Many people will say that church isn’t all that interesting. At some level, that’s because people who have not been reborn of the Holy Spirit don’t generally enjoy the real things of God, but in addition to the direct sinfulness of humanity, I think we Christians may also bear part of the blame for the lack of value in Church.
Churches generally spend a great deal of time trying to be more relevant, whether through changing worship styles, better small group programs, or even through shifting doctrine to be more inclusive, but all of this is strange considering the compelling nature of the Gospel (or how it was compelling to previous generations).
I don’t say this without evidence. Despite the great antipathy the culture has been feeling for the Church over the past several years, this past week, we saw society compelled by the witness of a group of Christians in Charleston, South Carolina. The reason is, in the face of a gross evil visited upon them, a group of Christians determined to offer forgiveness to the man who performed the evil deed. I have no idea if they saiid theologically correct things, but they did choose to overcome evil with good.
The interest in this part of a tragic story opposes the idea that we have simply arrived at a historical period where the message of the Gospel no longer has any clout. The idea that we can be acceptable to God; that all the mistakes and evil we have done in our own lives can not only be forgotten, but remade into a display of God’s goodness… into something beautiful…. Maybe that is no longer valuable to people. Yet when the men and women at Dylan Roof’s bail hearing wished mercy on his soul, many again felt the
Yet generally, as the Church, I think we have lost the plot, so this week, I’m going to do some short posts about where I think we’ve gone wrong, and how we can get right. In the meantime, though, it’s easiest to say that we have often followed our unbelieving culture, and lost our love of seeing God’s redemption because in order for something to be redeemed from a sinful state, it must be well and truly bad.
We have sought to isolate ourselves in the church from both the sins of others and the sins of ourselves, and even sought security and safety in things other than God, rather than facing evil squarely with the Gospel. We have as a result lost the ability to see God’s beauty in saving the lost and repurposing what we intended for evil for His ultimate good. Why has this happened? Tune in tomorrow.
(considering) 8:28
Implications of the Sovereignty of God
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Avoiding Scandal: Marvin Olasky at World Magazine comments on a rule made by Billy Graham that may have saved Tullian Tchividjian from the present scandal. At some point I’ll need to reflect on grace in light of this.Intellectualism: An older article at the Atlantic deals with the ongoing odd assumption that intellectual rigor leads inexorably to atheism.
Mass Media: Despite their chronicling of media missing the concept of religion, GetReligion has some optimism after some mainstream media grasp the spirituality of forgiveness.
Apologetics: Is it too intellectual an endeavour to be Christian? Why “It’s intellectual” is not the same thing as saying it isn’t Christian.
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Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism and Other God Substitutes, 2015, David C. Cook Publishing
With the cottage industry in Apologetics books coming out after the short-lived “New Atheist” revival of the early 21st century, it has become easy to find books at the local Christian bookstore dealing with “worldviews” and cataloguing the staggering number of “isms” associated with these worldviews.
While there is a great deal of value in being able to quickly label, and thus find information on, a given worldview when talking to people who have a different one, it can also become quickly intimidating for Christians to try and understand the massive number of different idea-systems out there, much less learn to effectively and lovingly talk to people who hold these worldviews without the crass oversimplification that has become endemic in western culture of late.
This is why Nancy Pearcey’s book is so refreshing. While it does include a great many good responses to actual worldviews, they are only as examples in the main point of the book; a system for Christians to deconstruct other worldviews from a Christian perspective. Following in the vein of Greg Koukl’s influential, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions, Finding Truth is less a listing of other people’s ideas and why they’re wrong, as it is a practical manual for understanding worldviews accurately and ideally without oversimplification.
Using principles gleaned from Romans 1, Pearcey helps the Christian reader to first look at what other people actually believe, and then to think through what the other worldview finds as central, and finally to positively and negatively critique the worldview. This is done in a way that avoids both the error of identifying so much with non-Christian worldviews as to simply capitulate to them, and the (decidedly unchristian) error of imagining that every non-believer is simply dumb.
Where other books on the topic of worldview throw the answers at you, Pearcey trains the reader to seek the answers in the interaction of the worldview in question, and the truth of the word of God. Instead of giving you fish, she trains you to fish. This book will be very useful, both to the trained apologist, and to the average Christian as we navigate the world around us, whether the fashions of thinking remain secularism, or shift to something else. Very highly recommended.
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The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,
while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.
Proverbs 13:4Work is Good
Most people know that one needs to work in order to see good things come about. Well, maybe fewer people see it these days than in other generations, but it is clear that one cannot expect to get things without some level of work. Of course, everybody knows that. I do too.
