Ramifications of Divorce; Hope for Struggling Marriages

Linda, in the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island

Here are some posts I've made on the matter of divorce. 

Divorce - The Kids Will NOT Be OK

For Children, There's No Such Thing as a "Good Divorce"

Overcoming the Regret of Divorce

Divorce Has Ruinous Consequences That Remarriage Cannot Heal

America's Divorce Culture

Does God Hate Me If I Am Divorced?

Do you want to save your struggling marriage? Here are some of my ideas on this.

How to Save Your Failing Marriage

Your Marriage Can Be Saved (Especially for Husbands)

Finally, are you a pastor who counsels struggling marriages? Linda and I are reading this excellent book to strengthen our own abilities to help marital couples: 

Hope-Focused Marriage Counseling: A Guide to Brief Therapy, by Everett Worthington.

Prayer as Accepting God's Invitation to the Big Dance (Prayer Summer)

The Wailing (Western) Wall, in Jerusalem

For the past 32 years Tuesday has been my extended prayer day. This afternoon I get to go to a quiet place, apart from distractions, and converse and confer with God, 1-on-1, for several hours.                                                                          

As I meet with God here are some things about prayer that are important to me.

1. God exists. God is real. There is a God. I believe in God. Without this, of course, prayer is an illusion. With this, I view myself, in the act of praying, as keeping company with the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, necessarily existent (everlasting; without beginning or end), personal agent who created and sustains all things. This is no small appointment I have today!
2. God is a personal being. God desires relationship. The Christian idea of God as a Trinity makes sense of God as essentially relational. God, in His being, is 3-Relating-Persons-in-One. (I confess that I do, very much, like The Shack on Trinitarian theism.) God as a 3-Personed Being makes conceptual sense of the idea that God is love. Everlastingly the Father has been loving the Son, the son the Spirit, the Spirit the Father, and round and round in the Big Dance (perichoresis). To pray is to accept God's invitation to the Big Dance.
3. God made me. For what? For relationship with Him. God, who is a relational being in essence, desires relationship. He made me for such a thing as this. When I pray I am living in the heart of God's desire for me.
4. God knows me.
5. God loves me.
6. Put 4 and 5 together and you'll begin singing "Amazing Grace" accompanied by tears of gratitude and joy.
7. God desires me to love and know Him in return.
8. This is where prayer comes in. Prayer is talking with God about what God and I are doing together. To pray is to enter into a loving-knowing relationship with God.
9. When I talk with God in prayer I often begin by asking God a question – “God, is everything all right between You and me?” This is the "Search me, O God" moment. Then I listen. If God shows me something that’s breaking relationship with Him, I will confess this to Him. It then becomes God’s delight to forgive me. God loves doing this because God is love, and God desires to heal anything that breaks relationship. (Note: God’s grace is amazing but it’s not cheap. It will cost me something to be in relationship with God. This should not surprise me, since it will cost me something to be in real relationship with anyone. Love is sacrifice. There are no exceptions to this.)
10. In prayer I talk and listen to God. Talk – I express my love to God, and my concerns. I don’t hesitate to ask for my own self if my request is kingdom-advancing. This is called petitionary prayer. I meet some people who feel odd about asking for their own self. That feeling is not a feeling from God. I also pray for others. This is called intercessory prayer. 
11. Listen – when God speaks to me, I write it down. I keep a spiritual journal, which is a record of the voice and activity of God to me. I will remember the things God speaks to me. God's history with me is more precious than things and accomplishments.
12. I have found that God has much to say to me – today. I take "This is the day the Lord has made" seriously. Today is the day of breakthrough for me. 
13. God has plans and purposes for me, which have to do with His Kingdom and His righteousness. I will, now, seek these two things in the first place. Then God will add all good things unto me. (“Good” = the kind of things God values, things like love and honor and reconciliation and joy and peace and compassion and real, authentic relationship.

There's no formula for this because prayer is relationship with God. And there's way more to prayer-as-relationship than these things.

Yet there are essentials that apply to all strong relationships, such as listening and understanding, and of course love.

I will pray, with these kind of things in mind, today.

