Archives For Life

Because unlike God we lack proportion in our experience.

The Objectivity of the Clock

The consistent tic of the clock teaches us to think of the future as something added to the past. We view time like a pile of beads added to a infinite string – every moment added to a series of equal moments.

The Failure of the Analogy

But the present is not a simple bridge between our future and past. It is and forever will be an end.

I’ve heard it said, “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” But in relation to time, it’s more true to say, “today is the last day of the life that we have lived.”

Our experience is unrelated to what is yet to come. It’s defined only in what has been.

Only by knowing eternity could we ever experience the consistency of the clock. For only then could we come to a true sense of proportion.

But because our experience of time grows with time we are continually remembering the past as longer than it is.

Only God in his eternal nature know’s the objectivity of the clock. And it is thus thinking of our lives in terms of the clock that we once again claim to be Him.

Reflecting on God’s eternality and the transitoryness of our lives, the Psalmist asks of God,

teach us to number our days, that we may present to you a heart of wisdom (Psalms 90:12).

Here’s a way we can do that.

A Better Analogy

Instead of thinking of experience of time like beads added to an infinite string, we should think of our it as a pie ever-dividing.

The analogy of the string suggests we can look outside ourselves and see our future experience as equal to how it is now. But a circle’s wholeness recognizes that we never actually add time to our lives.

In the analogy of the circle we see that each added moment makes shorter the one before. The pieces grow shorter and shorter. This more accurately reflects our experience.

The feeling of year, for us, is indeed growing shorter.

What do you think? What does the analogy say about our future experience of time?

How does one offer Jesus to a world that does not know God?

For those of us who believe in the atoning work of Jesus, it’s sometimes difficult to see how the meaning of the cross is not at all apparent to the people around us. As we proclaim the power of the cross to save, unbelievers are scratching their heads, wondering how the death of a man two thousand years ago makes a hill of beans difference in the postmodern world. And it saves? Saves from what?

I believe this was central to the controversy surrounding the Passion of the Christ. Christians perceived in the film a universal significance that has the power to change every man, woman and child. Unbelievers saw a man brutalized for two and half hours.

Jesus Saves Us From God

Historically evangelicals have looked to a person’s recognition of sin as the starting point for sharing the good news. Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is the model. Edward’s described in graphic detail the wrath of God waiting to be poured out on sinners. It was so powerful that when he first read it (yes read it) in his Massachusetts church, people fainted and cried out with grief at the recognition of their condition.

This has been our approach ever sense. Introduce people to the wrath of God against sinners and the hope that is found in Jesus and nonchristians will accept Jesus as the means of their salvation every time.

Of course this worked well in Edward’s small puritan community where the belief in Judeo-Christian God was axiomatic and like Hester Pririm in the Scarlet Letter, people had to wear their sin on their sleeve.

The Death of God

But what happens when people cease to believe in God or at least a god that is concerned with matters such as right and wrong?

Since the Enlightenment, the world has been increasingly moving in that direction. With cosmological discoveries such as those made by Copernicus and Newton, Western civilization’s image of God shifted from an active present spiritual force which moved the heavens each and every day to a distant clockmaker who wound up his creation and left it to run.

Deism was the intellectual halfway house between theism and atheism. With the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution, scholars were at last allowed to be, as Richard Dawkins has said, “intellectually fulfilled atheists.” Invisible deities began to be regarded like Santa Clause. True reality was found in the five senses – tangible empirical experience.

The remarkable achievements of science rooted in the senses have created today a world that trusts empirical evidence and distrusts things that cannot be tangibly verified. Today whether or not one says they believe in God, for most he has become an absent landlord or a harmless projection of the imagination.

As a result,  people are simply no longer concerned about God’s moral law.

Living in the New World

So what has become of our evangelical witness?

It’s increasingly shrill.

Witnessing no longer has the ease of placing bread before a hungry man.  Without a sense of guilt, people just don’t see the need for the cross.  So instead of simply offering the hope of Jesus, the Church has become the finger by which society is made aware of its sin.  Instead of simply bearing the message of the one who can free us from guilt the Church has become the sole voice of guilt in a society that by and large no longer feels guilty.

And thus nonchristians avoid us like the plague.

Sadly we don’t realize that in abandoning belief in God, unbelievers have begun to suffer from another disease, hopelessness, purposelessness, nihilism. The death of God is the death of meaning. Society ran from the God of absolute truth in part to alleviate itself from guilt but in the process it became mired in an equally depressing reality.

If there is no wrong then there is no right. If there is no sin then there is no purity. In denying the one they have denied the other. If one cannot error then there is no point, no meaning for ones own existence.

People still suffer for their sin they just don’t recognize it in the way that we have traditionally approached it.

So how should we respond?  How do we share Jesus with our culture?  How does He meet the felt needs our community and friends?

