Prayer Moves With the Mysteries of God's Kingdom (PrayerLife)

Our house, from the air (thank you Mark M!)

The Jesus-follower who has a praying life is involved in the kingdom activity of God. While there are many things we know about the ways of God, there are far more mysteries and unknowns, not to God, but to us. To pray is to move within the mysteries of God's kingdom. Ray Anderson writes: 

“Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives.” (Quoted in Philip Yancey, Prayer, Kindle Locations 1508-1509)

Yancey cites Jesus' prayer to discern who his disciples will be. The answer of Jesus' praying became the traitor Judas, Simon Peter who needed anger management help, and the "Sons of Thunder." Why these, I would have asked? Yancey writes:

"In the end, all twelve failed him at the hour of his deepest need. Eventually, however, eleven of the twelve underwent a slow but steady transformation, providing a kind of long-term answer to Jesus’ original prayer." (Kindle Locations 1511-1513)

As I pray and sometime do not see the answers I was hoping for I must remember that God sees the larger picture and is able to weave things together for the good of his kingdom.

Self-Forgiveness and Liberation From the Past - #2 - Why Self-forgiveness Is Hard

Monroe County sunrise

In my first post from Everett Worthington's book Moving Forward I looked at the benefits of self-forgiveness. Now I'll consider what makes forgiving ourselves so difficult.

Worthington says there are two kinds of self-forgiveness: decisional self-forgiveness, and emotional self-forgiveness. In the first you will no longer seek retaliation against yourself. You will choose to not punish yourself for past failings. Instead, you choose to value yourself. In emotional self-forgiveness you replace negative, unforgiving emotions with positive emotions toward yourself. "It is emotional self-forgiveness that cools the heat of anger in your heart; it’s what Corrie ten Boom referred to as “the temperature of the heart .” The emotions that we use to replace negative, unforgiving emotions are empathy, sympathy, compassion, and love for ourselves." (Worthington, p. 52) Why are these things so difficult to do?

Worthington cites studies showing that forgiving yourself is different from forgiving others. It is harder to forgive yourself than to forgive others. Worthington writes:

"When you attempt to forgive someone else for an offense, you are adopting the viewpoint of the forgiver. The wrongdoer, of course, is someone other than yourself. However, when you try to forgive yourself, you have to operate from two points of view— both forgiver and wrongdoer. Holding contrasting points of view at the same time is a strain. It is hard to bounce back and forth from one perspective to the other." (Ib., p. 54)

In forgiving someone else we are not with them (for the most part) 24/7. But we are with our own selves  and thoughts all the time. We can't get away from ourselves. This can make forgiving ourselves harder than forgiving others.

Worthington says self-forgiveness is harder because we have "insider information"; i.e., we have information about who we really are. "The fact is, we know too much about ourselves. We know that we are capable of repeating the same wrong even when we know how hurtful it is. We also know that, as much as we profess love for God, we are like Paul who wrote: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7: 15). That is, we know the weakness of our will to do the right thing." (Ib., 55)

Self-forgiveness is different and in some ways harder than other-forgiveness because:

1. We live with ourselves 24/7. That is, we live constantly with the one who has hurt us, which is us.

2. We have insider information about our own self that we cannot have when it comes to others.

Ehrman: Only "Internet Kooks" Think Jesus Never Existed

Urban Outfitters, Ann Arbor

In the late 1970s and early 80s, while doing doctoral work at Northwestern University, one of my emphases was Christology. I did one of my four Ph.D qualifying exams in this area. I immersed myself in Christological study and research, preparing for this exam. One of the areas I came across was the claim that Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed. If that were true, then in my mind I would be not only done with Christology but my faith would be over.

This was a minority claim that mostly caught the attention of theological seminarians. The entree into this discussion came, for me, via John Hick's edited collection The Myth of God Incarnate, from which I purchased and read Michael Goulder's edited Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued, and Michael Green's The Truth of God Incarnate, and so on and on. The core idea in these texts was: the less grounded in actual history the New Testament documents are (the more "legendary" they are), the more fictive Jesus is. By logical extension, if the NT documents were 100% disciple-invented legends then, as far as we know, "Jesus" is 0% historical.

I ended up rejecting this bunny-trail as unscholarly. For this reason (and some others) I do not invest in current "mythical Jesus" studies, even though they are still there, to a small degree. (By "to a small degree," I mean that 99.999% of the world knows nothing of them. To take a small sample, only 1% of the thousand undergraduate philosophy students I've taught in the past ten years have even heard of these discussions.)

