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I would like to highlight three articles from two British journalists and recommend them further; click on their names to read the full texts.
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. –Matthew Parris
And this:
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits. –A.N. Wilson
Finally:
…materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational. Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat. –A.N. Wilson
“I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. … This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.” – Oscar Wilde
There are few of us for whom it cannot be said that the worst of what we have suffered in our lives came as a direct or indirect result of our own actions, our own choices, our own habits of thought and emotion (it seems a cruel and imperious truth from which we reflexively, and understandably, shrink). Resultant guilt or shame can be a far more crushing weight than even our self-inflicted suffering, becoming an additional source of self-inflicted suffering. The roiling, turbid, inward, downward spiral of condemnation and pain must come to an end; we can suffer for only so long, the ultimate end of such a person is dark depression and death. If we don’t die or kill ourselves the life instinct in us fights back, claws at the walls of the well into which we have fallen, scrabbling for the surface world, for some light again. We’d be happy to fight back to a gray world, at least; we can live there, dying more slowly but still alive.
“I am Light that has come into the world so that all who believe in me won’t have to stay any longer in the dark.” –Jesus
Trite, religious, bullshit. Meaningless.
“Throw your pretty, worthless little trinkets at someone else! Don’t offend me with your simplistic aphorisms you Moron!! This is REAL life, okay? Not some fucking episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or ‘Seventh Heaven’!”
Translation: “You are not acknowledging and honoring my pain as real, as worthy of your consideration. You do not see me as a person or you would not insult me with false hope from your false prophet of B.S.. You would offer me more tangible help than that if you really cared about me at all and you don’t.”
I hate that I have ever done that to anyone in my life but I have. I hate that I did it even more when I was not being religious at all. That kind of insufferable myopia is in no way confined to religious people. Not seeing beyond the outward manifestations of another’s inward pain to the person themselves, to acknowledge that you see them, feel them, can cry with them and say, “Hey, it IS real, what you are feeling and it matters to me too!”, is endemic to the human condition.
Time after time we see that Jesus did just that; he acknowledged people and did not trivialize them. The woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well, the little children that his disciples thought should not bother the Master, he stood up for them and spoke to their hearts. He was light to them. He saw them.
Imperfectly, haltingly, but truly, people who love Jesus want to become more like him.
God, thank you for your grace and love that let me stop ruining myself. Please help me to always SEE people, to look past their acting out and their dysfunctional behaviors to the soul of them, the part that you love unconditionally and help me to love them like you do. Grant me a heart of forgiveness like yours. Through me, may they be inspired to come out of their darkness and to know you as The Light of The World. Thank you, amen.
I can forget sometimes that, at root (and my intellectual self will constantly challenge me on this) the Christian way of living is about the heart. Believe it or not, I will cringe when I hear people say that, sometimes, because I fear that non-christians will then easily dismiss Christianity as simply a preference, like preferring vanilla to chocolate, the color blue over brown. There are legion reasonable, intelligent reasons for accepting Christianity as objectively TRUE.
But this post is not about those reasons. It is a reminder to me and to you that God has a heart and we are made in his image to have one too. This is a reminder that Jesus wants us to accept his love and grace and offer our love and devotion in return to Him. Only here can we find The Truth and find it to be the reason for living we’ve been searching for.
The heart is central. That I would even need to remind you of this only shows how far we have fallen from the life we were meant to live—or how powerful the spell has been. The subject of the heart is addressed in the Bible more than any other topic—more than “works” or “serve,” more than “believe” or “obey,” more than money and even more than worship. Maybe God knows something we’ve forgotten. But of course—all those other things are matters of the heart. Consider but a few passages:
Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. (Deut. 6:5) [Jesus called this the greatest of all the command-ments—and notice that the heart comes first.]
Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. (1 Sam. 16:7)
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Luke 12:34)
Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. (Prov. 3:5)
Your word I have treasured in my heart, that I may not sin against You. (Ps. 119:11 NASB)
These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. (Matt 15:8)
For the eyes of the LORD range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. (2 Chron. 16:9)
–John Eldridge (Waking the Dead, 39-40)
In many long hours of prayer in the caves, I realized anew that the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ supersedes all else, allowing us to experience a freedom that is not limited by the borders of a world that is itself in chains. At the same time, I recognized that many of the burning theological issues in the church today are neither burning nor theological and that in an age characterized (in some quarters) by confusion, third-rate theatrics, and infidelity, it is not more rhetoric that Jesus demands but personal renewal, fidelity to the gospel, and creative conduct. As Emile Cardinal Leger said in his farewell to Montreal, “The time for talking is over.”
