The Pleasure of Solitude with God

Somewhere in Monroe County

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

Luke 5:16

I spent time praying yesterday afternoon. I did not go outside, which is my preference, because a deluge of rain poured out from the heavens. 

I got alone with God, lifted requests to him as they came to me, meditated on Scripture (Ecclesiastes), listened for his voice, wrote some things he was saying to me, prayed for some people, and gave thanks to him.

I also deburdened. This creates a space in my heart to receive from God. When I am in that secret place that is my heart, my listening capacity rises.

I have done this for so many years (see here, for a record of this) that the attraction of God overwhelms the distractions of life. This has helped me live more focused.

The French theologian Pascal said we require things to distract us from ourselves. He wrote: "Hence it comes people so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.” (In Dallas Willard, The Great Omission, Kindle Locations 2968-2969)

It took some time to learn aloneness with God, without distractions. To rest in the Lord, and not in the American sense of "rest" as "entertainment." The distracted life is the source of our miserable discontent. Willard writes:

"Solitude and silence are the most radical of the disciplines for the spiritual life because they most directly attack the sources of human misery and wrongdoing. To be in solitude is to choose to do nothing. For extensive periods of time. All accomplishment is given up. One learns “hands off.” Silence is required to complete solitude, for until we enter quietness, including not listening and speaking, the world still lays hold of us. When we go into solitude and silence, we even stop making demands upon God. It is enough that God is God and we are His. We learn we have a soul, that God is here, that this world is “my Father’s world.”" (Ib., Kindle Locations 2993-2997)

How different, how refreshing, how energizing and life-giving is the pleasure of solitude with God. No wonder Jesus did it!

Freedom from Self-Abuse (Cutting) - Sermon

My sermon on freedom from self-abuse (e.g., cutting) can be listened to HERE. (7/23/17)

The handout I gave is below.

Numbers and the Church

I'm reading on our front porch, watching the rain.

"Numbers pave the road to obsession."

Adam Alter

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

P. 113

I've been reading Os Guinness's Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel No Matter How Dark the Times. Guinness's book is hopeful, even as he correctly identifies the indicators that the Western Church has conformed to secular culture.

One indicator of world-conformation is the Church's quantification of Christianity. "Numbers" have become the measure of "success." This is not only about the heretical "prosperity gospel." Guinness writes:

"America as the lead society in the modern world is awash with numbers and metrics, and with statistics, opinion polls, surveys, targets, pie charts, scorecards, big data, game theory and measurable outcomes—all at the expense of the true, the good, the beautiful, the faithful and the significant—and at the expense of God too. Numbers and the mania for metrics are therefore a critical element of secularization." (Guinness, Renaissance, pp. 39-40)

In the Consumer Church matters of the heart have been displaced by the number of hearts, and concerns of the soul have lost out to size of the payroll. The big questions now are "How many?" and "How much?" (The Church as a metaphysical Fitbit.)

"Nineteenth-century thinkers foresaw the rising domination of numbers, quantity and majority opinion, and warned against it. They regarded it as the overspill of the age of democratic majorities and the triumph of technocratic technocratic rationalism, through which everything would be reduced to numbers, and big numbers would be valued most of all. The pressure would therefore be toward a false notion of explanation through numbers, a dangerous authority for numbers at the expense of the true and the good, and in the end toward a disastrous strengthening of the Leviathan of the state (for what else is “big” enough and “wise” enough to coordinate and manage everyone and everything but the government?)." (Ib., 40)

Number-crunching is not irrelevant to the Church. But in the kingdom of God numbers are not number 1.

Missing - Jenna Verhille

Jenna Verhille is from our church.

Disciples, not "Decisions"

In line at Puerto Vallarta restaurant in Redding, California

"Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples.... Evangelism that focuses on decisions short circuits and — yes, the word is appropriate — aborts the design of the gospel, while evangelism that aims at disciples slows down to offer the full gospel of Jesus and the apostles."

- Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, p. 18

Playing at Christianity

Maumee Bay State Park, Ohio

I've been re-reading some Kierkegaard. He writes:

"Truly there is that which is more contrary to Christianity, and to the very nature of Christianity, than any heresy and schism, more contrary than all heresies and all schisms combined, and that is to play Christianity."


