Soul Thoughts

Faith and relevance in the 21st century

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Divine Mathematics

June 2, 2009 /

Another classic from Selwyn Hughes, this time on grace. Similar to a previous post of mine called ‘Grace isn’t Fair’.

One person gives freely, yet gains more; another withholds what is right, only to become poor – PROVERBS 11:24                                 
                                                                      
What all the passages in Proverbs which talk about generosity are really teaching us is that selfishness short-circuits human happiness and that the route to joy is liberality – liberality with our talents, our treasure, and our time.

Today’s text is, of course, difficult for some to accept because it violates all the rules of mathematics. How can it be that the more you give away, the more you have? It doesn’t seem logical!

Well, let Lord Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest mathematicians of the century, comment on that: “Mathematics and logic have nothing to do with reality.”David Rivett, a chartered accountant and one of the directors of CWR – Crusade for World Revival – says that since he has been with the organization he has found that God has a quite different arithmetic from what he as an accountant has been used to.

For example – what do five and two make? Seven? Yes, in man’s arithmetic, but not in God’s. In God’s arithmetic five and two make five thousand. How come? Well, five loaves and two fish – the little lunch which a boy once gave to Jesus – were taken by Him and turned into enough food to feed five thousand. And just to add to the point – twelve baskets of fragments were gathered up after everyone had eaten their fill!

Nature, we are told, abhors a vacuum; it is the same in the spiritual realm. Liberality and generosity create a vacuum into which God flows, enabling us to give and to go on giving. I cannot explain it, but I have seen it happen again and again.

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Connecting

May 29, 2009 /

I was moved the other night to go back and have a look at Larry Crabb’s excellent book, Connecting. This is the book that had the potential to cost Crabb his career as a counselor. In it, he talks about the power of emotional healing that takes place when people relate to each other as Christ relates to us. And the best place for this to happen is in safe community with other like-minded people. The counseling relationship, while extremely valuable, cannot substitute for a community of people loving each other and speaking into each other’s lives.

ConnectingThe reason I mention this is because I was with a group of friends the other night, and as we shared deep parts of our lives, I came to see how much I was able to relate to particular aspects of what they were sharing. Why is it that just one small sentence that someone shares about their life can stay with us for years? When I have listened to some sermons over the years, there is often one line that will stay with me, that will resonate with me, even though I couldn’t tell you what the subject of the sermon was.

The reason that such relating touches us so deeply is because we connect; we relate, we nod with a knowing when we hear what that person is saying. We can say “that’s exactly my experience”. That’s why Jesus told stories of everyday life to explain the kingdom of God. He never actually defined what the kingdom is, he just always said “it is like…”.

Connecting is the essence of life. When we connect with someone, or something that someone says, we know we have touched something of what life is really all about; something that goes deeper than all the everyday stuff that we think is hugely important. I think I might go back and read through Crabb’s book again. I suspect there will be a few lines that stay with me for years.

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More greed and more loneliness…and more brilliance from Leunig

May 26, 2009 /

A prophetic article from the brilliant Michael Leunig on the insanity of our obsession with economic growth. Leunig is one of those rare individuals who has the ability to speak truth into a culture, to go straight to the heart of a matter and speak it like it is. Following a previous post of mine on our addiction to growth, Leunig tells the story of a childhood friend of his working in Papua New Guinea whose hosts in PNG were fascinated and pained by our way of life and how it lacked any semblance of community. The quote which haunted her when she explained that her family home had separate rooms with private bedroom for each of her daughters, was when they responded “”How sad for your children. How sad for your family. Everyone lost from each other in such a big house with so many walls.”

