The Advent of Grace

God oppresses the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Ephesians 5:21 (Proverbs 3:34)


Grace-unmerited favor.

As we experience the Advent Season, we focus on the grace of God that was given through the birth of Jesus, the Christ. As we reflect on how Jesus came to be born, we find that we have little understanding of God's purposes and how he effects our redemption through them.  We are left to read His word and trust in His love.

Isn't that how grace always is? Are not His purposes usually a mystery to us? How often do we pray for days, weeks, years, with seemingly no answer? Only in retrospect do we see that God's grace has slipped quietly into our lives, answering our prayers as quietly and unobtrusively as the birth of a baby in a stable. Our prayers were for an outcome; His purposes included the process.

Praying for a change in heart that that I knew I was powerless to achieve, I found after years of prayer the change had been miraculously accomplished. I do not understand His purpose in making me wait. I know that part of the delay was my own failure to humble myself to Him. I also know that He waited long enough for me to be certain that my change of heart was His grace and not my doing; He receives the glory, and I trust Him more than ever.

We had no choice in the timing of Jesus' birth. His birth and death and resurrection were collectively unmerited favor delivered to those who mostly did (and do) not recognize their need. That grace is offered with extraordinary patience to all who have been called to receive it, and given to all who accept it.

Daily grace, the grace that changes the way we think and act, that changes the way we love our neighbor, treat our children, value our wives, do our acts of service, even how we do the menial tasks of daily life, is given in the same mysterious way. It is offered to all who have been called to receive it, and given to all who accept it.

We receive daily grace in the same manner that we receive Jesus: we recognize our need, humbling ourselves and acknowledging our powerlessness to do what only God can do, and asking for His deliverance, both in our salvation, which is complete, and in our sanctification, which is an unending process growing out of daily renewal in His Word.

The Advent of Grace is a River, flowing from the throne of God to us.

Thanks you, Father God, for the gift of Your Son, and for the daily, eternal flow of grace from Your throne into our lives.  Amen.

Necessarily Incomplete:Thoughts on Repentance, Love, and Forgiveness

As Thou dost forgive us our trespasses, so may we forgive others who trespass against us.*

When Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden, they sinned. I had never considered their hiding as a sinful act until God opened my eyes to my own tendency to hide from Him after my own sinful rebellions and thoughtless acts of omission and commission.

I think part of the difficulty in living a life that experiences the "easy yoke and light burden" that Jesus promised His followers is our hesitance to repent at the moment we know we have sinned. Instead, our tendency, the human, fallen tendency, is to mimic Adam and Eve: we run away from God, hoping He didn't notice. But, we know in our hearts, we can run but not really hide.

So how do we change this habit of behavior? How do we change any destructive behavior, be it the sin or the response to the sin which compounds the original offense? The answer is simple but not easy: submit in humility; admit that, try as you might, you cannot successfully change the heart behind behavior without the Holy Spirit's work; and you cannot change the behavior permanently without a change of heart.

So, do we just sit and wait and do nothing ourselves. No, we are creatures of free will; we have choices, the most important of which is to submit in humility, but while God is changing our attitudes and healing our wounds that lead to destructive thoughts and behaviors, we can choose to act differently, not as a rebellious attempt to circumvent the need for a spiritually derived change of heart, but as a statement of faith that we trust God to carry our "heart-change" to completion.

C. S. Lewis said: "When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him." If we direct our actions to love someone, even if in our hearts we despise them, we are humbling ourselves to God. We are saying, in essence: "You, Father, love this person who is part of Your creation, so I will be obedient and act as though I love them, too." Our obedience opens the door for God to change our hearts using the emotions that He placed within us.

We cannot of our own volition change our hearts, but we can use our hands and feet, our words and actions to do the opposite of what our selfish hearts will us to do, submitting those evil desires to God even as we act in love, even as our actions speak the forgiveness of God that we have not yet experienced in our heart.