This is the fundamental premise around which the 230 disciples who compose the Little Brothers of Jesus have organized their lives. The Little Brothers learn to disentangle essentials from nonessentials and to realize that this particular way of life is simply an exterior consequence of an immense, passionate, and uncompromising love for the person of Jesus. To live among the poorest and most abandoned of peoples as a manual laborer without clerical garb, to pass days and weeks in the desert in the gratuitous praise of God, to communicate through friendship values that cannot be communicated through preaching, [emphasis mine] satisfies not a desire for novelty but a compulsion of love. Same may call it foolish. I call it true wisdom from the God of Love.
“The Importance of Being Foolish” – Brennan Manning
I am adding a new category to blog posts called “Excerpts & Quotes”. The new category is so named because it will include quoted material from books or other things I read and the bulk of the post will be the quoted material rather than my comments or thoughts on the quote or excerpt itself.
Sometimes I want to simply share something I think is worth sharing and not presume to ruin what I am sharing by overloading it with my own comments.
No polish on this one.
Blogs can be a little squishy, right? I mean they can be a little less perfect, more immediate, more personally revealing and less polished sometimes… Come to think of it, has anything I have written so far seemed polished really? I suppose not. But that is okay for now; at least I am writing and putting it out there. As I type this, I am in no mood to write something more considered or reflected upon.
For the past few weeks I have been feeling like a man sitting on an expanding balloon.
On a spiritual level, something has been building beneath me, lifting me up, and also expanding inside… an undeniable passionate desire to… to just spend every damned minute living significantly, living for what matters, for what life is about!
I also feel sometimes like a cartoon character whose legs are pumping, feet furiously pounding the pavement while his torso remains in place!! It is a wonderful feeling, believe it or not, albeit a bit restless…
So I bought some books today, mostly spiritual, my odd habit of routinely collecting paper containers of knowledge that I barely make time to read, as if the mere possession of them would transfer by osmosis to my brain and change me! LOL!! What a hoot! If only…
It has been said that the person you will be five years from today is shaped by the books you will read and the people you associate with. If that is true, I feel satisfied that I am, at least, trending in the right direction. God help me.
Security, pleasure and power, that triumvirate of worldly goals, has been on my mind a lot lately, synchronisticly popping up in books and magazines and conversations I have been having. I want so desperately to leave that dirt behind me. It is such crap, such nonsense, so unworthy of the attentions of an eternal soul and yet so damned compelling! All the self-help stuff I spent years devouring is so centered on that.
Oh sure, all the gurus of fulfillment and personal growth tip the hat to “spirituality” and to humanistic acts of kindness, condescension to the poor, dirty guy on the street corner. And even that is all about patting yourself on the back and feeling good about yourself; it is almost never really about that other person and their essential worth. They’ve no idea how to even describe essential, intrinsic human worth or where it might come from, building dishonestly on the borrowed capital of a Christian worldview they tacitly reject.
What have these feelings of mine, these recent thoughts been adding up to? As I sit here, searching inside for an answer, immediately I think “Death”. Death. I have to die. I want to hurry up and die. I am in a rush to die.
No, no, not suicide or a premature, unnatural end to my life in a human body. Death in the way that it is described in the bible, death to myself, my ambitions, my overwrought concern for all the crap I wanted to accumulate. And I do not only mean physical possessions either. I mean respect and respectability. I mean craving that I be well thought of, patted on the back, liked, told what a good man I am. Do you know how hard it is to do truly good things with no thought, none whatsoever, of hoping that someone else will notice it and appreciate it?
The burden of all that, the sticky-icky muck of it all… It all just eats away like a cancer at the spiritual and emotional and physical calories I have to burn on God’s concerns, eternal concerns, the stuff that matters.