The Decline of the American Entertainment Church

The River Raisin

Recently X told me his family left one of our local churches and is now going to a church because his kids are more "entertained" there.

I wanted to say, but didn't: "You are kidding, right?"

X would not like our church, since I am 0% concerned with entertaining anybody. But we are (like some of our local churches) 100% concerned with abiding in Christ and worshiping the one true God. Imagine the first church in the book of Acts meeting in that room worrying about how to keep the new Jesus-followers happy and entertained! When the people left those meetings they were talking about God and Jesus, not evaluating the "service." God, when actually encountered, is not "entertaining." That, precisely, is not the word to describe him.

Roger Olson, in Against Calvinism, agrees with the new Calvinists when he writes:

"The new Calvinists are reacting to what they regard as a general decline of theology and especially emphasis on God’s glory in contemporary American church life. His subjects, he says, are reacting against the “feel good theology” of many contemporary evangelical churches....

Far too many Christian youth grow up with almost no biblical or theological knowledge, thinking that God exists for their comfort and success in life even if he lays down a law nobody can really live up to. Like a kindly grandfather who dotes on his preteen progeny while decrying their bad grades, God may be disappointed in us but his whole goal is to make us fulfilled anyway." (Roger Olson, Against Calvinism: Rescuing God's Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology, p. 17)

I agree, as does Olson, with the new Calvinists. The Entertainment Church is brainwashed by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Want to Discuss Calvinism With Me This Wednesday?

J.B. and I will be discussing Calvinism this Wed., June 12, 11:30 AM, at Panera Bread in Monroe.

Anyone interested is invited to join us.

We will be especially referring to William Lane Craig''s online article "5 Objections to Calvinism."

They are:

1. Universal, divine, causal determinism cannot offer a coherent interpretation of Scripture.
2. Universal causal determinism cannot be rationally affirmed.
3. Universal, divine, determinism makes God the author of sin and precludes human responsibility.
4. Universal, divine, determinism nullifies human agency.
5. Universal, divine determinism makes reality into a farce.

I have never been a Calvinist. Perhaps that's because, on becoming a Jesus-follower in 1970 at Northern Illinois University, one of my campus ministry leaders was Bill Craig. Bill, though almost as young as I was at the time, was already a brilliant philosophical thinker. I was a philosophy major. Bill was my initial mentor in theistic philosophy.

Here is a quote from Calvin's famous Institutes of the Christian Religion:

"In conformity, therefore, to the clear doctrine of the Scripture, we assert, that by an eternal and immutable counsel, God has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction. We affirm that this counsel, as far as concerns the elect, is founded on his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit; but that to those whom he devotes to condemnation, the gate of life is closed by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment. In the elect, we consider calling as an evidence of election, and justification as another token of its manifestation, till they arrive in glory, which constitutes its completion. As God seals his elect by vocation and justification, so by excluding the reprobate from the knowledge of his name and the sanctification of his Spirit, he affords an indication of the judgement that awaits them."

Calvinism is again making headlines. See, e.g.,:

"How Calvinism Is Dividing The Southern Baptist Convention," June 6, 2013, The Huffington Post

"Growing popularity of Calvinism invites discussion about predestination, gender roles," June 7, 2013, Kansas City Star

"500 years later, theological debate over Calvinism still simmers among Southern Baptists," June 7, 2013, The Washington Post

Prayer Summer An Analogy from Marriage

Tonight - A Challenge and Call to Prayer

Tonight (June 9) I will be giving A Challenge and Call to Prayer at Toledo Vineyard Church. 

Thanks so much Pastors Bill and Barb Herzog and your people for your great support in joining and helping with this!








We'll begin at 6 PM, led into God's presence by the Vineyard Worship Team.

Then, the challenge and the call.



Toledo Vineyard Church

210 E South Boundary Perrysburg OH 43551

419.874.4808

MAP

How Mercy Looks from Here

I just gave Amy Grant's new cd a listen - "How Mercy Looks from Here" - and it is beautiful.

It's so good to hear her voice. Amy was an important piece in my faith in the 70s and 80s. She became a "crossover" artist with her album "Unguarded" and got persecuted by Christians for it. How ignorant, since Jesus was a crossover artist too. Christ crossed over from heaven to earth. He came to us, rather than waiting for us to come to him.