Some say that unless we forgive we cannot be forgiven; unless we love our neighbor as ourselves we are not true believers. There is an element of truth in these propositions, but they leave another aspect of God's grace unspoken: As we develop faith in Him, we love ourselves as He loves us; we forgive ourselves as He forgives us; only then are we prepared by Him to forgive others and to love others in the way we should love ourselves.

The concept of being loved to love and being forgiven to forgive necessarily implies that we have to first accept God's love and forgiveness before we can love and forgive as He demands. They are not actions that are the initiators of our salvation, but the fruit of it, and the fruit may take years of nurturing and pruning before it is produced, meaning that between our salvation and our perfection will be many trials in which we may fail to love or forgive as we should.

Packer points out in his book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, the occurrence in nature of antinomies, a situation in which two necessary laws appear to be contradictory. He uses the analogy of light being both particle and wave, two contradictory theories but both needed to adequately explain the action of light.

The need to forgive to be forgiven, to love others as we love ourselves, can be viewed as antinomies as well--we cannot forgive without divine grace first being given to us, without divine love first being offered to us; at the same time we are to forgive and love as a condition of that forgiveness and eternal love. A cause (being forgiven, being loved) is necessary for the effect (forgiving others, loving others), yet the effect is required in order for the cause to be in place--two necessary laws that seem to contradict each other.

Only God has the depth of intellect to understand such an antinomy. We only have to "trust and obey"---someone ought to write a hymn about that :).

When we walk with the Lord in the light of His Word,
What a glory He sheds on our way!
While we do His good will, He abides with us still,
And with all who will trust and obey.**

Peace and grace be yours. Amen

*(translation from Aramaic to Old English by G.J.R. Ouseley from The Gospel of the Holy Twelve)

** Trust and Obey, John Sammis (1887)

Daily Crossings

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Why are you crying out to Me? Tell the sons of Israel to go forward."As for you, lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, and the sons of Israel shall go through the midst of the sea on dry land. Exodus 14:15-16

When Moses and the fugitive Israelites arrived at the Red Sea, their backs were against the wall. There appeared to be only two choices that provided an escape from the brutal slavery to which they had been subjected--turn and fight Pharaoh or plunge into the Red Sea--both choices equally certain to produce death and destruction for the Chosen People.

Then God provided a third choice, miraculously moving the waters back to create a dry path through the Sea. All the Israelites had to do was step out in faith that the waters would stay where they were. I wonder if the average traveler saw this as opportunity or risk; I wonder how I would have viewed the situation.

How do I respond when such opportunities appear before me? The first question is: do I even recognize what I am seeing? Do I understand my hopeless plight, my enslavement to whatever it is from which God is offering deliverance? The first step in seeing "Red Sea" opportunities is to know I am in need of deliverance. My enslavement may involve dependence on gods of materialism or other addictions; it may involve a disordered set of priorities; it may involve bitterness in relationships; it may even be manifested in Pharisaic legalism that I have mistaken for Christianity. If I am deluded and don't recognize my enslavement, I will not come to the point of crying out to God for deliverance.

But let's say God has revealed to me my plight, and I have asked God for deliverance from my burden that weighs down my life and steals my joy. When the Red Sea parts, how do I respond? My tendency is to begin to analyze the risks, to calculate the odds of a successful crossing: "hmmm, the water is 20 feet high, the wind is 30 miles per hour, and I have about 40 minutes to make the crossing, or else I'm going to drown"--in other words, I forget Who it is who parted the Sea and I begin to lean on my own understanding of the risks and benefits rather than being obedient.

I calculate the harm to my reputation if I admit my addiction: I justify my need for financial security by claiming prudence as my god; I defend my pride by assuring myself that to try to mend that relationship will just result in my being betrayed; I argue that love has to have limits and that boundless compassion is just a license for someone else to sin, so I stand by my legalism. All the while the dry land waits, the waters roil, and the hope for the Promised Land lies on the other side.