Yeah… that balloon keeps expanding… and my thoughts about it are still coalescing, coagulating, building eventually into conclusions and actions and attitudes of mind and spirit… I know this much: I need to read the Bible more and really pray about it and really meditate upon it and let the Holy Spirit speak to me through it and change me…
And there – RIGHT THERE – my knee-jerk thought reaction was “Oh, Tom, don’t start speaking Christianese, don’t get all Jesusy and Bibley or you’ll lose the interest of the few people who read your blog and ain’t into all that!” Well fuck it. Sorry, but that is exactly what I am talking about! I have got to get over that, I have to… If I am dead to myself, really dead, how could the disinterest of those people hurt me?!
A man has to have the courage of his convictions and stick to them and stand up for them whatever anyone else will ever think of him or his ideas. Do I have to follow that up with a disclaimer like, “But of course, I have to be open to input from others and changing my mind too!”? Duh. Yes. When it is right to do so. But a man will never know when that is before he has had the nerve to take a stand. Before that he is just poser, a hope-so, an almost-ran.
What a sorry way to live. Cowardly, ungodly, unworthy.
Integrity: The quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one’s actions.
I do not know with any certainty to whom I can attribute the following quote. The quote itself is something that I heard from a motivational speaker but he did not originate it. Here it is:
People of integrity expect to be believed and when they are not they let time prove them right.
If you are honest, if your actions are congruent with your words – if you have integrity – time is your ally, obviating any need to defend yourself. When you understand this a shrill, defensive posture is replaced by a calm confidence. You could look forward to “I told you so” but never give in to saying it. You can occupy the moral high ground and never be obnoxious about it. You may even exhaust your detractors.
By not defending yourself you also heed the wisdom in Proverbs 10:19, “When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable, But he who restrains his lips is wise.”
I attend a church called Scottsdale Vineyard. At the moment we are not gathering in Scottsdale and we have no building that we can call home. That probably does not meet the criteria for definition of what most people would call a church.
But we do have something uncommon. We have a close, tight-knit, in-each-other’s-lives-almost-daily group of people who love each other and Jesus. We do so many things together, have so much fun together on a regular basis that it is unlike anything I have had before as a church experience. We are family.
This whole “thing of ours” developed organically, naturally, not in a planned manner. It grew out of love for one another and our shared commitment to advance God’s kingdom here on earth. And it has come with it’s challenges.
Every family argues and fights sometimes. Every family has moments when it thinks “I’ve had it with these people! ” And we have gone through many of the classic situations you might experience in a family: misunderstandings that hurt people’s feelings, mis-communications in the retelling that lead to anger, the frustration of feeling you are not being heard, or of feeling pressured, or that these people have no right to tell me what to do! Its annoying and messy… and wonderful.
“Genuine acceptance removes fear and hiding, and creates freedom to know and to be known. In this freedom arises a fellowship and sharing so honest and open and real that the persons involved dwell in one another. There is union without loss of individual identity. When one weeps, the other tastes salt. It is only in the Triune relationship of Father, Son and Spirit that personal relationship of this order exists, and the early Church used the word ‘perichoresis’ to describe it. The good news is that Jesus Christ has drawn us within this relationship, and its fullness and life are to be played out in each of us and in all creation.” -Dr. Baxter Kruger
We are like a family in another way: we stick together. Walk away sometimes – sure. Take a breather or a break, spend less time together for a season – you betcha. But we are not gone, we did not give up, we haven’t shuffled off to find a new family while we spurn the old. “Blood is thicker than water” and we are bound together by blood and love, both handed down to us and through us from God. We are practicing genuine acceptance of each other, warts and all, foibles and failings.
And damn it this is hard sometimes!! The temptation to say “Okay, NOW I have had enough and it is time to go” can be very strong. The belief that the grass is greener somewhere else can overtake your thoughts every now and again. And just like in a marriage, the temptation to believe that “It’s just not worth the effort anymore” can creep in.