‘The lonely crowd’ is a term friends of mine sometimes use to explain the loss of community and the feeling of lostness and aloneness despite living in a city of millions of people. To the ‘primitive’ people of PNG with their apparent superstitions and strange rituals, our lostness was bewildering. Leunig then goes on to explain our own superstitions and rituals. The question is then, who are the ‘primitive’ ones? He makes points which seem so obvious but blind us in our desperate search for more and better. His points, which are so pertinent in today’s climate, are:

“Yet surely an economy, as well as our personal lives, are doomed to malfunction if greed and its subsidiary behaviours and consequences are not factored in and collectively acknowledged as a central scientific reality. Just as we all have a heart, we have natural greed, and unacknowledged is uncontrolled. For economics to bypass it would be like the aviation industry refusing to acknowledge the fact of gravity or the Catholic Church refusing to accept that the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

We are asked to believe in eternal economic growth (upon which we have become dependent) when we know in our hearts and minds that such growth will destroy the Earth. This is worse than any cargo cult. It is a massive, absurd, depressing conflict.

So when the economy has a “downturn” we might think to look further and wider than new regulations or the replacing of cogs and washers and wheels. Underlying the financial dysfunction is the possibility of a conflicted, dispirited human culture that has consumed so flagrantly and ruthlessly that it has grown sick and ashamed of itself, to the point where it has lost its meaning and vitality: a society sitting exhausted and faithless in its own poisonous bathwater, regurgitating its worn-out gestures, stuck in its jaded, reactive modes, and generally incapable of sufficient originality, courage, innocence or honesty to make a healthy life.”

We have much to learn from our brothers in sisters in poorer parts of the world. What St Paul said many years ago still seems to hold true today, that the things of this world are foolishness in the eyes of God.

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More on humility

May 24, 2009 /

Some years ago, I wrote an article on the essence of humility. I talked about the fact that humility is a matter of facing reality – the reality that, left to our own devices, we don’t do life very well. Hence the need for a higher power, or a saviour, to get us out of our mess.

Photo by Remigiusz SzczerbakTo me, humility is about being self-forgetful. How hard is that? I find that the more I think about it, it is an issue of trust. When I don’t forget myself in the sense that Jesus meant, I am clinging on to my way of doing things and therefore not trusting. This elusive thing called humility is about not focusing on yourself.

Becoming Christlike has nothing to do with navel-gazing and everything to do with gazing on Christ and seeing reality through the fog of life. The irony though, and what catches many of us out, is that, as soon as you think you’re becoming more humble, you’re not, because you’re focusing on yourself again.

Humility really is about denying yourself. Humble people never think of themselves as humble. A friend once said to me that the closer you are to God, often the more you will be aware of your imperfections. Christian psychologist Larry Crabb says that if you ask a mature person when they last sinned they will smile the smile of a broken but healing person.

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The Christian message and self-esteem

May 24, 2009 /

When talking about proper love of self and how God loves all of us, many Christians strongly hold the view that you cannot love others until you love yourself. This view is not biblical and is therefore a heresy. If you do not agree with me, then I challenge you to find one verse or passage anywhere in the Bible that says that you cannot love others until you love yourself. To respond to this, most Christians who hold to this popular view quote Jesus’ saying in Mark 12:28-31 that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbour as yourself. So, clearly we have to love ourselves so that we can love others. After all, you cannot give something that you haven’t got.

The problem with this view is that Jesus still says that we are to love God and love our neighbour. Sure, He says that we are to do it ‘as you love yourself’ but the emphasis is on loving God and neighbour. It is about giving. This also follows in what is classically called the golden rule – ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. In a particular situation, think about what you would most want that person to do for you if you were in their position, and do it for them. Jesus’ point was that we are to think of others before ourselves. People would argue that if you don’t love yourself, then you would not want people to love you. If you hate yourself, then you have such a low view of yourself that you want people to harm you. While this is tragically true for many people, all of us still ultimately want the best for ourselves. Randy Alcorn, an American evangelical who, while being a bit too conservative for my liking, has made the excellent point that even a suicidal person has their best interests at heart – “I’d be better off dead”. Randy has written a great piece on how Christians are preaching this self-esteem heresy. Click here to access it.

