Ok so I’m not actually drunk; I’m just feeling very emotional right now so I’m going to say whatever I want like I would if I were drunk. I just got back from seeing “Dear John.” That movie is emotionally intense on so many levels, but what I’m thinking of now is the main character’s father, who is mentally handicapped. His son didn’t realize that he had mental problems so he was very hard on his Dad. He never told his Dad how he much he cared for him until his Dad was dying. One of my kids has some problems, not nearly that bad, but it’s still there so I feel a lot on this issue. I’m so tired of this world. There are so many hurting lonely people with no one to help them. I can’t wait for this to be over. Yes, my life is pretty good, but that doesn’t help the retarded kid who parents abuse him because they don’t know how to deal with it.
Of course the solution to all this is the gospel, but the church doesn’t know what the gospel is. Most evangelicals (people of the gospel) don’t know nor care what the gospel is. Even when you find people who get the gospel they don’t bother applying it. They get that there is more to the gospel than welcoming Jesus into our hearts. They get that Jesus in now Lord of the world and is restoring all of creation to peace and harmony with Jesus as the head. They even get God has begun that process through Spirit empowered believers. Unfortunately it doesn’t actually seem to happen in their world, nor do they expect it to. It’s like they hear Jesus say “go preach the gospel saying, ‘the kingdom of God has come near.’” But then stop listening when Jesus says “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead” at the end of that sentence. It’s like the gospel is some nice theory.
I’m tired of Christians blaming God for how broken things are. I’m tired of safe thinking where we are open to God healing the people and fixing relationships but don’t believe it will actually happen. The Bible says the prayer of faith will heal the sick. Do you know what faith is? Faith is not being able to imagine that something is not true. So if I have faith for healing that means when I pray for someone I can’t imagine them not being healed. If our belief is that most of the time God does not want to heal the people we pray for, I’m sorry, but it is impossible for us to have faith. That is not God’s fault. That is our fault.
Yes, God did allow the world to become broken, but only so if could be fixed through Jesus. The Church must allow God to fix the world through his chosen instrument – Us. And, yes, we can block God (remember Paul saying “don’t quench the Spirit”) so don’t automatically blame God when God doesn’t appear to be doing things he said he would do.
Below is a very helpful done by Trevor Wax with NT Wright. If you don’t know NT Wright is one of the top NT scholars in the world.
http://trevinwax.com/2009/01/13/interview-with-nt-wright-responding-to-piper-on-justification/
I’ve copied the bit that I thought was most important (hope that’s ok).
Trevin Wax: What is at stake in this debate over justification? If one were to adopt Piper’s view instead of yours, what would they be missing?
N.T. Wright: What’s missing is the big, Pauline picture of God’s gospel going out to redeem the whole world, all of creation, with ourselves as part of that.
What’s missing is the big, Pauline view of the church, Jew and Gentile on equal footing, as the sign to the powers of the world that Jesus is Lord and they aren’t.
What’s missing is the key work of the Holy Spirit in enabling the already-justified believers to live with moral energy and will so that they really do ‘please God’ as Paul says again and again (but as Reformed theology is shy of lest it smack of smuggling in works-righteousness again).
What’s missing is an insistence on Scripture itself rather than tradition . . .
I had the best beer I’ve ever had this week. I was looking for something different at Hy-Vee and saw the name Pere Jacques. Pere Jacques is a Belgian monk who is famous for making great bear. Goose Island, which is a brewer in Chicago, made this beer as a tribute to him.
I don’t know anything about beer terminology, but this is dark but not black and is very complex. It comes with a date on the bottle and according to the label will improve for the next 5 years. I’ve never had a vintage beer before. At $2.5 a piece it is expensive as far as beers go, but if you get a beer at a restaurant it is that much for a mediocre one so to me it is worth it. So if you see it buy it. In fact buy all they have as it will only get better with age (apparently, I didn’t wait).
When I was a teenager my Grandpa used to tell me that the world was my oyster. I used to dream of being a famous soccer player or great musician on stage wowing the world. The problem was those dreams were totally unrealistic. Just fantasizing about something doesn’t make it happen. It comes through hours and hours of deliberate practice.
In “Talent is Overrated” Geoff Colvin talks about what people like Tiger Woods, Mozart, and Jerry Rice went through to achieve the levels they did. We mere mortals like to talk about how talented these people are, but really that is our excuse to not have to work hard. If we try something for a couple days and don’t get great results we throw up our hands and say we don’t have “the gift” and go back to watching other people do it. But the truth is that although great performers may have certain innate abilities that we don’t have, in most cases they just worked harder and smarter than we are willing to work. I would be willing to bet most of us could hit a golf ball pretty darn well if you had good instruction and spend 20,000 hours practicing.
One of my goals is to stop fantasizing and start doing. And not only doing, but doing intelligently. In Oasis’ “Fade Away” Noel sings “while we’re living, the dreams we have as children fade away.” I don’t want my dreams to fade away. I have new dreams now, and I want to see them come to pass. I don’t want mediocrity to be my portion in life.
