|
whollyyours317
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Jennifer
Metro:
Interests: my amazing husband - my friends - my family - writing - road trips - Passion - good books - snow - youth ministry - piano - worship times with my friends - Apple computers - the color pink - Starbucks
Industry: writing and youth ministry
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
10/7/2005
|
|
| Over the last week or so I've walked with some ministry friends through some tough and painful things. It's sobering. It's draining. And it's made me turn to God a lot because I've been reminded that I stand only by His grace.
"Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in His holy place? Only he who has clean hands and a pure heart..."
I was at a worship night with Charlie Hall on Saturday, and he did that song. An old song, I've heard it a million times. But it broke me.
O God, give us clean hands! Keep us from the sin that so easily entangles us. After leading so many, don't let us disqualify ourselves from the prize. Obedience is better than sacrifice. Our integrity matters more than our work for You. It's in our lives that we honor or profane Your name. Keep us from sin that would put us out of the race. So much is at stake, and we fall so easily.
Give us pure hearts. If obedience is better than sacrifice, devotion is better than obedience. Saul lost the kingship because he disobeyed about cattle. David--by grace--remained a man after Your heart though he committed adultery and murder. So many of the stories in Kings and Chronicles are tragedies simply because the hearts of the kings did not remain fully devoted to You. Keep us from apathy, distraction, busyness, and anything else that would draw our hearts away from You.
Let us be a generation that seeks Your face, O God of Jacob. If we do, it will be only by Your grace.
| | |
| I found this article in the Sunday Pioneer Press to be very interesting. Rod Dreher expresses well many of the things that have long bothered me about people like Dawkins in their religiously militant nonreligiosity.
"Most atheists I know don't care for religion, obviously, but aren't angry about it. Not so the True Unbelievers — the Dawkinses and their followers — who prove that you don't have to be religious to be a fundamentalist.
"That is, the people Gray calls 'evangelical atheists' believe all would be well with our lot if everybody would get on board with their sternly anti-religious program.... Unfortunately, militant atheism in power has repeated all the crimes of religious regimes and, absent ethical restraints, made them vastly worse. Though their ideologies despised Christianity, both the communists and the Nazis justified their own monstrosities as 'scientific.' While religion's atrocities cannot be denied, today's atheist campaigners blindly refuse to accept that atheism's savage legacy is no accident.
"'There's a reason for that,' Gray said. 'If the New Atheists came to terms with it, they'd have to give up their basic faith. Their very project is flawed, and that flaw is the atheist project of liberating people from their traditions, their history and their humanity.'
"The religious sense — of awe, of mystery, of a need for meaning — is hard-wired into our species, which is why Gray, a nonbeliever, identifies a 'funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human.' He's certainly correct to warn that the attempt to repress the religious instinct (as with the sexual instinct) only means it will reappear in some other, degraded form — the operatic pseudo-paganism of the Nazis, say, or the Soviet Stalinist cult, or even, more benignly, the faintly ridiculous idea of an atheist church [www.churchoffreethought.org]."
READ MORE | | |
| Last night Greg & I watched The Kite Runner. I know, I should have read the book, but there are too many books on my to-read list and not enough movies on my to-watch list, and... we watched the movie.
I have to say, first of all, that as much as I would like to take issue with a lot of things about our government, the more I learn about others', the more appreciative I am of this democratic republic.
But that wasn't all that crossed my mind as I watched this difficult-to-watch film. I saw the horrors that religion can cause. As I watched the Taliban member call for the stoning of the adulterous couple, knowing that he himself was a pedophile, I thought, This is what religion leads to.
It reminded me of the religious leaders bringing an adulterous woman to Jesus and saying that the law said to stone her; what did He say? I've always loved Jesus' response: "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her" (Jn. 8:7).
No one found themselves at odds with Jesus more than the religious people. Jesus never verbally attacked prostitutes, tax collectors, murderers, or any other kind of "sinner," but He called the religious leaders a "brood of vipers" (Mt. 23:33). As I watch the Taliban, I think of the Pharisees, and I think, An apt description. No wonder Jesus would not put up with them. Religion is about rules and rituals and trying to somehow earn a right standing with God, and it always morphs into hierarchies and battles and hypocrisy, because, of course, none of us can be all that good religiously.
Jesus, on the other hand, was all about relationships. His laws summed up to love God and love people (Mt. 22:38-39). Unlike any religion up to that time or since, Jesus wasn't trying to tell people how they could earn favor with God. He was God come to find us because we couldn't find Him on our own. He had come to rescue us, be the remedy, take our punishment upon Him... so that we didn't have to try the rule-keeping, ritual-following road to hypocrisy.
