DECLARATIONS OF HOPE

On Sunday mornings we call the kids to come forward, and sit on the steps facing the congregation. We lay hands on their heads and  pray God's blessings over them.

On one of these mornings I asked the kids to share what God has been doing in them. One of our little boys spoke into the microphone and said, "This is the greatest day of my life!"

This child's statement stuck with me. It reminded me of a card I sometimes carry with me. The words apply to you, too. It is no accident that you are alive, in this time, in this place, "for such a time as this."

This truth brings great hope.

***

DECLARATIONS of HOPE (adapted from Steve Backlund)

• Today is the day that God is going to show off His favor on me.
• I speak to any worry, stress, or anxiety, and I say you cannot stay. Peace reigns in this temple.
• There is nothing I am facing that Scripture cannot speak into.
• I am not who my past experience says I am; I am who God says I am.
• Today is the day of my breakthrough — I am free!
• Because I trust in God, I am kept in perfect peace.
• My hope, my finances, my strategies, and my partnerships with others are causing great positive change in lives and nations.
• Tomorrow is going to be one of the best days of my life.
• I will wake up with strong faith, strong love, and strong hope in my heart.
• My past prayers will be working mightily today in every situation that concerns me.
• As I attach faith to what I am hearing, He will do far more than I could ever hope or imagine.

Grief, Remembered and Embraced

(Door, in Jerusalem)

 

Forty years ago I became a "man of sorrows, acquainted with grief." A son was born, and survived, for which I will always be grateful. His twin brother, whom Linda and I named David, died. 

David was fully formed, yet stillborn. I held the weight of his dead body in my arms. I never will forget that moment, nor do I want to. I have rarely, if ever, felt such inner pain. "Grief" is the word we use to describe the indescribable. I was "grieving."

I read from four devotional books every morning. One of them contains selections from the writings of C.S. Lewis (A Year With C.S. Lewis). Fifty-two years ago, when I became a Jesus-follower, Lewis was there to greet me. 

I went to a bookstore looking for Christian books, and purchased Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I, the new Jesus-follower and philosophy major, had some powerful weapons in my hands. As I read Bonhoeffer I did not understand him. Later in life, I was finally ready to read The Cost of Discipleship, parts of which have never left me. Bonhoeffer's book renders most "discipleship" books written after him unnecessary.

It was Lewis that initially captivated me. Here was a brilliant scholar, a very good thinker, a convert from atheism to Christian theism, who also wrote for children. Lewis combined a sharp intellect with childlike wonder. He was introspective, perhaps too much so. Lewis lets us into his inner life, and I was drawn in to the working out of his salvation.

I read Mere Christianity, then the space trilogy (especially Perelandra), then the brilliant Till We Have Faces (I re-read it this summer), the Narnia books, and his books on miracles and pain and joy and so on.

Then I read A Grief Observed. It's about what's happening to Lewis's insides after his wife Joy died of cancer. Initially he published the book under a pseudonym, N.W. Clerk. (Sometimes I kick myself for not buying the N.W. Clerk edition for $20 I saw in a used bookstore in the early 1970s.) Lewis exposes all of himself in this grief journal; his pain, doubts, anguish, his awkwardness, loneliness, his fears, in an unforgettable architectonic of grief. 

When I first read it, I thought Lewis, at times, was abandoning his Jesus-faith. Then I realized he's still fully a Jesus-follower who sounds like a 20th-century lament-psalmist, and who, in this journal, bears his entire heart and soul before the God he follows and the God he wonders about.

A Grief Observed was hard to read. I could not help but think of Linda, my young and beautiful wife, and what it would do to me should she die before I do. Or, conversely, the thought of her being alone, without me, was hard to entertain.

Lewis writes:

"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel his claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him in gratitude and praise, you will be - or so it feels - welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence... There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited... Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?... Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him."

If you've never before heard such words come out of a God-believer, you've never read the Psalms. You've not internalized the cry of Jesus from the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me." You've never understood Paul, who writes in Romans 8:18, "I consider these present sufferings not worthy of being compared to the glory that will be revealed in heaven." 

After reading Lewis on grief, I admired him more than ever. Following Jesus is not about being "happy" all the time. It is about advancing his Kingdom against the kingdom of evil and darkness and sin. As I write these words, in this moment, be assured there is a lot of grief out there. And rest assured that, in Jesus, the promised Messiah of Isaiah 53, we have "a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief."

If you are grieving today, and are a lover of Jesus, do not be ashamed of your emotional anguish. In Jesus, you have a Redeemer who is well-acquainted with depths of anguish and the turbulent seas of your soul. While following Jesus has brought me the greatest joys in life, I have found him sympathetic to my every weakness, and that I can bring every part of me to him.