The Other Side: The Promised Land AND lots of desert and difficulty.

How often do I consider the Red Sea opportunities in that light? Instead of valuing the supernatural event that God has placed before me, I argue for assurances that the other side will be all comfort and joy upon arrival. That wasn't realistic for the Israelites and it isn't realistic for me--there was desert on the other side and their subsequent disobedience delayed their arrival in the Promised Land.

Its the same for me: I can step out in faith, cross my Red Sea, but life will still be difficult in some ways, obedience is still required AFTER I cross, and there will still be temporal consequences if I make bad choices down the line--if I leave behind enslavement to one god and then fashion a golden calf on the other side.

The Israelites problem was not that they crossed the dry land to freedom, but that they turned to another form of slavery after they crossed. The risk for me, and for you, is similar--obedience in crossing may bring new challenges and new temptations. The answer is not to refuse to make the crossing, but to commit to obedience on the other side.

So, a challenge to you and to me: Let's open our eyes to our enslavement; let's pray to God for deliverance; let's walk on the dry land when God provides it; and let's remain obedient on the other side as we travel on to the Promised Land.

Father God, give us courage to step out in reliance upon your provision, not fearing the "other side" but trusting you moment to moment, day to day, with the outcome. We pray in the name of Jesus, Who died on the Cross in obedience to You, Amen.

At the Foot of the Cross

And I said to him, "Sir, you are the one who knows."Then he said to me, "These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb and made them white." Revelations 7:14

For most of my life have heard ministers and lay believers say that we should lay our burdens at the foot of the Cross. Have you ever considered what this would mean in practical application? What if you had lived during Jesus' earthly ministry and, during the hours of His crucifixion, you had knelt at the foot of the Cross and prayed, unburdening your life?

If you had knelt there at 9 in the morning as they raised Jesus onto the cross you would have been visibly clean. At 3 p.m., as Jesus breathed His last and gave up His spirit, you would have looked a lot like the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, who at that very moment were sacrificing the unblemished lambs for the Passover observance--stained, perhaps covered, in blood.

When Jesus shed His blood on the Cross, when the sweat and watery effusions poured from His body, anyone kneeling at the foot of the Cross would have been directly affected. They would have left the scene appearing radically different than when they came: they would have come, appearing clean and pure but full of sin, fear, anxiety, lacking purpose or direction; if they understood the meaning of the Cross, they would have left covered in blood and the debris of death, but cleansed from sin, rid of fear and anxiety, and aware of God's desire to be eternally in communion with them.

While kneeling they could have observed a landscape of paradoxes in human behavior: a thief, guilty as charged, mocking the innocent--another thief, guilty as charged, recognizing his guilt and repenting, asking for Jesus to remember him in His Kingdom; soldiers mocking Him and gambling over His clothes--a Centurion, the leader of the soldiers, understanding, as "it was finished", that he had just watched the Son of God crucified; religious leaders of the day, responsible for His crucifixion, standing by as they reveled in His death--the few who had not fled, Mary, His mother, and John and others, grieving in the face of the horror they were witnessing, and not fully understanding at that moment what was being done for all of mankind.

As a child, I did not grasp the meaning of "coming to the foot of the Cross." As a man, I have resembled the mocking thief, the gambling soldiers, the legalistic religious leaders; I have been Judas in betrayal, Peter in denial, Thomas in doubting, and the brothers James and John in wanting selfish position and power. I have been John the Baptist in having second thoughts about who Jesus is. I have been Martha in wanting "fairness" instead of worshiping Him as Lord, and even Mary, His mother, in wanting Him to do my bidding.

I have not spent enough time at the foot of the Cross, preferring to retain my external appearance and internal strife rather than being stained with His blood and washing my sin away. But the Cross is still there, bidding me come, offering the covering of blood that is always and eternally available to those to whom He has offered salvation and who will partake of it.