But would anyone argue that best marriages, the best friendships, the closest families are those which have endured despite the difficulties? It forges them like iron! It adds the character, the depth, the flavor that less mature relationships can never have. And there is a sense of security you have with those loved ones that cannot be gained another way.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame… Hebrews 12:1-2
The bible makes it very clear that Jesus had his own struggle with what he had to do, that he asked the Father if he might be released from the task before him, but he endured even a brutal execution and humiliating death because he saw a joyful result beyond the pain. In this way, as in so many others, he is our exemplar. Notice too that the bible does not say that Jesus just grit his teeth and did his duty like a good soldier. He didn’t heave a heavy sigh and say “By your command Father” and force his way through the pain like a man walking against blizzard winds. He was motivated by the JOY! He saw a glorious end result and he kept it in mind.
Jesus said in John 13:34-35 that all men would know we are his disciples by having love for one another. What?! That verse always bugged me because I thought, “Lots of people love one another that are not Jesus disciples so how is that any proof?!” But the bible is a very funny thing, it has layer-upon-layer of meaning that can only be revealed through time, experience, prayer, and persistence. There are many treasures to be found but not all of them are easily gained. Too often to count I have had the experience of recognizing that I could, only now, grasp more deeply the meaning of a verse that seemed so simple or, more commonly, that I now could understand what made no sense to me before.
The early church was so inspired by a love for Jesus and each other that they immediately began to gather together daily, meet each other’s needs, share meals and all their possessions (Acts 2:42-47). People of all social castes began mixing together, calling each other “brother” and “sister”. This was scandalous, counter-cultural behavior that was distinctive and captured the hearts of so much of the pagan world at that time that the “little Christs” (which is what the label ‘Christian’ means) spread quickly throughout the known world. People knew them by their love for one another.
That verse and the mere possibility of it’s truth only began to dawn on me as I have contemplated this experience of organic church I am having right now. It is something rather unique and inexplicable to non-theistic minds. Yeah, I know, “What an arrogant statement Tom!” Well, maybe, but it is my firm opinion based on at least a little experience and thought. Feel free to disagree and send me your examples.
I see something great in this, through this, on the other side of all this and it motivates me to keep at it. It can improve. We can love more, be more available to one another, spend less time feeling hurt or slighted and more time just appreciating one another. We could focus even more on Jesus and the Word than we do. We are not quite the 2nd chapter of Acts community, not yet.
But I see potential for our little community, potential and mission. We have got to show the world something better than what your typical mega-corporate-institutional-buildingcentered church has shown, at least on the human side, the relational side of our faith which is, after all, what Jesus instructed us to focus on and not new brochures and building projects. There is effort and toil… and a prize to be had that makes it worth it all. Church like that changes the world and spreads God’s kingdom here on earth. That is the joy set before me.
The urge to be honest, open, and unfiltered all of the time is hard to not give in to.
A woman in my life got angry with me a few times saying “You can’t leave it alone, I know you, your bullshit detector is too good and you can’t turn it off!!” That could be taken as a sly way of complimenting myself (or pointing out what a jerk I can be) but I don’t mean it that way. I simply do not have a lot of patience or grace in the presence of lies, falsehood, deceit, secrets, or people clearly spouting dishonest justifications (perhaps unconsciously) for what they believe or did or do. I hate it and I don’t want to BE that.
If you are built like me you find that you are constantly trying to turn that B.S. detector on yourself too. No one can do that perfectly but I try like hell. Logic and reason can be used to determine a course of action yet often they are used instead to rationalize a belief or action after the fact; we are motivated by our emotions and then we backwards rationalize what we’ve done.
So let’s start with my decision to publicly declare myself a Jesus follower, a Christian, claiming that Christianity is true, not just a preference, not just something that feels good but The Truth.
I have confidence that an incredibly unique, counter-cultural, iconoclastic, Jewish dude named Jeheshuah Ben Joseph was born in the middle east sometime around Gregorian calendar year zero. That guy challenged the Jewish religious authorities, declared himself the fulfillment of prophecies in their scriptures, identified himself as God and took on the Hebrew deity’s most ancient name when he said “Before Abraham was, I AM“. He earned himself a sentence of death when he agreed that he was king of the Jews before the Roman procurator of Judea. He was killed and his body put into a burial tomb. He came back to life and ignited a religious firestorm that transformed the known world and has endured for two thousand years outliving all its enemies. The things he said about his own identity do, to this day, challenge me in ways that no other world teacher or philosophy ever have.