(Lewis published A Grief Observed in 1961. After that he wrote things like Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, and published Christian Reflections.)

Remembering (Combating Spiritual Alzheimer's Disease)

Del & Linda

Linda's mother suffered from Alzheimer's Disease for many years. This horrible illness caused her to slowly lose her memory. One result of her memory loss was an increase of fear.

One afternoon Linda, her mother Martha, her father Del, and I were shopping in a mall. At one point Linda and Del left to shop together while I stayed with Martha. We sat for a minute and then she looked at me, eyes filled with panic, and asked, "Where's Del?!"

"He's shopping with Linda. He'll be right back," I responded.

This put Martha at ease. But only for a few minutes. Forgetting what I had just said, Martha looked at me again and asked, "Where's Del?"

"He's with Linda. He'll be right back."

This happened several times in an hour, with Martha forgetting, me reminding her, she calming down, then forgetting and filled with fear, asking "Where's Del?", and me reminding her again. Martha not only had forgotten what I said to her, she forgot a more basic truth, which was: in Del, she had a husband who would never, ever leave her or forsake her. He was always by her side, Alzheimer's or not.

There is a "spiritual Alzheimer's disease" which results in forgetting the many times God has rescued and delivered us, provided for us, and been with us. Such forgetting breeds fear. The more one forgets the deeds of God in one's own life, the more one becomes fearful in the present moment.

The antidote to this is: remembering.

"Remembering" is huge in the Old Testament. The post-Exodus experience of Israel is grounded in remembrance. The Jewish festivals are remember-events, such as Passover, when the head of the household sits with his family and asks, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" In response, the past is recounted, how God delivered their people out of bondage in Egypt. Remembering, which reminds them of God's faithfulness, brings fresh hope.

My spiritual journal functions as a written memory of the voice and deeds of God in my life. I take time every year to re-ponder my journals. In doing so, I remember what God has done for me, how he has delivered me from bondage, and how he answered many prayers. I re-read of past times when I was afraid, or worried, and then re-read how God came through, and my worry dissipated.

I do not, I will not, forget the deeds of the Lord in my life. 

The spiritual discipline of remembering brings renewed hope in the present, defeating the onset of spiritual Alzheimer's disease.

***

My books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

31 Letters To the Church on Praying

31 Letters To the Church on Discipleship

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity

Encounters With the Holy Spirit (Co-edited with Janice Trigg)

If Jesus Is the Only Way to God, What About Those Who Have Never Heard of Him?

Shipshewana, Indiana (photo by Linda Piippo)

How about some theological discussion? If Jesus is the only way to God, what about those who have never heard of him? (For in-depth see What About Those Who Have Never Heard? Three Views on the Destiny of the Unevangelized, John Sanders, ed.)

Imagine this story. John does not believe in Jesus. But Jason does. Jason tells John about Jesus, and John is interested. 

Jason feels God wants him to get back to John soon, but does not find time to get back to John. John dies without hearing more. What was John’s status before John died? To be saved, did he need more information about Jesus? 

Paul Copan asks: “Was his eternal destiny in the hands of [someone] who happened not to respond to an inner prompting? Could it be that God is more interested in a person’s spiritual direction or responsiveness than in his spiritual ‘location’ on a continuum?”

Theistic philosopher Copan does an excellent job of presenting the issues and suggesting answers to the question: what if someone has never had the opportunity to hear about Jesus? The points below are from Copan’s book True for You, But Not for Me: Overcoming Objections to Christian Faith. Read the book for more detail and explanation, especially regarding Copan’s “middle knowledge” position.

Here are the relevant points. 

1. God’s desire is that all be saved.

2. All who desire to be saved will have the opportunity to be saved.

3. We can trust that God is loving and just. We can trust that the eternal outcome of every person is in the hands of a loving and just God.

4. Persons who have self-inflicted “transworld depravity” will not want God, or God in Christ. So God is not unjust in applying eternal justice to them; viz., everlasting separation from his presence. (1 Thessalonians 1)

5. God has given persons free will. This is risky. Some will likely freely choose to reject God’s offer of salvation, and his revelation in creation and the moral law within (Romans 1 and 2). As C.S. Lewis wrote, re. this, there are two kinds of persons: one who says to God “Thy will be done,” and one to whom God says “Thy will be done.”

6. If God has middle-knowledge (knowledge of future choices) and knows that John will reject Him in any possible world, then God is not unjust in not presenting John with the opportunity to be saved.
 
