Be Still

 

                                                              (Grand Haven, Michigan)

Linda and I practice being still before God. Daily.

I was doing this yesterday, while reading Scripture. This is a habit for me.

Linda spends time in our living room, quietly, before God. She does this for up to a half hour. She slows down in her heart and mind. She listens for the voice of God. She gets spoken-to by God. 

Our hearts have been captured Psalm 46:10, which reads: "Be still, and know that I am God."

The Hebrew word here for "be still" is raphah. It means things like: 

"Be slack" (re. your arms).

"Be idle" (stop working and striving).

"Take leave" (of all your busyness).

"Cease struggling" (with God).

Even, "be weak" (so God can be strong).

"Chill out, and know that I am God." 

"Let go, and know that I am God."

Ps. 46: 10 does not instruct us to:

"Overwork, and know that I am God."

"Be busy, and know that I am God."

"Multi-task, and know that I am God."

"Try harder, and know that I am God."

"Get uptight, and know that I am God."

"Shop, and know that I am God."

We can draw a line connecting Psalm 46:10 with John 15, where Jesus tells us to "abide" and "rest" and "remain" in him, like a branch is connected to a vine. The promises for us include: Jesus will give us his peace, his joy, and reveal to us all the Father has made know to him. 

This is the incredible invitation to "be" with God, with the seminal Jesus-idea that being is prior to doing; viz., being-with God precedes all relevant "doing" in the name of God.

The "be still" thing is a heart-thing. You don't have to be in a physically quiet place to have a still, quieted heart. A "stilled" heart can be had in the midst of outer chaos. Jesus himself walked into many dark, chaotic situations. We don't see him freaking out and taking on the outer chaos in his own, inner heart. There is a focused calm about Jesus that's all about his ongoing abiding in the Father. How does he do this? Who wouldn't want to live like this? How is this possible? In John 14-15 he gives us the answers.

Jesus says: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work." 

Then, Jesus gives his disciples, and us, this amazing invitation: "Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." The Father and Jesus the Son will come and "make their home in us." (John 14:23)

If God is in your "home" (= heart), struggling ceases, and stillness remains. If the Lord is my fortress, and in his fortress I dwell, what shall I fear? Who wouldn't want to live like that?

Be still before the Lord today by:

1. Taking 10-15 minutes and just "be" in God's presence. For no purpose other than to "be still, and know that God is God."
2. Doing this again tomorrow. And the next day..., and so on...
3. Not striving to make something happen. You might say to God, "I want to know how to be heart-still, that I might know You better."
4. Listening
5. Watching, over time, how God meets you in that secret place, which is your heart.

There might be so much chaos in your life right now that you are thinking, "I can't find time to do this with all the stuff that's going on!" Or: "I could never get still before God with all the clutter in my heart!"

I can tell you from personal experience, from much time doing this, and from teaching this to many pastors and leaders over the years, the following: "Being still" will seem counter-intuitive in our crazy world of incessant, irrelevant "doing." But it is precisely what is needed, and what God calls you to do. In the phrase "know that I am God," it is important to understand that "knowing," in Hebrew, is a relational, experiential thing.

Psalm 46:10 is a "call to relationship" with God. As are the last earthly words of Jesus in John chapters 14-17.

The Existential Thirst That Never Goes Away

Butterfly House, in Whitehouse, Ohio

As a philosophy professor I've done a lot of teaching, talking, coffee-breaking, and reasoning with a broad spectrum of students. I spend time teaching and relating to theists, atheists, and don't-know-what-ists.

All of them have a worldview. Few have evaluated their worldview. This is across the board, no matter what their belief system.

They have one thing in common, because the deeper we go inside people, the more we are the same, in terms of life's important issues. They all have a metaphysical urge for the transcendent. Yes, even if they say they are atheists. 

This gives me hope when relating to my philosophy students. In the depths of the human heart there are reasons that not even reason can fully satisfy. As the French philosopher Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." (One helpful book here is Existential Reasons for Belief in God: A Defense of Desires and Emotions for Faith, by Clifford Williams.)