The great struggle of life, of my life, is submitting to the meaning of the Cross, of accepting that to go to the foot of the Cross means humility, means disregard for external appearances, means asking the Son of Man to remove from me what I cannot remove from myself.

Thank you, God, for your inestimable gift in Jesus. Help us all to go the the foot of the Cross often and in humility, and to not fear the stain of His blood, but to understand all that His blood has offered to us. Amen.

Keeping the Present in His Presence

He first cuts down a cedar, or maybe picks out a pine or oak, and lets it grow strong in the forest, nourished by the rain. Then it can serve a double purpose: Part he uses as firewood for keeping warm and baking bread; from the other part he makes a god that he worships--carves it into a god shape and prays before it. With half he makes a fire to warm himself and barbecue his supper. He eats his fill and sits back satisfied with his stomach full and his feet warmed by the fire: "Ah, this is the life." And he still has half left for a god, made to his personal design--a handy, convenient no-god to worship whenever so inclined. Whenever the need strikes him he prays to it, "Save me. You're my god." Pretty stupid, wouldn't you say? Don't they have eyes in their heads? Are their brains working at all? Doesn't it occur to them to say, "Half of this tree I used for firewood: I baked bread, roasted meat, and enjoyed a good meal. And now I've used the rest to make an abominable no-god. Here I am praying to a stick of wood!" Isaiah 44:14-20 (The Message Modern Translation)

Isaiah must have had a sense of humor to write this passage. Doesn't it seem foolish for someone to cut down a tree, use part of it for firewood and then carve an idol out of the other piece? Laughable, isn't it?

Sure glad I never do something that foolish. You neither, huh?

Well, maybe I should think about that. I do like my LSU football, and sometimes it goes beyond entertainment, and I really get depressed for a day (or a weekend) when they lose. And I spend a lot more time picking out cars than is necessary, something that has four wheels and an engine no matter which one I pick...okay no real defense there. But I don't worship knowledge and I never get in an argument just for the sake of proving a point (lightening strike at any moment). And I never get upset if someone gets the best of me financially, like when Blue Cross and I disagree and they have the audacity to ignore my tenth email. And beating that car down Spring Hill Avenue that just passed and cut me off is just teaching them a lesson---I'm totally unemotional, completely detached and just doing them a favor by proving their hurriedness was unnecessary.

And I do NOT have to please others or feel depressed! I only worry about things like that for few hours (or days) and then I'm over it, so no problem there. And that package I expected in the mail yesterday--I will wonder about it all day today, but isn't that normal--the fact that it captures my attention and wastes time, that's okay, isn't it?

Well, you get the point. I don't cut down trees and make little wooden images while I cook my dinner over the rest of the wood. And I really don't worship a Tiger or any other animal; I really don't have to be in control ALL the time, or win every argument, or whatever else distracts me from this moment with God.

But I let all of those things encroach on "the present" and crowd out the "Presence". I was made to be in communion with Him, not just on Sundays or at church or on Tuesdays and Wednesdays with my group of Christian and Jewish friends. I was made to be in His Presence continually, not always thinking of Him, but always aware of Him. My state of mind is to be constantly seeking Him and His Kingdom, and He said He would give us all the things we need, and sometimes lots of things we just want.

But we do ourselves harm and do Him great injustice when we forget Whose things we are prone to worship, Whose sovereignty we are prone to usurp (in our minds only), Whose justice we are prone to impose (against others, not ourselves), and Whose righteousness we fall woefully short of (it bothers me that I ended this sentence with a preposition, so I added this parenthetical remark to make it look better, not that I am perfectionistic or anything; really I'm not...)

Isaiah's example of foolish idolatry was obvious, ludicrous, ridiculous. But if I give lip service to worship while my mind wanders over the anxieties of the moment; if I speak of my faith while my life indicates a constant need for control; if the last word is my form of "vengeance is mine, saith me"; if things are more important than people; if people are more important than God; if religious correctness is more important than the fact that Jesus died for us all--then I think chopping down a tree and carving an idol rather pales by comparison.