And so Jesus is the remedy--the ONLY remedy--for religion gone wrong.
With all due respect to the intro to the movie by "The Kite Runner"s author, all of the humanitarian aid, money, and education in the world will not fix the problems in Afghanistan or anywhere else. The evil runs deeper. The problem is larger. The pain is bigger. Unless the very worldview of a faulty religion and corrupt leadership is changed at the core, the injustice will persist despite humanitarian aid, and we waste our money.
Like the atheist who somehow understood that God was fixing what humanitarian aid could not in Africa (see my last post), only Jesus brings the remedy to what is most needed in countries run by corrupt Muslim governments.
And He calls us to bring that remedy.
"Where there is pain, let there be grace.
Where there is suffering, bring serenity.
For those afraid, help them be brave.
Where there is misery, bring expectancy.
And surely we can change,
surely we can change,
something.
Oh the world's about to change,
the whole world's about to change..."
--David Crowder Band, "Surely We Can Change"
| | |
| My friend Megan (a missionary in Uganda) sent me the link to this very refreshingly honest and surprising article about why he, an atheist who grew up in Africa, sees the need for Christian evangelism, not just physical aid, in Africa.
"But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
"Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good."
Read the rest of the article here... it's worth the read!
| | |
| What would happen if you encountered God face-to-face in a shack?
That's the gist of William P. Young's speculation in his book "The Shack." His main character, Mack, had a young daughter who was kidnapped and brutally killed, and since that fateful day Mack has dealt with "The Great Sadness" and has questioned God's goodness. Then one day he gets a note from "Papa" (God) inviting him to a meeting at the shack--the very place where they found the evidence of his missing daughter's death.
I read this book after a couple friends told me a should. I don't always feel the need to read the books "everybody's reading," but sometimes I want to be in on the conversations and see what all the hype is about. And there's quite a bit of hype about this one.
Unwarranted, I think. It could be that the $6 I paid the library in late fees (oops!) has given me a bad taste for the book, but I think it's more than that. Aside from a few somewhat-significant theological differences (Tim Challies covers them pretty well in his review, which I encourage you to check out if you want a more involved theological review--especially what he says about the Trinity, submission, free will, and Scripture), there was one thing that bothered me the most.
It just doesn't seem to line up with the biblical stories of people encountering God.
Not that it's heretical, really. It might come close sometimes, but it's often too vague for me to really be sure of what he's getting at (other than that Young is definitely not a Calvinist). But one big thing is missing.
He doesn't fall on his face.
When the great prophet Isaiah "saw the Lord" (Isa. 6:1), his response was "uh-oh... I'm a goner" (my paraphrase). The glory and splendor was too much; he saw his sin as too great and thought he would die. But God in His grace took away his sin and allowed him to see and live.
When John, arguably the man closest to Jesus on earth, saw a vision of the risen, glorified Jesus, he fell on his face (Rev. 1:17) and Jesus had to touch him and raise him to his feet. In fact, throughout Scripture, we see seraphim covering their faces and feet, angels falling on their faces, and people bowing down at the presence of God.
When Job (another man with a lot of hurt who questioned why God had allowed it to happen) heard from God, he--like Mack in "The Shack"--was given more questions than answers, learned more about God than about his situation... but the differences in the responses of "God" in The Shack compared to God in the book of Job are profound. In Young's writing, God spends most of his time trying to show Mack that he is loved and that God is good. In Job, we hear God say, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?... Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?" (Job 38:4, 34-35).
The God we find in Young's book does not seem that big. Nice, perhaps wise, and a good cook... but no one's falling facedown. There's a conspicuous lack of glory. And the lack of glory makes the love seem not as meaningful.
That's not the God I know.
It's part of Him, perhaps. Like I said, the book's not heretical. It rattles some cages that probably need rattling and has a few profound things to say, but not enough to warrant most of the hype I've heard. Young wants to take God out of the box most people have for Him, and I can respect that. But I wonder about some of the ways he chooses to do it. Yes, God could show up as an African woman if He wanted, I suppose, but you've got to wonder why He never does this in Scripture. Mack is startled to realize that all of his mental pictures of God had always been "very white and very male," and well, the white is probably something from his culture, but male... that's likely because God is called "He" throughout ALL of Scripture... and don't you think God probably has His reasons?
Read the book if you want to know one man's perception of God. But if you truly want to know GOD, the best book I'd suggest is the one He wrote about Himself. | | |
|