The British writer Theodore Dalrymple confesses, “It is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God.” After confessing that he is an atheist, he proceeds to describe the void.

"Believing there is no God does not make the thirst go away. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose . . . To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of." (Quoted in Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?, p. 31)

***
My two books are: 

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

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

The Moral Relativist as Enemy of the Oppressed

(This is wrong, right?)

As a (retired) professor of logic, much of the chatter on social media drives me crazy. But it gives me a feast, a harvest, of formal and informal logical fallacies. Including the absurdity of cultural moral relativism.

I'm listening to Bruce Cockburn. (My favorite lyricist ever?) There's a line in "Down Where the Death Squad Lives" that has never left me. He writes:

Sometimes I feel like there's a padlock on my soul

if you opened up my heart you'd find a big black hole

but when the feeling comes through it comes through strong

if you think there's no difference between right and wrong

just go down where the death squad lives

Correct. 

Where evil reigns, lines become clearer. Moral relativists appear, if they do at all, as voices of injustice as they say, "right for you, but wrong for me. Who are we to critique Isis beheaders?"

Hitler was from another culture. (I read Mein Kampf.) Who are we to tell him he was morally wrong? If cultural moral relativism is true, we can't. In this way the moral relativist is the enemy of the oppressed.

Cockburn:

goons in blackface creeping in the road

farm family waiting for the night to explode

working the land in an age of terror

you come to see the moon as a bad news bearer

down where the death squad lives

they cut down people like they cut down trees

chop off its head so it will stay on its knees

the forest shrinks but the earth remains

slash and burn and it grows again

down where the death squad lives

Want to know something that's scary? Teaching philosophical logic in a relativistic world, where relativism is the air we breathe, while going unnoticed by most university students. 

Pause here. Logic is about "truth." Logic looks at statements, and uses words like "true," "false," probably true," "probably false." These words leave the logician's mouth, and horrify the student-relativists. 

I received a logic text to review - Critical Thinking Unleashed, by Elliot Cohen. The book is pretty much a standard logic text, except for the introduction, where Cohen's passion and sense of urgency falls from above like nuclear logic-bombs on our Facebook nation. Cohen writes, "Enculturation, or the socialization of children to cultural norms, is another factor in creating barriers to rational thinking." (4)

Uh-huh. That's it. The herd (Nietzsche), the crowd (Kierkegaard), mindlessly follows the culture. As Kierkegaard famously wrote: The crowd is untruth.

When I teach about the fallacious nature of ad hominem circumstantials, tu quoques, and various forms of the genetic fallacy, I have this sense that, for a number of the students, I might as well be speaking ancient Greek. It's not that these students are unintelligent. It's that they have been enculturated and baptized in the warm waters of moral relativism. As Allan Bloom recognized decades ago. (See here. And yes, I read the entire thing, if you know what I mean.)

In a logic class the professor uses uses statements like "This is true," and "This is false." After all, that is the philosophical point of the whole thing. Then, predictably, one cultural clone of a student will say, "That's just what you happen to think," as others nod silently, in Stepford-wife-like agreement. 

But there be be one, just one, freethinker in the class, who is engaged in a meta-activity that may result in a break from cultural bondage into freedom. They are interested in truth - does it even exist? Can one get at it?

Cohen writes, "conformity to slanted norms routinely replaces self-reflective thinking." 

I agree. 

Now note this. Cohen is ethics editor for Free Inquiry magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism. I'm a theist, Cohen is a secular humanist, yet we're both in agreement that we're living in a time when reason has been abandoned. I suspect we both feel a bit like Nietzsche's madman, except that everyone else seems to have left the land for the relativistic seas while we're standing on the philosophical shores waving, "Come back!" I presume Cohen and I want to reason and argue about our differences from the same logical foundation, as we reject the silly waters of il-logic.