I have moved well past the idea that because I do not or cannot fully intellectually grasp every nuance of what it means to be a Christian that therefore I should just not be a believer and throw out the baby with the bathwater. I am way past that because my experiences in being connected to Jesus and Church and my experience trying to be connected with other types of philosophies, groups and spiritualities provided a dramatic contrast; other ways were so anemic and flabby and lacking that there is just no comparison. Existentially, my life is simply better, happier living as a Christian than living any other way I have tried. It seems to answer more questions and satisfy and honor more parts of what make me human than any other approach does. That reason alone is sufficient for me to proudly declare myself a disciple of Jesus. And I would also be the first to admit that my personal experience could only be a part of a broader presentation of proofs for the truth claims of Christianity.
So what am I trying to say? And why is this post named “Transparency”? I am trying to explain that even with something as “personal” as my choice of religion I wish to be open and honest: transparent. I want not to kid myself into believing falsehoods. I feel a certain internal impulse to write about my thoughts and experiences as I live this out and… well, I guess I’m just leaving it in His hands what happens with that. Consider this a warning too that I might offend. I will use colorful language, sometimes plainly express my frustration or other negative emotion. Hell, you might be even more embarrassed by my expression of love or gratitude or other positive emotions! That scares the crap out of me too because it means you’ll see more deeply into me than I have been comfortable with up to now. I never want to be trite, self-indulgent, or boorish about this. There is enough of that on the internet today, more every moment, and I loathe it. To become that which I loathe would truly disturb and unnerve me the moment I realized what had happened. But there is some value to authenticity and transparency and it is what I feel compelled to share.
Time will reveal the value of this mode of expression and I reserve the right to backpedal, change my mind and change direction at any time.
God help me.
It is generally considered impolite to ask someone an intrusive question like “What is your religious belief?” We could reword it to sound more innocuous and say “What is your philosophical worldview?” They really are the same question but the first might get you a mildly offended look while the second would be most likely greeted by a quizzical expression. But have you thought about it?
For most people, the question remains unanswered; they’ve just never thought about it, they really don’t know. So they are left to the influence of advertisers and newscasters, the opinions of characters in movies and sitcoms all just accepted in with little grid that could help them to filter out the bad or acknowledge the good.
Confused, subconsciously trying to hold to contradictory beliefs, they wander through life riding up and down, forward and backward on the manic-depressive emotional waves lapping the shore of their daily life.
Funny thing is, these same people will be the first to trash your Christ. They know church sucks, every religious person is a hypocrite, the bible is a bunch of old, dumb stories and history that have no relevance to their lives. Jesus bones were found and a documentary about it done by that guy who made “Titanic” right? Besides, “The DaVinci Code” showed it all to be a misogynistic plot against pagans who, after all, understood and honored women more than the christian religion does.
Opinions like that from the under informed, misinformed, pop-culture consuming masses do nothing to dent what makes Jesus so awesome.
Jesus was born about 2000 years ago in humble circumstances to a teenage mother and a carpenter father. He never traveled more than a few hundred miles from his home, never made significant amounts of money, never held a powerful office, never married, never had children, never wrote a book. He life was humble in every way.
He made the most extraordinary, unparalleled truth claims in the history of the world. He said things that no other religious leader has ever said! He said he was without any sin (John 8:46). He said he could forgive sin (Mark 2:5-12). He claimed to be the way to God (John 14:6-7). He claimed he was omnipotent (Matthew 28:18). More, he claimed to be GOD (John 8:56-59, John 10:30-33)!
Jesus simple life went off like a bomb in history and the echo of Jesus person and work continues 2000 years later. A few billion people on earth claim to worship him. Our calendar rotates around him. More songs have been sung to him, more paintings painted of him, more books written about him than anyone who has ever lived. There are no less than 17,000 books in the Library of Congress catalog about Jesus. Love him or hate him, everyone is talking about Jesus.
He is the most towering person in the history of the world!
My favorite philosopher Dallas Willard once related “Because I make my living as a university professor and philosopher I am frequently asked, in so many words, “Why do you follow Jesus Christ?” My answer is always the same: “Who else did you have in mind?”
To whom do you go for your worldview? Who has the answers? Or as I put it, “What else have you got?”
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Recently Inspiring… "Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do, - and natures like his can realise it." --Oscar Wilde in De Profundis
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