Here are five views on the question "What about those who have never heard?"

1. The Agnostic View.

a. Alister McGrath and J.I. Packer are agnostic on the matter.

b. If God really loves the whole world, and if Christ died for all without exception, and if God commands all to repent, and if God does not want any to perish, “then it follows that his initiating grace, though resistible (Acts 7:51), is directed toward all without exception. This would include the unevangelized.” (Copan)

c. We can trust that God has the question of the unevangelized figured out.

d. Further, God has done so much to reach us all, even to suffer with us in a world filled with evil and misery, that we have good reason to believe the unevangelized are in excellent hands.

e. We can trust that God is loving and just. So God won’t condemn anyone for being born at the wrong time and place (viz., in a time and place where the message of the Gospel of Jesus was not known).

f. God is able to reach people in ways we don’t expect. For example, he can reveal himself – and has done so – through visions or angelic messengers. Copan cites examples of Jesus appearing to Muslims who had never heard of him.

g. In the end we can trust in a good God to do no wrong. “We should not think about the unevangelized apart from God’s character, motives, and good purposes.” (Copan)

2. The Inclusivist (Wider-Hope) View 

a. In Romans 2:7 Paul writes: “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor, and immortality, [God] will give eternal life.”

b. Could some unevangelized people fit in this category?

c. Inclusivists say: Salvation is exclusive in its source – Christ alone as God’s full, final revelation. Salvation is available to every person – even those the missionary can’t reach.

d. One criticism of this view is that accepting it would diminish missionary zeal. Why bring Christ to the nations if the nations can be saved without hearing of Christ?

e. The inclusivist responds by asking why anyone’s fate should solely depend on evangelists who are not always available and/or faithful?

f. Belief in the sovereignty of God makes us think God will not really leave the destiny of unreached people in the hands of imperfect, fallible missionaries. Can’t God work beyond the boundaries of the gospel’s proclamation and our expectations?

g. What about those in the Old Testament who didn’t know about the historical Jesus and his death and resurrection? “Clearly they were saved on the basis of what Jesus would eventually accomplish (Rom. 3:25; see Acts 17:30).

h. And what about infants and those who are mentally incapable of grasping the gospel message?

i. The inclusivist believes that human beings are guilty and helpless before God, separated from him, and cannot be saved apart from Christ.

j. The inclusivist believes that God wants all to be saved. This seems to imply that he makes salvation available to all.

k. The inclusivist claims that salvation through Jesus’ “name” doesn’t necessarily imply knowing the historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth. While Jesus is ontologically necessary for salvation, he is not epistemologically necessary.

l. Natural revelation may have a positive role and may be used by God’s Spirit to show the unevangelized their need for him. For example, Romans 1:20 and Romans 2:14-15 may give us two ways persons can be saved without hearing of the Jesus story. Here inclusivists are optimistic about the role of “general revelation” through the creation, and the moral law within each human heart. Millard Erickson, who is not an inclusivist, says: “If they [persons who know about God through his self-revelation in nature (cf. Romans 1:20) but still reject God] are condemnable because they have not trusted God through what they have, it must have been possible somehow to meet this requirement through this means. If not, responsibility and condemnation are meaningless… Perhaps there is room for acknowledging that God alone may know in every case exactly whose faith is sufficient for salvation.” (In Copan)

m. The Roman centurion Cornelius (Acts 10) seems to be an example of someone who seems to display the working of God’s Spirit and grace in is life.

n. John Stott summarizes the inclusivist argument: “What we do not know, however, is exactly how much knowledge and understanding of the Gospel people need before they can cry to God for mercy and be saved. In the Old Testament, people were certainly “justified by grace through faith,” even though they had little knowledge or no expectation of Christ. Perhaps there are others today in a somewhat similar position. They know they are sinful and guilty before God, and that they cannot do anything to win his favor, so in self-despair they call upon the God they dimly perceive to save them. If God does save such, as many evangelical Christians tentatively believe, their salvation is still only by grace, only by Christ, only by faith.” (In Copan)

Copan presents an argument against the inclusivist position.

a. Inclusivism can blur important distinctions, which can result in disastrous affirmations. For example, some inclusivists hold that Muslims whoa re seeking Allah can be saved.

b. Romans 1 seems to argue against the inclusivist position. Paul has a pessimistic view of humanity’s ability to turn to God because of God’s revelation in nature.

c. There are people who don’t respond to general revelation yet respond to the preaching of the gospel.

d. Inclusivism dampens concern for missions. “It seems doubtful that inclusivism would actually increase evangelistic fervor.”