Is there objective evil in the world? Only a subjective moral relativist would deny it. And in their denial, they oppress the victims of objective evil, while claiming an objective truth (which is: Moral values are subjective to cultures.), which leads to a self-contradiction.

Cockburn concludes:

I've got friends trying to batter the system down

fighting the past till the future comes round

it'll never be a perfect world till God declares it that way

but that don't mean there's nothing we can do or say

down where the death squad lives

the world can be better than it is today

you can say I'm a dreamer but that's okay

without the could-be and the might-have-been

all you've got left is your fragile skin

and that ain't worth much down where the death squad lives

Does the Bible Promote Slavery?

 

                                                       (The River Raisin, Monroe County, MI)

For any who are interested in the subject of biblical authority, I strongly recommend Craig Blomberg's Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions. 

Here's Blomberg on the matter of the Bible and slavery, for example.

"Many people with only superficial or secondhand familiarity with the Bible’s contents wrongly believe, for example, that the Bible promotes slavery. It is true that some Christians in later centuries supported their defense of slavery from Scripture, but the Bible has been twisted and distorted to support countless bizarre beliefs throughout history. The most important matter is what it actually says, and there is not a single text anywhere in the Bible that commands slavery. God allowed it in Old Testament times, as it was universal among the people groups of the ancient Near East. He enacted legislation, however, to make it more humane than in any other ancient context, often more akin to what might better be called indentured servanthood. In Israel it was primarily an institution for enabling individuals to work themselves out of debt and return to free status. In the New Testament even more countercultural teaching appears, with numerous seeds that would eventually germinate into its abolition altogether—abolition that was disproportionately spearheaded by Christians." (P. 2)

RENEWAL SCHOOL OF MINISTRY - Term 2 Begins Nov. 2!

RENEWAL SCHOOL OF MINISTRY - REGISTER BY CLICKING HERE

RENEWAL SCHOOL OF MINISTRY

hsrm.org

Costs: $10/session or $25/Term

 

Term 2 is starting November 2, 2020 !

Holy Spirit Renewal Ministries (HSRM) is very excited to announce the upcoming online Renewal School of Ministry (RSOM), beginning in mid-September! We’re inviting you to participate in this unique opportunity to learn and grow spiritually and to become better equipped for the ministry God is calling you to.  

Take classes for credit toward a Certificate of Completion or audit classes if that meets your personal needs and interests.

What is a HSRM Certificate of Completion?

The courses for Fall 2020 Term 2 are listed below. 

Click on the course title for the course descriptions.

Courses for Fall 2020

Term #2 Classes, November 2 –December 2, 2020:

 

1.       Soul Health/Pastor Pamela Wantz  (inward)

                    Sundays, 8pm ET/5pmPT-- (Nov 1 to Dec 6)

 

 

2.       Christian Worldview/Pastor Peter Conlin  (foundation)

                     Mondays, 8pm ET/5pmPT-- (Nov 2 to Dec 7)

 

3.       Theology #2/Pastor Ed Owens  (foundation)

                     Tuesdays, 8pm ET/5pmPT --(Nov 3 to Dec 8)

 

4.       Foundations of Bibical Worship/Pastor Norelle Lutke & Team  (upward)

                    Thursdays, 8pm ET/5pmPT --(Nov 5 to Dec 10)

 

5.   SPECIAL SEMINAR: “The Tribulation, the Rapture, & the Second Coming”

         Dr. Clayton Ford : Saturday Nov. 14, 10 am - 1 pm ET/ 7 am - 10 am PT

 

BASIC CLASS INFORMATION

Course Times/Dates:  

Classes will be a 1.5 hour Zoom meeting for six weeks on the same night each week starting at 8 pm ET / 7 pm CT / 6 pm MT / 5 pm PT. Currently there are classes scheduled for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights. 

Cost:  

The cost to participate in RSOM is so low  it is astounding!  You’ll be charged a fee of $10 per course, or a maximum of $25 for all courses taught per six-week term.  It is our desire to make these courses accessible to all. 