Yet, I find in myself the problem isn’t the desire to avoid work, or to sit idly, or to stay in bed too long in the morning. No, the issue I find is that I have so many small things I can do or focus on that will take me away from real work. Some of it even masquerades as meaningful activity while actually being largely valueless, or worse, is of value, but of little value compared to the time you find yourself putting into it.
Dissipated Energy
I’d like to say it is as easy as cutting out <insert popular time-wasting social media here> or video games, or television or some such. The problem I find is more insidious, and harder to pin down. Small diversions become big problems. It’s such a large issue that the writer of proverbs feels the need to mention it twice (Proverbs 6:10-11; 24:33-34):
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.It’s like how a mighty river can be largely dried up by a series of small irrigations taken from it. No one person is making a big dent in the amount of water passing by, but when hundreds, thousands, or more people all take water from a great river, the result is that all the water is used, and at the end, none is left.
Time is like that. No matter how much time it looks like we have, it is dribbling away at a constant rate, and will eventually be all used up. The question is whether we will use our time while we have it, and we will use our time, it’s flowing by at a constant rate. The question is what we will use it for as it flows by.Larger Stakes than we think:
Of course, what holds true for physical matters (nb. 2 Thess. 3:10) also holds true for the spiritual. While we Christians are not saved by our works, it is clear that our ability to see and rejoice in Christ, to avoid open sin, and to do the good, will be somewhat dependent on our working out our salvation. One cannot be washed in the word of Christ if one doesn’t actually read the word of Christ, and one isn’t repenting of sin if they don’t actually do the work of breaking old sinful patterns of behavior, and work at placing their eyes and desires on what truly matters (Christ). Indeed, for the sake of this goal, we need to be careful even of our seeking worldly wealth,
It is not simply that we must work so that we may be rich in this life (as is no doubt true), but that we must be careful to choose the best things for our time so that when all time has run out, we might be rich in the wealth that truly matters: God. -
It’s always been a bit of a puzzling maxim for me: People don’t change. I’ve heard it fairly frequently, whether it’s said positively, about some character trait of a person you’re depending on, or negatively about some person, and their character trait that is causing pain for others yet again. Yet what puzzles me is that it is so clearly not true, and in fact leads us to believe some strange things about people, and possibly dangerous things about ourselves.
A Grain of Truth
Like most ideas we have as a culture, this one stems from a bit of truth. There are character traits that people have that one should not count on changing. If you are looking at a partner with marriage in mind, you should not be thinking about things they need to change to be a good spouse. Nor should you rely on someone to display character traits in day to day interactions that they have never displayed before.
With people, the most accurate predictor of future activity is past activity. That is something I will frequently say in counselling situations, even after I spend a blog post debunking the maim of how people don’t change. The reason is that people do most often keep character traits that they have in the past, and are most likely to continue to struggle with sins that they have struggled with in the past (Biblically, think of David’s weakness for women, Peter’s fear of people, etc.)
So then why would I take issue with a statement that seems to pass on this useful bit of information?A More Accurate Picture
Unfortunately, the reason that we can count on past character as an indicator of future character has nothing to do with the unchangeableness of humanity. Rather, that particular bit of truth is a working out of the fact that all humanity is ALWAYS changing. This is true whether we are talking about our physical change (growing from children, to adults, to the elderly, and eventually to death), or change in our personality (from childish, to mature, whatever “mature” will look like for you).
The change we’re going through continues day by day, often so slowly we do not notice, and so we humans (having freakishly low attention spans) imagine that this is constant. This is also the reason we can be dumb enough to believe that changeable parts of us should be considered our identity (beauty, intellect, etc.). It also means that there is an awful lot of inertia going for the trajectory of changes we’re going through, and so to change our direction, there will have to be many choices we make in a different one.
Danger and Opportunity
Ths simple fact is that the changes in our character and physique are going to happen, but the way that those changes are going to happen will be determined by the choices and actions we have right now. Just as in the physical sphere, we will never start to get healthy habits and thus a healthy physique unless we actually take the time to change our present habits that have been building our present body, our character will only improve insofar as we make decisions and do things in keeping with a better character.
This means that as Christians, while our justification is secure in Christ’s action on the cross, we will never be the kinds of people Christ calls us to be unless we avoid sin and act righteously. That is to say, unless we make the decisions that will lead us away from what we were making ourselves into through sin, and follow Christ who will remake us into righteous people.
We will all change. A year from now, we will all be a year older, and we will either be more conformed to the image of Christ (if we seek Him) or we will be more conformed to our sinful nature if we follow sin. Change will happen. The question is what change will it be?
(considering) 8:28 