Tag Archives: God

Fairness Meters In Our Heads…They’re On!

Posted on by Silva
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We all say, at some time in our lives, “that’s not fair!”  Parents can count on hearing this all the time from their children.  Even those who are the most obsessed about keeping their kids from uttering the words, like infant-sized temper tantrums, the impulse to judge is hard wired into who we are.  (Those same obsessive parents will then be saying, “Hey, this isn’t fair!”)  Oh, for a dollar for all the conversations where the originating comment was “that’s not fair!”

Let’s talk about fairness, then.  If you sat down with a pen and paper to answer the query, “What in your life, in your judgment, isn’t fair?” the chances that you’d be staring at a blank piece of paper after five minutes are close to nil.  From the shape of our bodies to the size of what’s in our bank accounts; from the cars we drive to the phones we carry; from the promotions we didn’t get to the taxes that we have to pay.  Our fairness meters are very active.

Is this on your list of unfair things “I’m going to heaven”?  If you’re a Christian, it’s likely that you’ve considered the patent unfairness of that statement.  If you haven’t, you should.  I was reflecting on these words from William Farley’s book, Gospel Powered Parenting (pg. 75):

The Father’s love for his Son is intense: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17).  It is not a common love.  It is holy.  He loves his Son with omnipotence, which means all power, with infinite intensity.  He loves his Son with omniscience – all knowledge.  His gaze penetrates the infinite perfection of his Son’s deity.  Since the Son’s glory is infinite, only an infinite intellect can fully know and love him.  He knows the Son exhaustively, and what the Father knows and sees is the infinite perfection of the Son’s divinity.

But here is the stunning truth: such is the holiness of the Father that when the Son bore our sin and transgressions, God separated himself from him.  “My God, my God,” Jesus cried from the cross, “why have you forsaken me?”  (Matt. 27:46).

The holiness of God, His utter uniqueness and separation from all that’s not like Him, at that time demanded that He turn from His Son.  The very One with Whom He’d spent eternity in perfect harmony and relationship.  Why on earth would He ever do such a thing? Jesus’ quote of Psalm 22 about being forsaken is surely among the most stunning and breathtaking statements ever written.  Do we not see just what has taken place?

Add this to your paper (under a new heading, “Really Not Fair”),

  • I was born in sin (Psalm 51:5)
  • I sin because it was my nature (Ephesians 2:1-2)
  • My sins will lead to my death – justly and fairly (Romans 6:23)

Drumroll….

  • They don’t (Romans 6:4)

They don’t.  But why don’t they?  They must!  I am the man!  I am the angry man; I am the thief; I am the adulterer; I am the one who rages against the rule of God!  I am the one guilty of my sins.  Why on earth do we read of the blameless Holy Son walking the streets of Jerusalem soaked in blood carrying a cross?  Why is He the one who’s been nailed to it?  Why?

Don’t talk yourself into the good news until you’ve come to grips with the cosmic truth that what happened at Calvary wasn’t fair.  All that is or isn’t fair is judged in light of that event.  Those events weren’t fair in ways that we can never really grasp – larger ways that should scare you.  Do Paul’s words in Romans 8, stun you?

What then shall we say to these things?  If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?

Shocking truths that we must consider.  This leads to what we must also talk ourselves into: the truth that in Jesus Christ, having been covered in His blood, we appear before the throne of God.  And as He looks to you and me, affection and welcome and rest are given in abundant measures.  Wow.

I am scarcely able to lift my head to gaze upon them…But, I don’t have to, He reaches down to all those who call upon His name and He lifts our heads (Psalm 3:3).  His grace never ends.  Alleluia.

Mainstreaming

Posted on by Silva
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You spend any time on the web (especially news sites like the Drudgereport) and you can begin to notice trends.  I’ve been noticing one here recently: mainstreaming.

Let me illustrate.  Take a topic like waterboarding (not a nice topic, I admit…but that’s part of my point here).  You know the war on terror, well, think back to all the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib prisoner of war interrogation flap in the last few years.  Waterboarding was part of the content of that flap.  It is an extreme means of interrogation (some say torture) where a prisoner is subjected to dripping or pouring of water on the face such that breathing is difficult and gagging is common.  “You talk and we stop” as is common in interrogation (unless you’re Jack Bauer hanging by a chain).  It’s not the kind of thing that you’d find yourself discussing at Dairy Queen.  Nonetheless, over the past few years, it has become such a topic of conversation all over media that people know about it.  (Had you ever heard of waterboarding before?)  Today, do a Google search and you’ll get 1,010,000 hits (whatever that really means); you’ll even find pictures.  More significantly, we’re not alarmed by it, really.  Yeah, what I just described might make you queasy or shake your head but not rise up in outrage.  At one time, it did, but not any more.

Let me get to the trend I’ve recently noticed.