So, how do I avoid this? Do I separate myself from all temptations of the world that are good things but lead me to idolatry? No, as I heard a minister say recently: we cannot place ourselves in a plastic baggy to insulate ourselves from the world, for even then we could still have our ill temper, our covetous nature--our humanness would be in the bag right there with us. The answer is in separating ourselves to God--putting Him first and allowing Him to be the master of our lives, our possessions, our relationships, and each waking moment (and pray that He directs our dreams!!).

Not easy, not for me. But nothing of eternal significance really ever is.

Jesus, in Matthew 6 said: If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers--most of which are never even seen--don't you think he'll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God's giving. People who don't know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works.Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes." Matthew 6:30-34 (The Message Modern Translation)

Amen-so be it.!!

Justice for All

For the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light. John Calvin

We are a people that value liberty, who prize the freedom of the individual to exercise his or her own decisions within the boundaries of the laws of our nation. But what do we do when those laws deprive a segment of our population of their inalienable human rights? You might say we defend those people, but...

It has not always been that way. For many decades we condoned the slave trade, as did our English friends before the time of Wilberforce. For nearly a decade we allowed a fascist government in Europe to kill and imprison millions of people on the basis of religion and only became involved when the economic effects on our merchant ships, and the military aggression of Japan prompted our response. For decades after slavery was abolished, we diminished a race in our country through all manner of degrading laws and cultural rules.

I said it has not always been that way. In truth, it is still not that way. In the years of slavery, greed clouded people's moral vision and passivity by the unaffected perpetuated the injustice. In the years preceding WWII, our isolationist views, brought on by the terrible memories of WWI, overrode the need to intervene to protect the Jews and allowed an evil dictator to solidify his power until it was almost too late. Now, we ignore another "nation" of humans who live amongst us, bound not by nationality but by their common residence and their common fate.

We allow their human rights to be trampled; we insure that they are not protected, that their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness never see the light of day. We stand by, numb to their plight just as whites were numb to black slavery, just as common German citizens, free Europe, and the U. S. ignored the development of the holocaust.

Except, in our case, we are not ignorant, just numb, morally dulled and therefore without defense. We know that millions of humans have died and that many more are dying daily. We are abhorred at cruelty to animals, yet a human can be quietly dismembered while otherwise thinking, seemingly morally upright people, stand by and defend the perpetrator's right to murder and applaud the mother's privilege of "choice".

We do not see the expressions of pain, we do not hear the screams, for their lungs are not filled with air. When they inhale, they breathe in the salt water of their world, the ocean of protection intended to help their mother shield them from the early traumas of the world. They cannot defend themselves; there is nowhere to run; the person intended to be their greatest defender has, sometimes coldly, sometimes in ignorance, sometimes in desperation and misguided compassion, and sometimes just inexplicably, decided to end their life--before their eyes can see, before their ears can hear anything beyond muffled sounds, before their sense of smell can be exercised, before their sense of taste can know something besides salt, and before they can touch or be touched in love.

We rightfully condemn the Klan for killing hundreds of African Americans over the course of a century. Yet we are silent as, in each four day period that passes, the number of African-Americans killed legally equals that of all of the Klan's century of evil. Minorities, Black and Hispanic, are disproportionately represented among victims of abortion, yet the civil rights of those lives are not defended. The government sanctions the killing to which the parents have consented.

I am culpable. I have spent the first 61 years of my life, 39 of them after Roe vs. Wade and 34 of them caring for those who are alive but ill at birth , turning a blind eye to the atrocity of abortion, not in favor of it, but, like most folks, too busy with life to focus on what it really means, to really think about the unthinkable of humans being torn apart before they can even see the beauty of the world around us. I have intellectualized, rationalized, sympathized, but I have done nothing.