The fact is that, as I mentioned above, Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbour. The emphasis is on others. He did not tell us to go and do a self-help course or take up some hobby or do something else to improve our self-image, and then once we feel good enough about ourselves, then and only then will we be able to love others. Not that I’m against having a hobby – having a hobby is very healthy, but if it or anything else that is designed purely to improve your self-image detracts from your following Jesus, then it is detrimental, both to yourself and to others. How often have we neglected other people’s needs in the process of trying to improve our self-image?

It is only when we ask the Holy Spirit to help us be more Christlike and that we ask Him to help us to be Jesus in our daily lives, as we live this out, that we become closer to God. And it is through this that we slowly find ourselves developing a healthy sense of self-worth. Jesus said, in Mark 8: 34-35, “if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me”. It is then that we develop a healthy self-love, a healthy self esteem, a healthy sense of self-worth. It is in doing what is right that we come to love ourselves in the way that Jesus properly wants us to because it is then, as we seek to follow Him, that we become truly close to God.

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The problem with prosperity doctrine

May 24, 2009 /

Well, there are many problems with it actually, but when you hear people like Joel Osteen stating that when you are in relationship with God, you can expect the favour of God, that you can actually expect good things to happen to you, it is a very dangerous (not to mention heretical and unbiblical) statement to make. If Osteen is right then Jesus himself must have been pretty out of favour with the Almighty! The One who is described in Isaiah as a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, is the Jesus of the Gospels, who was born in a trough, was the friend of sinners and of the scum of the earth, the people who no one else wanted to be around, and was constantly in tension with the religious establishment and the powers of His day, and was of course eventually crucified for his efforts. According to Osteen’s theology then, Jesus was a failure (and not just in the worldly sense, but in a spiritual sense as well). When people in favour of this doctrine quote the Bible, notice that they almost overwhelmingly quote the Old Testament, and then in bits and pieces. My pastor once said that a verse taken out of context is a pretext; in other words, you can take a few single verses and put them together to say exactly what you want them to say. Now, I am convinced that the Old Testament is just as much the Word of God as the New Testament. But when these people hardly ever quote the New Testament in defence of their prosperity doctrine, particularly the Gospels which deal explicitly with the sayings and life of Jesus, there is a problem. Christians who don’t talk about Jesus – how’s that for an irony?

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The Intelligent Design debate

May 24, 2009 /

In the U.S. and now here in Australia, the Intelligent Design (ID) debate has been getting more media space. The Australian Government has been open to having ID taught in schools. However, those that would be against it say that it is unscientific and is a front for creationists. My problem is not whether or not it should be taught in schools, but the way the media, at least in Australia, has either misunderstood or deliberately manipulated the debate. In an article in The Age in early August 2005 about the ID debate, there was a poll which asked, not if you agree that ID should be taught in schools, but if you agree that creationism should be taught in schools. Creationism and ID are 2 different things, but they have been reported by the anti-ID side as really the same thing, and, on top of this, I believe the ID school has been hijacked by the creationists.

The ID people basically accept evolution as probably the best explanation for the development of life on the planet, while stating that the intricate complexity of the web of life could not possibly have happened by chance. The creationists, meanwhile, accept literally the idea that that earth is about 6,000 years old and that it was created in 7 x 24 hour days. Personally, I have shifted to the view of the former ie. from my reading of things (and I have read quite a bit, but I am also no scientist) the 6,000 year view of the earth just doesn’t hold water, but I also believe that there has to be a designer behind the intricate complexity of the web of life. I confess, I am also a Christian.

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Ben Lerner needs to read Max Lucado

May 24, 2009 /

A few years ago when I was in a Christian bookstore, I saw a book by Ben Lerner called ‘Body by God’. The premise of the book is that God wants us to be fabulously beautiful, outrageously happy and prosperous. On the shelf below Lerner’s book was a book by Max Lucado simply called ‘It’s Not About Me’. Ben Lerner needs to read Max Lucado’s book.