I'm listening to one song over and over - "Deep As It Is Wide" - with Cheryl Crow and Eric Pasley. This song brings tears of joy to my eyes. Here are the lyrics.

There's a place at the edge of the sky
Where there's a love deep as it is wide
The weak are strong, the hungry are all fed
And there's a breeze from the angels flying overhead
Oh yeah

And there's a path, a glorious light
That guides you up the mountainside
And at the top, if you could you'd cry
Cause you see pure love for the very first time

Deep as it is wide

Every breath taking me closer
Every step leading to paradise
They say the faithful get to go there
I believe there's a love
Deep as it is wide

And I hear, when you get to the river
You look back for the very last time
And when you cross, you get washed off forever
Hurry up boy, eternity's on the other side

Deep as it is wide

Every breath taking me closer
Every step leading to paradise
They say the faithful get to go there
I believe there's a love
Deep as it is wide
I believe there's a love

Every nation covered [?]
Like grace pouring out, far as the eye can see
Singing praises up to a King
Cause He died, for a crown
Deep as it is wide

Every breath taking me closer
Every step leading to paradise
They say the faithful get to go there
I believe there's a love
I believe
I believe there's a love
I believe there's a love
Deep as it is wide
Deep as it is wide
Deep as it is wide

There's a place at the edge of the sky
Where there's a love deep as it is wide

Frog Weddings and Sex Slaves

Annie D. posted this on Facebook:

"Weddings for frogs and shrimp while Thailand's daughters are sold in prostitution? Speechless."

See "Mass wedding for frogs, bullfrogs in Thailand's Northeast." 
Meanwhile, here in the American world of irrationality, Ariel Castro may be prosecuted on multiple counts, including aggravated murder for purposely beating one of his women hostages who was pregnant with his child, causing her to miscarry. But in America abortion is legal. You will not be able to logically wrap your mind around this.

Prayer Summer - Finding a Lonely Place to Pray

Prayer and Stillness as the Gateway to the Source of Life (Prayer Summer)

Green Lake Conference Center, Wisconsin

Howard Thurman writes: "There is no argument needed for the necessity of taking time out for being alone, for withdrawal, for being quiet without and still within. The sheer physical necessity is urgent because the body and the entire nervous system cry out for the healing waters of silence. One could not begin the cultivation of the prayer life at a more practical point than deliberately to seek each day, and several times a day, a lull in the rhythm of daily doing, a period when nothing happens that demands active participation...

...At first the quiet times might be quite barren or a retreat from exhaustion. One has to get used to the stillness even after it has been achieved. The time may be used for taking stock, for examining one's life direction, one's plans, one's relations, and the like. This in itself is most profitable. It is like cleaning out the closets, or the desk drawers, and getting things in order.

The time may be used for focusing or re-focusing one's purposes in the light of what at first may be only one's idea of the best and the highest. Then quiet changes begin to take place. Somewhere along the way, one's idea of the best and the highest takes on a transcendent character and one begins to commune, to communicate with one's idea of the best and the highest - only a man does not talk to, or with, an idea. When the awareness of God comes in - how He entered, one does not know - one is certain that he has been there all the time. This assurance is categorical and becomes the very core of one's faith; indeed, it becomes more and more one's faith." (Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, 27-28)

I love how Thurman puts the idea of getting still in the presence of God.

• Withdraw daily from the rat-race of life
• Get still in your heart
• Your physical body cries out for such heart-and-space stillness
• Take time to "do nothing" but be with God
• If you're new at this, tiredness and exhaustion will take over, and the God-times may seem barren and dry
• Our world does not train us for this kind of stillness, so it takes getting used-to
• Once achieved as a lifestyle it becomes the gateway to the Source of Life
• In the stillness be examined by God, as you engage in listening prayer
• In the stillness "spring cleaning" happens every day (there's a lot of useless garbage in the human heart, which accrues in inverse proportion to the amount of "still time" with God)
• Then... God breaks in, creativity happens, life results, energy gets retored, purpose gets defined, direction is given, transcendence takes over, and one communes (dwells/abides) with God