Course Types

   Upward, inward, and outward are the three primary directions of the Christian life and the ways we minister and grow spiritually; also the three directions the Holy Spirit always moves: Upward includes our personal and corporate relationship with God (like worship and prayer); Inward includes spiritual growth in fellowship, body life, discipleship, building up the church; and Outward includes reaching out to evangelize and minister to the needs of others, also being salt and light. 

   The Holy Spirit moves in all three directions, and all three are very important. If one of the three is left out, there is a lack of spiritual growth and ministry in that area, and that affects our growth in the other areas as well.  So, we want to maintain a healthy balance and have included courses that reflect this balance. 

   In addition to the upward, inward, and outward courses, there will be a number of General courses, which are foundational courses that everyone should take, like Old and New Testament, Theology, How to interpret the Bible responsibly, Christian worldview, etc. We believe that by experiencing these four types of courses that you will develop a great foundation as a Holy Spirit filled disciple of Jesus.

  Requirements for Credit: 

To receive credit for a course students will need to:

 •     Attend every live Zoom session

 •     Participate in the class discussions

One absence is permitted as long as the student makes arrangements to watch the Zoom replay.  

In addition to the 6-week courses, we will also provide online specialized focus seminars and conference experiences for credits toward certification. 

Exceptions to Requirements for Credit: 

If a student wishes to enroll in a particular class but is unable to attend the live streaming sessions due to personal scheduling issues the student has these options:  

Special Arrangements:  If credit toward certification is desired course instructors may offer to  make special arrangements for alternative approaches to receive credit for their class. Inquiry about this should be made to  individual instructors .  

Auditing:  Follow the online enrollment process provided in the link and choose the auditing option provided. All Zoom sessions will be recorded and auditing students will be given access codes for replay on demand. (Auditing results in no credit given toward Certificate of Completion.)

              

REQUIREMENTS FOR CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION

1. Successfully complete six Foundation courses 

2. Successfully complete three Inward Courses 

3. Successfully complete three Upward Courses 

4. Successfully complete three Outward Courses 

5. Participate in any offered online HSRM events 

6. Write a three to five-page paper describing how you will use your new knowledge and your certificate 

7. Meet with members of HSRM for discussion and feedback about your paper.                                                                         .

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Preaching the Unrecognizable Jesus

 

Downtown Monroe

Pastors - stop trying to be "relevant." 

Stop it, in the sense of being culturally cool, or socially awesome, or acceptable. If you become cool, you will swiftly become passé, swept aside by the nothing-new-under-the-sun, question-begging waves of culture.

Just be clear.

Be clear about the gospel.

The gospel, not you, is eternally relevant to the core, ontological struggle of humanity. 

Speak, teach, and preach the gospel in words your culture understands. That will be enough. You won't need the blue jeans. (I wear blue jeans, but don't think they are the key to attracting people to Jesus.) 

Imagine John the Baptist, concerned about "fitting in," and wondering "Will they like what I am wearing?"

Jesus was, and remains, shockingly a-cultural. Therefore, be free of obsessing about your hair. Remember Einstein, whose hair-care issues indicated neglect, but whose ideas started a scientific revolution.

The presentation of the gospel will sound strange and irrelevant to the indoctrinated cultural masses. That is good. It should sound this way. Think of the philosophical prophet Kierkegaard, and his historical precursor Tertullian, who both said, Credo quia absurdum, "I believe because it is absurd." Absurd, in light of the prevailing ethos.

A clear presentation of the gospel must be understandable. Part of its clarity is that it will be unrecognizable. It will sound like it is from another planet. Why was Jesus on earth, and what was he expecting of his followers? To make disciples. Period. 

Remember that Jesus said, "My planet is not of this planet." 

This must sound silly, from the viewpoint of secular culture. The more you try to make the gospel relevant to culture, the more the gospel loses its recognizability. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. (John 1:10)

Had the this-worldly masses recognized him, it would not have been him. They didn't. Not even his disciples.