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Everyday faith

May 21, 2009 /

I was talking to a friend last night about faith. We touched on different aspects related to faith, including doubt, atheism, and agnosticism. On my way home I got to thinking about it a bit more and I realised again that everyone of us lives by faith every day of our lives. Faith is not something that believers in God live by; that’s just a different aspect of faith. As I sit on my chair writing this post, I’m exercising faith that the chair won’t collapse under me. When you eat your cereal tomorrow morning, you will be exercising faith that there is nothing poisonous in it and that it won’t kill you. And so it goes on. Everything we do in life requires the exercise of faith. We are not consciously aware that all of what we do is done by faith, but it most definitely is.

In thinking about this and how it relates to what we normally call faith, that is, faith in God and its manifestation in our lives, I soon realised that a position of agnosticism is not enough. Someone told me years ago that agnosticism is not just sitting on the fence, it is taking a position. I believe life is to be lived to its full. I believe that life was actually designed to be lived to its full, and that means to go further in our exercise of faith than we have previously.

To that end, I believe that faith in a God I cannot see is the ultimate act of faith. It is not blind faith. That would be superstition. It is a reasonable faith, a rational faith if you like. It is a faith that is based on what someone has deduced as the evidence. It is thought through and then, having made a decision about it, it is lived out. We become more human the more we live by faith. As St Paul said long ago, ‘this life I live, I live by faith in the Son of God’.

The more we live by faith, the more we jump into the arms of a loving God, the more like Christ we become. It is said that we become like that which we worship. Our lives are a worship of something. When our lives are a worship of Jesus, we become more like him. It was Irenaeus who said “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”. When we exercise faith in Christ, when we live this out in our lives each day, we love more. We live out what St Paul called ‘the most excellent way’.

Faith allows us to become more human. It is a risk, it can be frightening, but it is life. We either move forward into it or we retreat into our cocoons. C.S Lewis said it brilliantly:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

This is what living by faith is. This is the adventure, not just of a lifetime, but of an eternity.

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True repentance

May 19, 2009 /

In my sermon, ‘Free to Love!’, I talked about the issue of repentance and how that word has such negative connotations. If you’re like me, you probably immediately think of someone yelling from a pulpit with his finger pointed straight at you shouting “Repent!”

Photo by Zsuzsanna KiliánUnfortunately the attitude that that image represents is quite accurate of many Christians. And, I have to admit, it has been true of me on too many occasions.

Fuzz Kitto has reminded people a few times that real repentance is not about repenting ‘from’ but it is about repenting ‘to’. The following story of the legend of Odysseus and the Sirens illustrates it better than I ever could:

Odysseus and his crew needed to get somewhere in their boat, but they needed to sail past an island which no one had ever passed before. The reason that everyone had floundered on this island was because of the beautiful seductive voices of the sirens on this island. When they would sing of their promises of wisdom and knowledge, no man could resist and they would turn their ship toward the island and be wrecked on the rocks. So Odysseus needed a way to get around this. He was advised to have his crew lash him tight to the mast of his ship, and then to plug their ears with beeswax so they couldn’t hear the sirens’ song. Odysseus was determined that they were not going to be seduced. He told his crew that when he heard the singing, even though he would be desperate for them to unleash him and let him be lured over to the sirens, they were not to let him. And so they made it through. But Odysseus was exhausted from his efforts at resisting the sirens’ song.

Odysseus then realised there must be a better way. So he took with him Orpheus, who had the sweetest voice in all the land. And when they were approaching the island from where the sirens’ song could be heard, they heard the sirens starting to sing, luring them over. But then Orpheus started to sing, and Orpheus’ voice was more beautiful than that of the sirens, and Odysseus and his crew made it through unscathed.

2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth walked the dusty roads of the Middle East living out the same message. The common people heard him gladly because in him they found not condemnation but acceptance. In him they heard words of life, words spoken for them. And in him they saw a life lived in sacrifice and service of others. After his resurrection, his followers became so enamored by his message that they turned the might of the Roman Empire upside down. They no longer had to try to prove themselves. They knew that something new had happened, and they devoted their lives to sharing this love with everyone around them.

The message of Jesus is about finding a better way. It is about repenting ‘to’. It is coming to see how attractive following him is that everything else fades into insignificance. God help me to be more like that.

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