And what could "play Christianity" mean?

Perhaps "playing at Christianity" means...

... liking the awesome music more than worshiping God from the heart (you don't need music to worship)

... spending more time, energy, and money on staging than on discipling and missions

... saying "I follow Jesus" on Sunday, but not following him Monday through Saturday

... taking no time to pray, while having time to text and tweet

... telling someone "I'll pray for you," and never doing it

... self-righteously judging others, while having a secret sin life

... "attending" church without serving as the church (many Christians come on Sunday mornings to be serviced)

... going after "decisions" for Christ while neglecting the Great Commission, which is the labor of disciple-making

... being kind and loving in public, while hateful and despising in your home

... focusing on appearance, rather than cultivating the heart

... wanting to be seen, more than wanting Christ to be magnified

... hating your enemies, rather than loving and praying for those who persecute you

How can we know what real Christianity is so we don't just play at it? I suggest going back to the four Gospels, and then the book of Acts. Meet Jesus again, as if for the first time. Of course, you have to want this more than anything else. Otherwise, you're just playing at Christianity.


***
If you want to go deeper, see my book Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

My next book, Leading the Presence-Driven Church, will be out Fall 2017.

The Lemonade-Twaddle of the Consumer Church

Maumee Bay State Park, Ohio

In my doctoral program at Northwestern University I served as a T.A. (teacher's assistant) to my philosophy and theology mentor, Dr. James Will. One of Dr. Will's interests was existentialism. One of his courses was on the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. I sat in Dr. Will's class, and taught it a few times when he was out of town. (Dr. Will studied under Reinhold Niebuhr, and referred to him as "Reiny.")

Kierkegaard was a Christian theist (yes, there are plenty of theistic existentialists). One Kierkegaardian theme was his polemic against the banality of the Church of Denmark. It had become colonized by secular culture. It had taken on the shape of this world. This outraged Kierkegaard. He wrote against it. He called it out. Kierkegaard's attack on the secular church is prophetic, and speaks to us today.

He wrote:

The sort of men who now live cannot stand anything so strong as the Christianity of the New Testament (they would die of it or lose their minds), just in the same sense that children cannot stand drink, for which reason we prepare for them a little lemonade—and official Christianity is lemonade-twaddle for the sort of beings that are now called men, it is the strongest thing they stand, and this twaddle then is their language they call “Christianity,” just as children call their lemonade “wine.”
- Kierkegaard, Attack on Christendom, p. 277 (1854)

Apply this to the American Consumer Church.

Five Views On the Destiny of the Unevangelized

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

FOUR  RESOURCES

Paul Copan, True for You, but Not for Me, Part 5.

John Sanders, ed. What About Those Who Have Never Heard: Three Views.

William Lane Craig, "No Other Name": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ,” reasonablefaith.org.

William Lane Craig, On Guard, chapter 10.

***

THE QUESTION - What if someone has never had the opportunity to hear about Jesus?

THE POT OF STEW

GOD’S DESIRE IS THAT ALL BE SAVED.

2 Peter 3:9 - The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

2 Tim 2:4 – God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

SOME PERSONS HAVE “TRANSWORLD DEPRAVITY.”

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) Note: "transworld depravity" (from Alvin Plantinga) in this case means: in any possible world X will reject Christ if offered the opportunity.

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.”

GOD HAS GIVEN PERSONS FREE WILL.

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.”

WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO NEVER HEAR ABOUT JESUS?

ROMANS CHS. 1 & 2

Romans 1 says that, even without a knowledge of Christ, people have an opportunity to know God. We read: ¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Theologically, this is called "natural revelation."

8. Romans 2 says: (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares. 

So it seems likely that some persons will be saved by following the moral law within.

Their salvation is still in Christ. The cross of Christ is the bridge over the gap that separates us from God.

WE CAN TRUST THAT GOD IS LOVING AND JUST. 

This is an argument from authority.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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)

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

NEXT ONE-HOUR SEMINARY – ANDY GRIFFITH, ON "WHAT IS EVANGELISM?"

The Kalam Cosmological Argument - Video

For my Philosophy of Religion students.

ONE-HOUR SEMINARY - What About People Who Have Never Heard of Jesus?

TUESDAY

SEPT. 12

9-10 PM  EST