No more. To the limited extent that this personal record is public, this is a declaration of intent: I intend to do all within my limited abilities, as God provides me with ability and the means, and within the years I have left to turn the tide; to move our culture back towards a culture of life because God is the Author of all life, and if He said "it is good", then who are we to decide to prevent it or end it. Help me; pray for me; pray for your own involvement if you feel moved.

A man trying to push a mountain appears foolish; yet Jesus said if we have the smallest amount of faith we can move mountains. Let us exercise our faith in the protection of the unprotected, and give justice to those who cannot seek it on their own. The task may seem impossible, but our God is the God of the impossible.

Use your imagination to see what abortion really is! Fight against the kind of social stupor that gripped Nazi Germany – the feeling that the problem is so huge and so horrendous and so out of our control that I just can't be wrong to let it be. Use your imagination to see and feel what is really happening behind those sterile clinic doors. If you could see each little handiwork of God and what it looks like when it is being crushed or poisoned or starved, you would say, this can’t be happening. Civilized people do not do this! The children will not be saved and God’s work will not be reverenced without an act of sustained sympathetic imagination. Otherwise it is out of sight out of mind – just like Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Auschwitz. It just couldn't be happening and so we act as if it isn't. John Piper

Abba, Father. I am committed, with You and whomever reads this as my witness. Thank You for Your love and Your gift of purpose. Amen.

Securitas and Desperatio*

(Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea)**

I received word that my brother-in-law’s brother, a good man and a kind mind, had passed away. His family was sad and I was sad for them. Yet there was another emotion that rose up in that time of grief over a lost friend.

I am not certain that I can fully characterize the emotion. The closest I can come to labeling my feelings is to admit that they contain an element of envy, a longing to be like the saint who has passed over to new life, borne not of depression but of a desire for relief from the path we walk in this life.

We travel a life-long road that has as its boundaries the sins of pride and desperation—the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Saved by grace yet living in this fallen state, we are persistently tempted to a kind of pride that leads the non-believer away from grace and leads the believer to become a casual saint—one who knows about grace but devalues it so that an incautious life and a calloused spirit become tolerable. We become secure in our sin.

The other boundary, desperation, tempts us to look perpetually inward, and backward, and even in a perverse way, forward. We know our past mistakes, we dwell on them, we even dread making them again, knowing that sooner or later we will be weak in whatever realm our souls are habitually weak. We become desperate, but our desperation does not send us to confession and repentance but to the altar of pride where we pronounce ourselves beyond hope.

We travel most peacefully when we look to the end of the road and see Who welcomes our approach. We travel most treacherously when our feet slip into the ditch, pulling us toward temporal destruction, or perhaps as I am now doing, placing a coveted eventuality above His will for me in the present. I make an idol of eternity or a point in time instead of worshipping the God Who gave us time and eternity.

Like Peter, whose brief ecstasy in walking on the waves rapidly changed to panic when he took his eyes off Jesus, we live an entire life buoyed by His gaze or, if not, looking away to sin.

So, there will be relief when the path is at its end, when we are done walking to Jesus, resting in His arms; and moments like these, where one we love has gone ahead, bring a mixture of sadness and wishing to be farther along the path ourselves, beyond the temptations of pride and desperation, beyond the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Thank you, Lord, for being there, for not only being at the end of the path, but for giving us Your Comforter to walk beside us and guide us in the daily walk. Amen.

*from Creation and Fall Temptation—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

**from His expedition with the worthy Scots regiment called Mac-keyes—Robert Monro

Corruption

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

2 Peter 1:3-4 (NIV)

A recent development in the prevention of the spread of disease in medical settings as well as in businesses and homes is the availability of waterless hand cleansers, usually available through dispensers located in strategic locations within the various environs.

As I entered one of our office buildings recently and pushed on the lever which dispenses the hand cleanser from the supply just inside the building door, I was chagrined to note that the dispenser was empty. I wondered at that moment how many others had, as I had, placed their less than clean hands on the dispenser, expecting to receive the benefit of its contents, only to become aware that rather than receiving benefit, they had actually increased their need for the product they sought.