Porn Star Runs for Parliament In England

Tiger Woods Porn Star Girlfriend

California Safe-Sex Porn Rules

Sandra Bullock’s Husband’s Porn Star Ex-Wife

Notice anything in those headlines?  Porn star and public office.  Porn star and world’s greatest golfer.  Porn stars and safe sex.  Porn star and Miss Congeniality.  Mainstreaming.

Growing up, “porn” was a word that no one ever said.  Porn “stars” were worse than the harlots of the Bible (though they are no different).  Culturally, we had a firm line in the sand on the boundary of acceptability and porn-anything was out of bounds.  No more.  What should be culturally stigmatized because it is profane is mainstream.  It’s “news” though the fact that it’s news is what makes it news.  We even look at empowered porn-starlets running for public office like they’re doing something good; feminism lives!  Gone is the view that such a lifestyle should be avoided, ostracized, de-legitimized, or condemned; that those who choose to be in it need to be rescued by the gospel of Jesus Christ and empowered by a culture to be legitimate contributors to society.  It is mainstreamed now and there’s no outrage.  Women and men, strangers, routinely and publicly engaging in sexual acts that were created by God for marriage in private.  (You know, if you’re thinking that it’s one of the oldest professions in the world and so what? then you’re making my point.)  Does the thought of your daughter cranking out X-rated films that others are masturbating to do anything to your sense of common decency?  That’s somebody’s daughter, after all.  Mainstreaming.  Heck, I bet many probably look up the names and see if they can be “friends” on Facebook.

In place of what we have now mainstreamed as a culture but shouldn’t, are things that we should esteem but don’t. At some point in the past, the holiness that comes from faith in Christ was deemed boring; that God should be so droll and stingy.  How backwards.  We are so boring as a culture.  For all our “liberation” from the shackles of holiness and Christian morality all we can do is slouch against the next thing that’s going to make our hearts beat faster (barely).  When that stops working, we bend in a different direction drooling over the next thing.  Pathetic and boring.  Reminds me an alarming scene in a dumb movie, The Island.    Some pretentious capitalist is explaining how this pulsating blob of human flesh without a face can be someone’s own personal clone to save their life.  The whole premise is that you could live like hell and still get that critical liver transplant that your alcohol addiction destroyed all because you have a perfect clone organ donor.  Disgusting.  Our culture is like that pulsating heap of faceless flesh.  No faces, no personalities, no relations beyond what our basal urges can demand.  Maybe Freud was right.  (On second thought, no he wasn’t.)

The real news is that we are a culture of losers.  We are as mindless as those on our back-room screens.  We have divorced ourselves from meaning in the pursuit of the next stimulation.  The holy is now common and the profane is now all that matters.  What amazes me most is not that we’re pathetic losers, but that God redeems a single one of us.  He did say, “My ways are not your ways.”  Thank God.

God: Our Greatest Gift

Posted on by Silva
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Part II.

Previously on 24…I was making the point that we all live with goals in life.  Those of us who believe in Christ include in our goals spiritual ones: less of this, more of that.  That we would put on more goodness and put off more yuck.  These are not bad in any universe. Until…

Until we arm ourselves with the incorrect tool.  I was talking about Radio Man Stan and his commitments in Lent.  Once again, to buckle down to more Bible study is a good thing.  To use Lent as a means to spur one on to that end: good thing.  What struck me at a visceral level was both how charming he thought he was being in doing so and the fact that it might be true that his (our) failures had more to do with him (us) than with God.

So, in that universe of thinking, God is a tool: the means to a better you or your best life now.  In that universe of thinking, what’s most important is that I be better.  We aren’t actually living for His glory but for our own ever increasing glory (or happiness).  We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do and be better.  We watch other parents and spouses and co-workers and etc. and tell ourselves that we should and can be better.  We even see others who serve more and love more and die-to-self more and we tell ourselves that we should and can be better.  (And we’re probably right.)

Then we realize (quickly) that we aren’t.  Or, if we are, we might’ve picked the ones against whom we stack up pretty nicely.  In this universe of being better we are always looking for tools.  Of course we need them because without them (i.e., status quo) we aren’t better.  According to the laws that we set down for ourselves, we fail to keep them at best or we regularly break them at worst and God as our tool to better selves doesn’t work too well.  We end up still screaming, pouting, failing, manipulating and getting caught.  So the problem must be God – He’s just not enough.

Now, I don’t know anyone who actually talks that way, but, I do know a whole lot of people who are disgusted with the regularity of their sin and they don’t know how to stop or change.  (Hint: They’ve “used” God and it hasn’t worked.)   Suggest to them something simple and they get the glazed eye look.  I once had a seminary instructor who was livid after a guest chapel preacher mimicking James 5 told folks that if they are sick, they should confess their sins and see if it is related.  He was blathering on about how simplistic and stupid this man was!  The thought that sin and sickness could be related (even though it’s clearly in the passage).

I’ve seen something shocking in the faces of believers who are desperate for something different: gospel boredom.  The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ means little.  It means a lot when we talk about eternal address, but parenting?  Communication?  Mercy ministry?  Forget about it.