Did I get it right?

Sometime ago I engaged in an online discussion with Brian Kirk, a youth pastor and well known youth ministry blogger.  Brian wrote a post in which he mused

This all make me wonder: Why does the Church spend so much time pushing GLBT individuals away, labeling them, encouraging society to deny them rights and privileges, and motivating Christians to get out and vote by dangling anti-gay amendments in their faces?  What would happen if the Church spent one tenth of that energy getting to know gay persons as people -not as an issue or biblical hot topic – but as fellow children of God?  What would happen if the Church became the primary voice in our culture speaking out for justice, compassion, and inclusion of persons of minority sexual orientations?  How might such a shift affect how our teens see other students at school and their call as Christians to work for justice and peace for all people?

As one who sees it it differently, I felt I needed to respond.  Here’s the conversation.

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Brian, let me start off by saying I have two girls in my youth group who have homosexual desires. I’ve welcomed them both and I’ve even allowed them to speak about there orientation to our group. I understand your concern for GLBT youth. I echo your compassion. Christ calls us, and our love for Him compels us to seek the last, least and the lost. My problem is not your compassion but rather the line which you’ve bought. Orientation does not equal identity.

I agree that the vast majority of homosexuals for whatever reason did not choose their desire. But ones identity is more than desire. The Word of God everywhere calls us to submit our desires to the authority of Christ and find our identity in Him. It’s clear that the average heterosexual male is oriented to have sex with multiple women. Yet God calls us to surrender our orientation to practice sex within the confines of a monogamous union. I’ve surrendered to Christ. If my orientation equals my identity why should I remain sexually committed to my wife? Should I not explain to her that God loves me the way that I am and in turn she also must accept my promiscuous ways?

Or if adultery is not an issue for you, take the orientation of a pedophile for instance. For whatever reason, he or she comes to the realization that they are sexually attracted to children. Most I’ve spoken to would given a choice pick a more culturally acceptable attraction. But despite their orientation, society demands that they actively choose against their desires. In this we admit that there is a distinction between the un-chosen orientation and the individual choice to either accept or reject those desires.

The homosexual movement has gone to great lengths to convince the public that there is no choice involved in there “lifestyle” and because it’s not a choice we should accept them for who they are. But as you can see this is a morally dangerous proposition. If we must accept homosexuals for their orientation then we must accept the promiscuity of heterosexual males and equally ignore those biblical commands. In fact isn’t sin itself, in whatever form we find it, an orientation? Or have you simply abandoned the outmoded notion of sin altogether?

I don’t believe the bible teaches that homosexual sex is the worst sin committed. Paul’s point in Romans 1 is simply that homosexual sex is an obvious abandonment of what God has revealed to everyone, it being committed against our natural design. So why the Christian uproar about this particular issue? It’s really the issue of sin itself. If orientation equals identity then we might as well abandon the notion of sin altogether. They want us to believe that what is unconsciously desired is never wrong. My brother, that’s Bull Shit.

Brian said…

Matthew – just one issue I’d appreciate your response to: you make analogies between gay relationships, promiscuous heterosexuals, and pedophiles. I would affirm that promiscuous heterosexuality and pedophilia are examples of relationships in which one person does not treat the other with respect and in fact most often brings harm to the other. But what of monogamous, loving, stable gay relationships where the partners have been togther for decades and have created a positive homelife together? How is this harmful, either to the couple or to others? I understand that you beleive the Bible says that it is wrong — but why is such a relationship wrong? To put a finer point on it – if you claim that it is wrong because God says it is wrong, then WHY does God beleive it is wrong? Who is being harmed? How can God object to two consenting adults mutually loving and caring for each other? I’m not talking here about DESIRE — this isn’t all about sex — I’m talking same gendered couples who live in partnerships no less loving or stable than the best straight relationships.

Matthew Miller said…

First off God does not object to two consenting adults mutually loving and caring for each other. You’ve entirely mischaracterized the issue. No one is objecting to such relationships. You’ve heard of lifelong friendships right? The issue is sex! – Is it loving and caring to engage in a sexual relationship with a person of the same gender? You believe that despite natural design, almost universal aversion and the clear scriptural injunctions against it that homosexual sex (done properly) is okay because no one is disrespected and no one is harmed? But such a premise and conclusion are clearly wrong.

Leaving aside the issue of scripture for the moment, just look at natural design. To use a wrench as a hammer is to disrespect its purpose and ultimately its wellbeing. Whether or not it knows it, the wrench is harmed. Believe me. I’ve done it more than once. This is why I believe the issue of loving mutual consent – the main premise of your argument – is completely awry. Mutual consent does not negate injury. Homosexual sex like pedophilia and promiscuous heterosexual sex is inherently disrespectful to ones design and harmful to ones wellbeing. Would you like me to describe the physical as well as physiological injury that those who consensually engage in such acts suffer? Such sex therefore cannot be loving, no matter the expressed feelings of affection. It is not love to give what is ultimately harmful to another. And we haven’t even brought in the Bible yet. What if the Bible’s right that homosexual sex damages your spirit, violates our design and ultimately severs our relationship with God? Shouldn’t that be classified as some sort of harm?