3. The Accessibilist/Middle Knowledge View

a. God judges the unevangelized based on their response to natural revelation, which his Spirit can use to bring them to salvation. “Natural revelation doesn’t damn anyone without furnishing genuine opportunities to be saved (Romans 2:7) God’s initiative offers them prevenient (“preceding”) grace to respond. All they need to do is humble themselves before him and repent. God is not only just in his judgment, but also gracious in genuinely offering salvation.” (Copan)

b. God can’t make people freely choose to respond to the gospel. “Some might be like NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel, who said, ‘I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ Indeed, with every new indication of God’s reality, a person might come to resent or hate him even more.”

c. God knows all future possibilities and free choices of human beings, and whoever would want to be saved will find salvation. God knows all truths – even future ones. God knows all possible future events and human choices – what free creatures could do in various circumstance and what world-arrangements are feasible.” For example, Jesus knew (from the Father) that Peter would deny him three times. God knew that Peter would freely choose to deny Christ under certain circumstances.

d. God takes human free will seriously. Copan says: “No one will be condemned as the result of geographical or historical accident, lack of information, or failure of a missionary to “get there.” All who want – or would want – to be saved do find salvation. Those who would always refuse salvation get their way in the end.”

e. Perhaps there’s no feasible world of persons who all freely choose Christ; this God creates a world containing an optimal balance of fewest lost and greatest number saved. Sometimes people ask: “Why didn’t God create world in which everyone freely chose to love him?” But if humans are truly free, then there’s guarantee they will use their free will to love him. Remember that God does not create out of any need. God desires that none perish; he wants us to embrace him and live. Copan writes: “So it’s reasonable to believe that he wants a maximal number of persons saved and a minimal number condemned. He wants his renewed creation – the new heaven and earth – to be as full as possible and hell as empty as possible. The only thing preventing hell’s being completely empty of people is the human will’s resistance to his loving and gracious initiative. God isn’t less loving because some people are condemned for rejecting him. So why couldn’t this world be the one that achieves this optimal balance?”

f. Some persons possess self-inflicted “transworld depravity” or “transworld damnation”; they would have been lost in any world in which they were placed.

g. Missions motivation isn’t diminished, since God has also providentially arranged fort human messengers to bring the gospel to those he knew would accept it if they heard it.

h. Some individuals may seem “so close” to salvation in the actual world without finding it. But perhaps this actual world is the very nearest the transworldly depraved ever come to salvation.

Dr John Piippo | How To Pray Effective Prayers!

 

Technology and Spiritual Formation - Bibliography (in process)

 

(The Lutheran Home, in Monroe, MI)

I post this for any who think spiritual formation into Christlikeness is important, and wonder how technological advances will affect this.

This morning I am reading Eric Larson's book. (See below.)

Somewhere in me a book about this relationship is brewing.

Here are books I have read and studied to help me better understand the relationship between technology, culture, and Christian spiritual formation. 

A note: Linda and I watched "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix. Helpful. Well done. Concerning. Frightening.

Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.

Aiken, Mary, The Cyber Effect: An Expert in Cyberpsychology Explains How Technology is Shaping Our Children, Our Behavior, and Our Valuers, and What We Can Do About It. 

Mark Bauerlein, ed. The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking

Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

David Baggett and Jerry Walls, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning

James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Albert Borgmann, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology

Danah Boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

John Brockman, ed. Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

John Brockman, ed. What to Think About Machines that Think

Harold I. Brown, Perception, Theory and Commitment: The New Philosophy of Science

Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Heidi Campbell, Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture 

Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers are Changing Us

Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves.

William Davies, The Happiness Industry

Craig Detweiler, iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual and Social Lives

Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World: A New Translation

Ellul, The Technological Society

Amitai Etzioni, Happiness is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism

Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

Donna Freitas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost

Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation

Craig Gay, Modern Technology and the Human Future: A Christian Appraisal

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukionoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. 

Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 

James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality

Don Ihde, Philosophy and Technology: An Introduction

David Kaplan, ed. Readings in the Philosophy of Technology

Larson, Eric. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think thre Way We Do.

Tim Lewens, The Meaning of Science: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Raymond Martin. The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity

Adam McHugh, The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction

Carl Mitcham, Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology

Moreland, J.P., Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology. 

Richard Muller, Now: The Physics of Time

H. Richard Neibuhr, Christ and Culture.

Newport, Cal, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life In a Noisy World. 

Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

Pellegrino, Edmund. Human Dignity and Bioethics. 