For example, see cnn.com's "The Jesus Debate: Man vs. Myth." There are still people who are "mythicists" in regard to the historical Jesus. People like Timothy Freke and Robert Price. I'd never heard of Freke before this article, because I don't invest my time in a thesis I abandoned years ago. I've heard Price's name but haven't read him, for the same reason.

On the other hand, I have read works written by skeptical NT scholars Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan. I've got old Crossan books on my shelves, having read them many years ago. Ehrman's recent book is: Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth? Note: Ehrman is not a Jesus-follower, and denies core ideas such as the resurrection of Christ. Nonetheless, in the cnn article, he refers to most Jesus-deniers as "internet kooks." Ehrman says "Freke and others who deny Jesus’ existence are conspiracy theorists trying to sell books. “There are people out there who don’t think the Holocaust happened, there wasn’t a lone JFK assassin and Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.,” Ehrman says. “Among them are people who don’t think Jesus existed.”"

In his new book Ehrman writes that every week he receives two or three e-mails asking if Jesus actually existed. He writes:

"I was surprised because I was trained as a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, and for thirty years I have written extensively on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the early Christian movement, and the history of the church's first three hundred years. Like all New Testament scholars, I have read thousands of books and articles in English and other European languages on Jesus, the New Testament, and early Christianity. But I was almost completely unaware - as are most of my colleagues in the field - of this body of skeptical literature.

I should say at the outset that none of this literature is written by scholars trained in New Testament or early Christian studies teaching at the major, or even the minor, accredited theological seminaries, divinity schools, universities, or colleges of North America or Europe (or anywhere else in the world)." (Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?  )

Ehrman's book shows that the mythicists "cannot be right about their major contentions. The reality is that whatever else you may think about Jesus, he certainly did exist. That is what this book will set out to demonstrate." (Ib.)

Ehrman does not think his book will convince many mythicist "conspiracy theorists," since they hold to their mythicist belief system like someone who has gotten all their knowledge of medieval history from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." 

What about the "Zeitgeist" idea? From CNN:

"Some scholars who argue for the existence of Jesus says the New Testament mentions actual people and events that are substantiated by historical documents and archaeological discoveries.
Ehrman, author of “Did Jesus Exist?” scoffed at the notion that the ancient world was full of pagan stories about dying deities that rose again. Where’s the proof? he asks.
Ehrman devoted an entire section of his book to critiquing Freke, the mythicist and author of “The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?” who says there was an ancient Osiris-Dionysus figure who shares uncanny parallels to Jesus.
He says Freke can’t offer any proof that an ancient Osiris figure was born on December 25, was crucified and rose again. He says Freke is citing 20^th- and 19^th-century writers who tossed out the same theories.
Ehrman says that when you read ancient stories about mythological figures like Hercules and Osiris, “there’s nothing about them dying and rising again.”
“He doesn’t know much about ancient history,” Ehrman says of Freke. “He’s not a scholar. All he knows is what he’s read in other conspiracy books.”"

Like Ehrman, but to a far smaller extent, I've respond to a small number of internet-informed mythcists. My academic pursuit is historical Jesus studies, more than ever. The pursuit after the mythicist red herring is akin to my having to read the "Da Vinci Code" years ago so as to respond to the few who bought into it.

Ehrman writes: "Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have consixered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves. Froma dispassionate point of view, there was a Jesus of Nazareth." (Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?)

And like Crossan, who also thinks the existence of Jesus is "certain," so do I.

Teaching at Payne Theological Seminary This Week

Linda and I are traveling to Dayton on tomorrow morning where I will be teaching my Spiritual Formation class to Payne Theological Seminary M.Div. students next week. Here are some photos of Payne and my students.

Spiritual Direction Brings Freedom from Automatic Responses

Spiritual direction is different from counseling and advice-giving. Thomas Merton writes:

"Spiritual direction is not merely the cumulative effect of encouragements and admonitions which we all need in order to live up to our state in life. It is spiritual." (Merton, Spiritual Direction & Meditation, 14)

Spiritual direction concerns the whole person. "The spiritual man (pneumatikos) is one whose whole life, in all its aspects and all its activities, has been spiritualized by the action of the Holy Spirit." (Ib.) 

A spiritual director views the directee as a whole person, as a son or daughter of God, who is "seeking to recover the perfect likeness to God in Christ, and by the Spirit of Christ." (Ib., 15) A spiritual director discerns and champions formation into greater and greater Christlikeness (Galatians 4:19). This happens as the connection (abiding in Christ) happens and gets strengthened. 