Jesus' planet ("kingdom") is not of this world. Not two thousand years ago. Not today. The great danger is that people would begin to see the two conflicting kingdoms as the same kingdom (like the mindless conflating of "Happy Holidays" and "Merry Christmas.") People will be comfortable and happy with church, because it is like snuggling up with the world.

People today need to come face to face with the unrecognizable Jesus, the one New Testament scholar Michael McClymond named the "Familiar Stranger." So,  pastors - preach, with as much clarity as you can bring to the moment, the unrecognizable kingdom.

Then, let it go.

Trust God's Spirit, who will hover over the irrelevance and the cognitive dissonance, touching nerves in dead flesh, igniting sparks on a cold night, sending drops of rain to a disenchanted desert, and speaking hope to nihilistic souls. Then, behold, as another insane mind, stuck in the meaningless eternal recurrence of the same, awakens, by the power of the Spirit, and hears the voice of redemption, calling to them from another world.: FOLLOW ME.

***

Note: When the absurdity of the gospel reaches the low levels it had in first-century Rome, then I expect the gospel's intrinsic power to be unleashed in another global outpouring. In those days the world will have long-tired of the world-system and the futile way of life handed down from generation to generation, and the absurdity of the gospel will be clearly seen as the answer to systemic world-weariness.

***

My two books are:

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

Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

God Desires Participants, not Spectators

 

(Detroit)

Soren Kierkegaard writes:

"Is God's meaning, in Christianity, simply to humble man through the model (that is to say putting before us the ideal) and to console him with 'Grace,' but in such a way that through Christianity there is expressed the fact that between God and man there is no relationship, that man must express his thankfulness like a dog to man, so that adoration becomes more and more true, and more and more pleasing to God, as it becomes less and less possible for man to imagine that he could be like the model? ... Is that the meaning of Christianity? Or is it the very reverse, that God's will is to express that he desires to be in relation with man, and therefore desires the thanks and the adoration which is in spirit and in truth: imitation? The latter is certainly the meaning of Christianity. But the former is a cunning invention of us men (although it may have its better side) in order to escape from the real relation to God." (In David Augsburger, Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor, 28)

Real Jesus-following is following-after Jesus. It's participation, not spectating. It's not pew-sitting. It's not being entertained. It's "following the footsteps of Christ in imitation" (St Francis of Assisi, in Ib., 27). 

It's keeping in step with the Holy Spirit. Or, as Craig Keener translates this, "walking in the footsteps of the Holy Spirit."

Real Church was never meant to be an entertainment center. David Augsburger says that authentic Jesus-spirituality "accepts no substitute for actual participation." (Ib.) 

Augsburger writes: "We are not observers, not spectators, not admirers, not onlookers, not conceptualizers, but participants. Participation is the central theological framework of all careful thought-about spirituality...

...The ideal of discipleship as participation through the imitation of Christ is a recurring theme, reemerging wherever the practice of following Jesus in life is given priority." (Ib.)

Anyone who claims to belong to Jesus must follow the path taken by Jesus. How will you do this? 

Begin by reading the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). Slow-cook in them. Become familiar with the Real Jesus. 

Next, submit to the filling of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God will empower you to live, do, and say as Jesus lived, did, and said. 

Finally, remember that this is a growth process. Even Jesus had to grow in wisdom and stature. (Luke 2:52)

***
My two books are

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

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Sin Doesn't Change

                                                                           (The River Raisin)

This coming Sunday evening I am speaking to our church's young adults. I get to hang out with them! 

The subject is: SIN. 

I have much to share. And, we'll have a Q&A time.

About a year ago I was discussing sin with a young person who reads my blog. They had a relativistic view of sin. They claimed that "sin changes," and varies over time and place. So, certain things the Bible calls "sin" are no longer viewed as sin in current American culture. Therefore, Christians need to readjust certain beliefs and fit them into the pattern of this world. (See Romans 12:1-2) They sounded, to me, like a moral relativist, which ends up being a difficult position to defend philosophically.