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business 

Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Powers, William, Hamlet's Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You

Schuurman, Derek. Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology 

Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today's Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship

Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up

Mari Swingle, i-Minds: How and Why Constant Connectivity Is Rewiring Our Brains and What to Do About It

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity

Taylor, The Secular Age

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood - and What That Means for the Rest of Us

Twenge, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement

Jose van Dyck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media

***

My Books

 Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

Breaking Free from Self-Pity

 

(Lake Michigan sunset)

In Luke 9:23 Jesus tells us, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Self-denial is necessary to take up the cross and follow Jesus. It needs to be happen every day.

Self-denial involves stripping away negative aspects of the self. These are things like self-love, self-hatred, and self-pity. All are forms of self-obsession. The more self-obsession, the less following of Jesus there will be. Following Jesus is in inverse proportion to self-obsession.

Self-pity is one of the more punishing forms of self-obsession. Self-pity cannot coexist with spiritual renewal and transformation. 

In one of my seminary classes I was talking about holding “pity parties,” when a pastor named Samuel from Ghana asked, “What do you mean by “pity party?”” I said, “Samuel, the next time I host one for myself, I’ll invite you.” Unfortunately, I could write an essay on How To Host Your Next Pity Party.

To be self-pitying is to live life as a victim. While it’s true that sometimes we are victims, there is a spirit of victimization (self-deprivation) that is to be distinguished from the real thing. It looks like this: "Poor me! They are not treating me right - and after all I've done for them!" Such is the self-pitying, angry person. (Can you imagine Jesus acting like this?)

In this regard Henri Nouwen asks, "What else is anger but the response to the sense of being deprived? Much of my own anger comes from the fact that my self feels deprived." When one chooses to express this anger by hosting a pity party, self-obsession has begun.

In Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilych we see one of the most brilliant literary depictions of self-pitying victimhood. Read closely. He writes: 

"What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result… The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odour) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position… [W]hat most tormented Ivan Ilych was that no one pitied him as he wished to be pitied. At certain moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied. He longed to be petted and comforted.” (Emphasis mine.)

Self-pity is in opposition to spiritual renewal and transformation of the heart. Someone who holds “pity parties” refuses to take responsibility for their own behavior, and blames others. Self-pity leads to a “victim mentality.” Self-pity needs to be denied access to our hearts, because it keeps us from being fulfilled in Jesus. 

To experience renewal and transformation, be free from defending your own honor and reputation. Experience God as your Defender. Do this by being like a branch attached to Jesus the true Vine, gaining your sustenance from him. You will experience a joy, and a peace, unlike our culture offers, that will exorcize self-obsession.

“Four Reasons for Choosing a Religion”

 

I'm re-meditating on my spiritual journals, from the early 70s to the present. This is a summer-long project. 

June 29, 2009. 

At our annual HSRM summer conference.

J. P. Moreland is speaking. J. P. is one of the greatest teachers I have ever heard.

He presented “Four Reasons for Choosing a Religion.” Here they are.

1.   Pick a religion whose picture of God harmonizes with what we know about God from creation.

2.   Pick a religion that does the best job of solving and diagnosing the human condition.

3.   Pick a religion that is best explained by supernatural activity.

4.   Pick a religion that has all of Jesus instead of a watered-down, distorted version of him.

(For this summer's conference, see HERE.)

Just as I Am? (On Cheap Grace)

 

 

                                                          (Maumee Bay State Park, Ohio)

Does God affirm me, just as I am? Here's what I wrote in my book Deconstructing Progressive Christianity.

"In 1970 (yikes!) I became a follower of Jesus. I was twenty-one. (You do the math.) One of the first books recommended to me was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's monumental The Cost of Discipleship. I didn't grasp it all at the time. I did understand Bonhoeffer's distinction between "costly grace" and "cheap grace." It reminded me of the apostle Paul, when he wrote, What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? (Romans 6:1-2)  

Eric Metaxas, in his biography of Bonhoeffer, argues that the Lutheran Church's drift into cheap grace was a factor in allowing Hitler to come to power. (See Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy) Metaxas says that cheap grace means "going to church and hearing that God just loves and forgives everyone, so it doesn’t really matter much how you live." Anyone who believes that, and self-refers as a follower of Jesus, has drifted into heresy. Yes, orthopraxy is important.  

Tim Keller writes that, today, we live in an age of cheap grace.  "Many Christians want to talk only about God’s love and acceptance. They don’t like talking about Jesus’ death on the cross to satisfy divine wrath and justice. Some even call it “divine child abuse.” Yet if they are not careful, they run the risk of falling into the belief in “cheap grace”—a non-costly love from a non-holy God who just loves and accepts us as we are. That will never change anyone’s life."".