The result is greater and greater freedom, which is essentially a condition of the heart. This "means that in all [the spiritual person's] actions he is free from the superficial automatism of conventional routine. It means that in all that he does he acts freely, simply, spontaneously , from the depths of his heart, moved by love" (Ib.)

Spiritual direction moves in the deep waters of the heart (Proverbs 20:5). Merton writes:

"The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the facade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. This is entirely a supernatural thing, for the work of rescuing the inner man from automatism belongs first of all to the Holy Spirit. The spiritual director cannot do such a work himself. His function is to verify and encourage what is truly spiritual in the soul. He must teach others to "discern" between good and evil tendencies, to distinguish the inspirations of evil from those of the Holy Spirit." (Ib., 17)

The spiritual director discerns the movements of grace in the directee's life.

Redeemer Ministry School - 2015 Winter Classes

2015 WINTER CLASSES

TORAH:  THE FIRST 5 BOOKS OF THE BIBLE
Sunday nights, 6-8 PM, starting Jan 4
Taught by John Piippo
Torah, the Jewish Written Law, is also known as the "Pentateuch," meaning the first five books of the Bible. This will be an in-depth study. Students can prepare by reading, or rereading Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

WORSHIP II: BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS OF WORSHIP
Tuesdays, 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. starting Jan 6
Taught by Holly Benner
What do you give a God who has everything? When the Trinity created this earth, they had in mind an intentional design for what worship would be like for us in relationship with Him. Before sin entered the scene, worship and relationship took on a different form than what we see laid out for us in the rest of Scripture. Sin changed everything and after Jesus' death and resurrection, love & grace changed everything once again. This class will seek out the story of worship as it unfolds throughout the Old & New Testament to find God's original intention and how it applies to our lives today.

COFFEE AND APOLOGETICS 
Wednesdays, 9:30 - 11 a.m. Starting Jan 14
Will meet at Panera Bread
Taught by John Piippo
"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect." - 1 Peter 3:15

What questions do non-Christians ask that you would like to answer?
Class time will include Q&A with students. Questions we will address include:

• What difference does it make if God exists?
• Why does anything at all exist?
• Why did the universe begin?
• Why is the universe fine-tuned for life?
• Can we be good without God?
• What about suffering?
• Who was Jesus?
• Did Jesus rise from the dead?
• Is Jesus the only way to God?

Required Materials:
On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision, by William Lane Craig and the corresponding Study Guide

To sign up:

Send me an email - johnpiippo@msn.com

Call the office - 734-242-5277

Torah Class - Session 1

Session 1 of my Torah class will be tomorrow, Jan. 4, 6-7:30 PM.

We'll begin at 6 with some worship.

I'll give students the class syllabus.

I will then teach on:

• How to Interpret the Bible
• 6 Views of the Bible, and the view I believe in.
• I issue a WARNING!
• I explain this quote from Ben Witherington, and why it is important: “A text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean; therefore always study the Bible in light of its original historical, archaeological, literary, theological, ethical contexts.” 
• What "Torah" means. (Note: It does NOT mean "law.")
• The Torah is a story in 6 acts - I'll present each one as an overview.
• I'll repeat the assignment for Jan 18 (no class Jan 11, I'll be speaking in Dayton), and explain how to keep a Torah Journal.

If you are interested just show up at Redeemer tomorrow night at 6.

Chelsea Bruck’s mother vows to keep searching in 2015 - 13abc.com Toledo (OH) News, Weather and Sports

Chelsea Bruck’s mother vows to keep searching in 2015 - 13abc.com Toledo (OH) News, Weather and Sports



Let's keep praying...

I Shall Not Want

- Audrey Assad


This is really nice.

When I allow the Lord to shepherd me, 

I will not be in an inner state of wanting.

Begins this Sunday Night - Study Torah With Me This Winter

Studying Torah in Jerusalem

Beginning this Sunday, January 4, I will teach an 11-week class on "Torah: The First Five Books of the First Testament."

Torah, the Jewish Written Law, is also known as the "Pentateuch," meaning the first five books of the Bible.

This will be an in-depth study. Students will read, or read again, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I will supplement this with classic and current scholarship on Torah.

Sunday evenings, beginning Jan. 4 -  6-8 PM. (Note: no class Jan. 11.)

If you are interested in attending please send me an email at johnpiippo@msn.com, or contact my office at 734-242-5277.