Moral relativism has been the cultural air we breathe in America for many years. It's popular, but intellectually shallow. It puts doubts about the reality of objective moral values in peoples' minds that no sane person should ever have. And, it entails that moral statements such as Racism is wrong is itself relative to our culture, yet subject to be changed in the future should what culture values changes.

Dallas Willard addresses this, and other moral matters, in his recent book The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. Willard, the brilliant phenomenological philosopher, believed that...

"This shift in the overall cultural attitude towards moral knowledge is devastating for both individuals and society as a whole. To fail to recognize that, for instance, “lying is wrong” is how things are and can be based on appropriate evidence and instead come to treat it as mere feeling, or tradition, or uncertified opinion is to undermine the way that good and bad, right and wrong are meant to function in human life. Without a vision of the good life as truly good, human desire is left to want what it wants without the constraint of knowing what is good, better and best. Knowledge of good and bad, right and wrong recognized as knowledge (and not, for instance, as mere feeling) provides authoritative guidance for living. Dallas held that the authority of such guidance degenerates and, in fact, disappears when the authoritative institutions of Western culture cease presenting moral knowledge as publicly certifiable." (Steve Porter, "The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge: Exploring Dallas Willard's Parting Diagnosis of Our Cultural Moment")

How to Forgive Yourself

(My feet, in Hockeytown Restaurant, Detroit)

I'm thinking of the inmate at Mansfield (Ohio) State Correctional Center who asked me to pray for him. I said, "I would love to pray for you."

He said, "Pray that I could forgive myself."

Yes, I will.

"Because," he said, "I cannot forgive myself for killing my parents."  

One reason that request affected me so much is that I have, in my own moral and spiritual failure, sometimes felt unable to forgive myself. I meet many people plagued by the hell-designed incapacity to self-forgive. How can we do this?

Everett Worthington says that "repentance and humility are at the core of breaking free from self-blame." (Worthington, Moving Forward: Six Steps to Forgiving Yourself and Breaking Free from the Past, p. 76) To be repentant and humble people need to do three things:

1. Accept responsibility for your wrongdoing.
2. Feel and show regret and remorse for what you did.
3. Realize that making up for the wrongdoing and repairing the relationships damaged by the wrongdoing is going to be costly in time, effort, and self-sacrifice. (In Ib., 77)

Failure to accept responsibility "shoots forgiveness in the foot - and makes it difficult for the one we harmed to forgive us as well." (Ib.)

Conversely, three things render self-forgiveness impossible:

1. Acting like a victim, and blaming others for your wrongdoing.
2. Showing little or no remorse for what you did.
3. Expecting that repairing the damaged relationships will be a quick fix (which often leads to blaming others for their "inability to forgive." Like: "Aren't you over this yet?")

Worthington's book is one of the best books on self-forgiveness there is.

***

My two books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

To Love Deeply Is to Suffer Deeply

 

(Linda and I in Green Lake, Wisconsin)

The one who loves much suffers much.

To surrender to love is to risk. It is to be vulnerable. It is to be open. Because eventually, there will be loss.

For example, our family loved our dog So-fee. When she became so sick that we had to put her down it was painful. It made me think that I never want another dog, because I never want to go through that again.

Suffering can cause one to stop loving, since loving entails suffering, a hurting-with (com-passion) the beloved. When we open ourselves to transparency and vulnerability we invite the real possibility of suffering.

Will Hernandez writes: 

“It is equally accurate to say that only one who has known the experience of deep suffering can freely love and give love with true abandon. If suffering happens to be the consequence of true love, then that same love also becomes the fruit of real suffering.” (Hernandez, Henri Nouwen and Spiritual Polarities: A Life of Tension, K231)

Henri Nouwen has written: 

“Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear” (IVL:60; cited in Hernandez, K240).

To immerse yourself in the sufferings of others is to grow in your capacity to love others, one’s own self, and God. “Love and suffering are bound to change anyone radically.” (Hernandez, K240)