We have become a people who demand something complicated.  How is that so when folks are typically clamoring for the books and teachers who have the easiest and most practical messages?  They are the ones who say citing simplicity and relevance, “Sermons must have applications that are relevant!”  These balk at those who beckon them to something more mysteriously complicated (they think) because we want it complicated not simple. We’d never say that though.

Check your heart: is the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Christ where you turn when bombs start exploding in your marriage?  If I were to tell you what Paul tells us in the Scriptures, you would be skeptical.  You’d accuse me of oversimplification.  You’d tell me that maybe that works in seminary but not here.  Really?

The greatest gift we could ever have is a perfect life, an atoning death, a completed resurrection, and an assurance of an exorbitant inheritance, right?  Do we not see that in Christ that is exactly ours?

For us, in Him; in us, for Him.  It’s all done.

You with Us, We with You

Posted on by Silva
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I continue to be provoked by a discussion about parenting in light of eternity.  The affect it has had on me as a parent has been to clarify the things of parenting.  I will (and do!) still struggle in making mountains out of molehills and vice versa, but I definitely believe that the picture of my destination as a parent is clearer – under the specter of eternal judgment, all things are clearer.  Interestingly, Paul wrote this way in his letter to the Thessalonians (1:9, 2:16, 3:13, 4:13-17, chapter 5).

Just the other day, I found out that one of my children had been participating in mean-spiritedness against another child from our church: covenant children victimizing others, who’d have thought?  Nonetheless, once I found out I was surprised by how much more quickly we moved to handle this (Judgment day still fresh in our minds).  I whipped out the church directory, found the relevant phone number, made the call, connected with the parent and passed the phone along to my child who asked for forgiveness from the other.  The mom told me that my child had acted courageously.  I responded, “It takes courage to do the right thing.”  I might’ve said it differently, “It takes a Judgment-Day perspective to do the right thing.”

In a resource designed to help parents bring the gospel to their covenant children, I read a quote from Richard Mather, English-born American congregationalist preacher (c. 1600) in answer to the question, “What might covenant children on their way to hell say to their parents?”

All this that we here suffer is through you.  You should have taught us the things of God and did not.  You should have restrained us from sin and corrected us and you did not.  You were the means of our original corruption and guiltiness, and yet you never showed any competent care that we might be delivered from it.  Woe unto us that we had such carnal and careless parents.  And woe unto you that you had no more compassion and pity to prevent the everlasting misery of your own children.

I have said in class before that even among those of you who do not have children, your commitment to your covenantal vows at the many baptisms you witnessed in our worship obligate you to help parents with children in their tasks of parenting for Judgment Day.  I pray that in and through our faithful covenant parenting (you with us and we with you) in light of eternity, our children will have no opportunity to speak words like these.  May God grant us the grace and strength.

Pastor Gabe

Do you know?

Posted on by Silva
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In our knowing, do we know?

A problem may arise if we are not careful. It’s about “gospel.”  I’m afraid that in our knowing we might not know it.  This will look different for different people – at least initially.  Maybe some among us are not converted and that’s serious.  You may not ever have repented of your independence and rebellion against God.  You’d never considered Isaiah’s words when he said, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).  Think about that: if that’s true, then now is the time to turn to Jesus Christ and plead with God that He would credit Jesus’ perfection to you – and save your soul from the wrath of God.  If your parenting was changed because your heart was changed then Hallelujah!

For the rest, my fear is that familiarity with the gospel will breed contempt for it.  Maybe contempt is too strong; how about a passive kind of ho-hum attitude?  Do we believe that the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ was what we needed to be converted but, beyond that, we’re talking about something fundamentally different to actually live?  The Galatians did: 3:2-3.  If we hold this view, we may, in fact, not understand the gospel’s place in our lives.  If we misunderstand what it means to live in the gospel as converted Christians, then we risk living for the glory of something else.  The stakes are high!

We need to ask ourselves why we are interested in studying the Bible; say parenting, for example.  Let me oversimplify to make a point: are we more concerned about being equipped to parent or is our interest more about God?  Think about it.  I mean, clearly, parents need help parenting; no parent knows what in the world he’s doing while he’s doing it!  (The sheer number of parenting books published in the last decade (75K??) proves the hunger for help.)  But God apparently doesn’t believe that parenting-ignorance is our biggest issue (I know there are times when it feels like it!).  The fact that the Bible contains so few verses about such a significant subject proves that.

At the same time, it’s not as if God isn’t concerned about it either!  His message is different, even strange to us.  Paul preached this message to his churches.  We should take note because they were like us with pressing needs in every area of life: they were parents, employers, employees, children, friends, soldiers and artisans.  They all needed to know how and what to do.  They looked to Paul to provide help.  Yet, his message was:

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2)

Ask the Lord to reveal your interests here.  Do you want to know Him as Paul prayed for his Ephesians brothers (1:15-19)?  Or do you just want to know how to better parent?  Desire to be a better parent less than you desire to know Jesus Christ; that the details of His life, the gospel, become your preoccupation – and that in which you bathe your family.