resolve to "hold on" to it this time?

Is it time with family?

Is it the "spirit of giving?"

Is it the chance to see Pac-Man save Santa just one more time?

Is it that we just love "Up On The Housetop" so much?

Is it Jesus?

...

(If it's Jesus, how come people who don't believe in Jesus often feel the same way?)

...?

Fearless

Last night on the news we saw a story about a young man who had just become a Christian. He was so excited about it that he started telling all of his friends. Apparently he told one of them about it one too many times; the guy was found shot to death at an apartment complex.

So my 8-year-old son was there listening to the story and I wanted to see what he thought; you have to make sure your kids aren't scared by something like that. So I asked Mikey, "What do you think of that? Is that scary, that a guy got killed for telling someone about Jesus?"

Mikey didn't hesitate, and he didn't blink an eye. With total honesty, in answer to the question "Are you scared about that?" he told me, "No, not if it's the Word of God!"

Lord, please teach me to be as fearless as Mikey!

Sarah Palin

Interesting video that I found via Pastor Mike Goolsbay's blog. I think it speaks for itself.