Brilliant bit from “A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Slippery Slope” by Lemony Snicket
A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called “The Road Less Traveled,” describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used.The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely,and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is now dead.
One of my favorite preachers and Christians was killed in a car accident this morning. He leaves behind his wife and 10 children. He was head of IHOP’s adoption ministry (the reason he has 10 children several of whom are handicapped).
I’m absolutely devastated by this news. Of all people to die young (he was 37). You can ask “why?” but we don’t know why. Why take someone who the church and his family needs and leave behind people like me? Who knows.
Yesterday Derek’s friend Randy Bohlenger wrote an incredibly timely post about living knowing that your time is running out.
http://randybohlender.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/dealing-with-limited-quantitites/
I was watching a video on climate change where the scientist wrote that the research of his opponents made Intelligent Design advocates appear rigorous. This raised the question in my head, is Intelligent Design a rigorous science? And for that matter are their opponents rigorous scientists? I was reminded of the documentary Ben Stein made called “No Intelligence Allowed” where Ben Stein asked various Darwinists how life began. The answer from all of them was that we don’t know. This tells us not only is there no evidence for life beginning by Darwinian processes, but that there isn’t even a theory on how that would have happened. This leaves us with no conclusive theories on either side of the argument.
Do we then have to throw up our hands and say we can’t know anything scientifically about how life began? I don’t think so. There are all kinds of definitions of what science is, but however you define that word I believe that probability should be included, if nothing else to tell us the likelihood of something being true. As I’ve said before in this blog, calculating the likelihood of design or life by random mutation is relatively easy. The chance of something happening is 1 minus the chance that it didn’t happen. Therefore, the probability that life was the result of design is 1 minus the probability of it happening by chance, since that number is so small let’s use 0. 1 – 0 = 1. That means that, mathematically, the likelihood of intelligent design being true is 100%. So although we can’t say with scientific certainty that life was the result of design, we can say that it is by far the most likely option open to scientists.
This Thanksgiving I’m thinking quite a bit about my Grandparents who passed away in the last few months. In the past on holidays we have been overwhelmed with the number of places we were expected to go. But now that that is over we are really missing it. It has made me think that I shouldn’t take people who truly care about me for granted. It is so important to know that there are people out there who truly love and accept me no matter what. With friends I am tempted to worry that they might not like me as much if I say certain things or if I truly open up. But with family it is different. I am thinking about my Grandma Eubanks who was always delighted to see my family when we came regardless of my political views or whether we said a couple of stupid or annoying things or even if the kids were cranky. So if you have people who truly care about you don’t take them for granted. In this life that is a very precious and rare thing.
The Holy Spirit is moving at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City so I’ve been thinking about revival over the last week. There’s a lot of confusion over the subject of revival in the church so hopefully I can clarify what revival is and why we want it.
Revival is simply the Holy Spirit acting in a tangible way among a group of people. During revival the Holy Spirit
- convicts of sin
- saves, heals and delivers people
- brings joy
- creates love for God, for ourselves, and for others in the church
- gives the church a desire to read the Bible and to pray
- creates a passion for worship
- gives people a tangible sense of his presence
- does strange things (I would call them fun things)
- equips the saints for ministry
Basically revival is Christianity functioning. Christians are dependent on the Holy Spirit’s power for almost every aspect of our lives. Christians, in our own power and unbelievers for that matter, can use the teachings in the Bible to make us live better lives. We are totally incapable, however, of changing ourselves or other people without the power of the Spirit. We can’t heal. We can’t deliver. We can’t even believe or love without the power of the Spirit.
This is why I get so upset when I hear people say that they think Christianity is more powerful without revival. To me this smacks of humanism. To believe we can get more accomplished in a “purer” way by trudging through the desert in our own strength is disastrous. They may counter “we are going through the desert by the power of the Spirit,” to which I would reply “how can you tell?” If what you call the activity of the Spirit looks, feels, and gets the same results as you doing things through your natural abilities, how can you tell which is which? Shouldn’t you be able to tell? Shouldn’t the world be able to tell? The New Testament makes it appear that you can tell a difference.
The Church needs revival. Revival needs to be normal. We can’t force God’s hand, but we can ask a God who hears our prayers to send revival and to remain with us. In the New Testament there is no indication that a powerless life is the normal Christian life. I see in the Bible that God answers prayer. I see in the Bible that Christians have joy unspeakable. I see in the Bible that Christians are people who are full of love.
Here is a great quote that Michael Bird put in a blog post today. Totally agree.
“The purposes of God are reducible to his will, a will that initially appears equally set to harden or to save, but turns out on closer inspection, and in the end, to harden only in order to save, to hate only in order to love, and to consign all to disobedience only in order to have mercy on all. What has twisted Paul’s theology into this strange shape is his understanding of a “gift” that has redefined the meanings of charis and eleos and defies explanation or rationale. That gift is the Christ-event which reconciled the world “while we were enemies” (Rom 5:6-10) and justified the ungodly (4:4-6)”
- John Barclay