The experience made me wonder: How many other things intended for good in our lives become vehicles for contaminating our emotional, physical, and spiritual lives? And how often do we recognize this phenomenon and turn to the Provider so that He may redeem our perversion, restoring the relationship between creatures and Creation to that which He intended?

If all of God's creation is good, and He said it is, then nothing He created is intrinsically evil. Evil arises when we, the creatures, presume that we are minor gods and decide we know better than He how to use His creation.

Food is good. God gave it to us to nourish us, to give us pleasure, to provide fellowship with each other in partaking of it. We eat ourselves into poor health, either through our choice of foods or our total intake. We ignore or give scant attention to those who go hungry because the ample food in the world is poorly distributed.

Sexual pleasure is good. God gave it to us for our enjoyment and to populate the world He had created. We misuse it by objectifying another person as a means, a tool, instead of honoring the unity of spirit in which it was intended to be enjoyed. We mock the example of the Church as bride of Christ through the perversion of God's greatest gift and example of that relationship.

Spirited drinks are good. God gave them to us "to make our hearts glad". We begin there, but we over indulge either by pure choice or by choice combined with genetic predisposition to intolerance. The result is emotional, physical and spiritual devastation, disruption of families, death, and destruction.

Entertainment is good. God gave us creative minds to beautify the world and stimulate the mind, through the visual arts, the written word, music, and the spoken word. We misuse those gifts by creating idols of the art or the artist, by using those gifts to appeal to centers of our mind that lead to lust and evil thought, and by dishonoring the God of Creation in misusing the forms of expression that He gave us to praise Him.

Competition is good. God gave us minds and bodies that derive great pleasure from exercising the abilities He has given us in enjoyment with others. We make gods of bodies, the competitors, and victory; rather than valuing the opportunity to participate, finding satisfaction in the victory, and contentment in the legitimate effort, we idolize the outcome and lose the joy found in the process, robbed of holy pleasure by our pride.

Religion is good. God gave us minds to seek Him, to study His ways, to study His word, to discern our place in His world using our minds, our bodies, and our spirits. He reached out to us, offered Himself in our place to save us from our sins. As in the Garden, we have tried to become our own god, rejecting His overtures, and assuming wrongly that we need to "do" in order to reach up to Him. All false religions, and virtually all the misdirected practices of Christianity have come from man's attempt to overlook God's offer and create our own salvation.

Compassion is good. God is love, and part of His love involves compassion for us, and His love in us compels us to have compassion for our fellow travelers. But undisciplined compassion, truly false compassion, arises out of our desire to please others instead of God. For a myriad of reasons we enable others to do harm, to themselves and/or to others and call it compassion when in truth we would rather avoid confrontation.

Discipline is good. God is righteous and expects obedience to His commands and for us to establish practices which lead to righteousness, including counseling our fellow man. But unmerciful discipline, really false, self-righteous discipline, comes from our need to control. Its purpose is not to help others please God, but is legalism designed to promote our own misdirected image of ourselves as creator, not creature.

Pretty depressing! How do I avoid jumping off a high bridge after considering this corrupt world and my participation in it?

By remembering that real love is good, that God is love and God is good, and that we have no power to corrupt Him, even if we in our self-delusion as "god" fear inadvertently doing so. God knew all of His Creation would be corrupted before He ever contemplated creating the world. He knew the Fall would occur. He knew we would pervert the good, idolize the Creation, deceive ourselves in attempts at self-salvation--He knew we would sin--yet He created the world and all that is in it because He had the plan of redemption that would undo all that we have done.

My job is the daily renewing of my mind to understand my position as creature, as dependent on Him for my sustenance, as forgiven and in need of a forgiving attitude, in need of His deliverance from all my tendencies to corrupt what is good. My job is to be a disciple, to exercise discipline, to wait on Him, to ignore the cacophony of the world and wait to hear His whisper.