I’ve used comparisons to adult-child sex, not because I believe homosexual sex is equally sinful, but because the things on which the argument for homosexual acceptance depends can and do often cover it as well – along with a number of other culturally abhorrent behaviors (prostitution, bestiality, polygamy). You asked me to explain God’s reasoning. I ask you to explain to me why adult-child sex is wrong in a culture that is entirely okay with it. You think stable homosexual monogamy should be the Church’s standard of right and wrong but where do you get such a notion? Certainly it’s not from scripture or natural design because both have something quite different to say. Without any fixed point of reference I find your standard of loving monogamy just a mask for whatever is culturally acceptable. I very much doubt you would have been making the same arguments 50 years ago. In a society that doesn’t care so much about the injury of others (Nazi Germany for instance), tell me your standard would be the same.

Brian said…

Matthew, I appreciate your willingness to explain your point of view. Clearly, this is a complex issue that does not lend itself easily to a discussion in a forum such as this. You and I have very different viewpoints on this issue, perhaps due to different life experiences, cultural values, places we were educated, etc that we cannot readily identify in a blog converstation. Some of the objections you have raised in your last comments regarding same gendered sex and relationships would be hard to sustain if one actually sat down and spoke with a wide variety of gay persons and asked them about their experiences, in my opinion. That said, again I appreciate your willingness to articulate your understanding of all of this. Peace,
Brian

The conversation continued a bit longer but you get the gist.

What do you think?  Was I ultimately successful or unsuccessful in making the point?  Is this the right way or the wrong way to approach the issue of same sex attractions? How would you respond?

For a fuller discussion of my take on homosexuality please watch Sam Williams – A Christian Psychology of and a Response to Homosexuality.  

Forget natural ability!  Talent only makes the job easier.  Here are 12 ways to be excellent at just about anything.

  1. Pray about it
  2. Read about it
  3. Study it
  4. Think about it
  5. Dream about it
  6. Write about it
  7. Talk about it
  8. Practice it
  9. Work at it
  10. Pursue it
  11. Do it
  12. Ohh and NEVER GIVE UP!

I need to remind myself every now and then.

Did I miss anything?

We’re ramping up for our church’s yearly firework stand.  The proceeds of course support our youth and children’s programs.  But you know what’s really cool? The residuals of the stand extend far beyond the money.  Here are 4 additional ways the stand benefits the church.

1. The stand empowers us to work as a team

Have you ever gotten lost in the details of a never ending project, wondering how your contribution makes a difference?  When goals are ill defined, teamwork can suffer, vision gets blurred and strategies become tangled.  But a goal that is SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time bound) unites a team.

At the firework stand, you never have to wonder if your time and energy are making a difference.  The goal is crystal clear.  We aim to sell as many fireworks as we can from June 28th to July 4th for the children and youth of our church.

2. The stand encourages 24/7 relationships.

Our firework stand may just be the best way for you to build lasting church relationships.  Think of it as a church bootcamp.  It often can take months for the Sunday morning and Wednesday night attender to build deep connection with people in the church.  You could speed up the process by planning and inviting others to an extra-church activity, but this too takes time.

The cool thing about the stand is that it’s a 24/7 operation.  From the 28th of June, to the 4th of July, the stand is never void of people.  There’s always a group working or just having fun hanging out.  There’s plenty of opportunities to create memories together.  If you make it a habit of coming down to the stand, I guarantee you’ll be well connected before the end of the week.

3. The stand enables a growing connection with our community

“If you build it they will come.”  Yes I know the movie wasn’t about a firework stand.  But it could have been!  It’s amazing the number and variety of people who come to our stand.  Many of them are repeat customers.  People who wouldn’t think twice about coming to church, flock to check out our product and prices.  They come for the fireworks, but in the process we sell them our mission and purpose.

Just imagine taking our church,  located at 500 SE Everett and transplanting it for a week down on the most trafficked area in Camas.  It’s more than fireworks.  Its intentional ministry.

4. The stand ensures a united celebration.

Year after year we’ve moved beyond what we previously thought possible.  In the last three years alone we’ve seen revenues climb from $10,000 to $26,000 to $42,000 – and this in the midst of a faltering economy.

This year we’re taking it above $50,000.

But again, it’s not just the money we get excited about.  The firework stand has continued to bless our church by allowing us to practice genuine and effective teamwork and to build lasting relationship inside as well as out.

I think we can praise God for that.