Lord, forgive us for misusing Your Creation; thank You for Your redemptive gift in Christ Jesus. Give us all, young or old, regardless of our abilities the discipline to be humble in your presence and to live our lives with the goal of honoring You; not focusing on avoiding misuse of the Creation, but focused on worshiping You and receiving Your forgiveness when we stray. Help us to find freedom in that discipline and joy in that freedom. Amen.

Glory

When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled His temple. 1 Kings 8:10-11.

In this passage and in others, particularly those associated with Moses in the wilderness, God's presence is presented as an incalculable source of energy and light, so powerful that humans could not survive its effects. That makes sense when one considers that the same God whose Presence created such fear and care among the Israelites was the God who initiated the Big Bang we read about in science.

If God can speak and have the universe explode into being from nothing, if he can create an intensely dense particle and then, exerting His infinite energy, cause that particle to expand into the growing universe in which we dwell, then is it so surprising that the power that surrounds His Presence when He makes Himself visibly present to man could be lethally overwhelming?

Scientists are increasingly aware of facts that support a beginning event several billion years ago, an event from which our universe has come. Most philosophers who study the possible origins of that beginning agree that there had to be a cause for the effect. They debate as to whether that cause was a personal God, an impersonal god, or some other force, but fewer and fewer espouse the idea that the universe is self-creative or self-existence, both intrinsically illogical ideas.

If the universe was begun by a single action, and that is what scientifically appears to be the case, then something or someone had to preexist that beginning to set things in motion. Because time began with the creation of the universe, that something or someone would of necessity be eternal in nature.

If that person or thing can create with a single act what we see all around us, above and below us, in the precise manner to have it all continue to exist and not collapse, knowledge of physics beyond our comprehension would have to have existed, for the room for error was essentially non-existent according to modern calculations on timing and rates of expansion. A tiny fractional difference in either direction and the universe would have collapsed back into dense matter or disappeared into the granddaddy of all explosions.

If a planet with the capability of sustaining life is so improbable as to defy any random chance of its occurrence, located precisely in the Milky Way, our galaxy, in a manner that gives our solar system a view unique among solar systems, one which allows our scientists to study the universe and arrive at proof of beginning events, does that not imply the creative energy of an intelligent person who wants us to discover the "how", but more importantly the "Who" of the Creation.

Scientists generally agree that there have been no new species since the beginning of recorded time. Alterations in species have occurred and species have disappeared, but no purely new species have appeared. The God Who created for six "days" and rested on the seventh, is still God of the Seventh, the "day" in which we live. He most often speaks with a "still, quiet voice", sustaining His Creation with the enormous energy at His disposal: He causes our hearts to beat, our minds to process thought, our cellular factories to turn substrate into energy, our souls to seek someone or Someone outside of ourselves as a source of Authority.

When one considers that the unimaginable amount of life and energy it takes to sustain the universe, to sustain life on this planet, to sustain life in each of our loosely bound amalgams of chemical compounds we call bodies, is it so surprising that He might need to shelter us from a direct view of Himself as God the Father.

Yet He loves us and desires for us to know His love. So he divested Himself of that incredible majesty, was born in dishonoring circumstances, lived a pure and perfect human life, subjected Himself to terminal injustice, and overcame death to show us the way to live with Him in all His glory, where we will stand in His Presence and not die or be afraid, but in awe, will see Him as only those made pure and perfect through His power are allowed to see Him.

I pray that anyone who reads this will know God and know His Son, will accept the power of the Spirit He has sent to reside within us, God in us, and will allow God to be sovereign in their lives, so that, in death, as we go to Him, or if we are still on earth at His coming, we will stand in loving awe and behold the full display of His power without suffering harm or being afraid. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Suggested reading: Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe, Edited by Hoffman and Geisler
Defending Your Faith: An Introduction to Apolgetics; R. C. Sproul