Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

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Why are you amazed?

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Amazed“Men of Israel, why are you amazed at this, or why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk?” – Acts 3:12

I can read about miracles in the Bible and not be amazed. The flannel graph presentations of my youth have made the stories so familiar that too often I do not connect with how radical the events actually were. This healing should amaze me but its familiarity masks how marvelous it really is.

But how would I respond if I actually witnessed a miracle of this nature?

In Acts 3, Peter and John passed by a lame man who frequented the gate to the Temple. Rather than giving the man some money, they grabbed him by the hand and commanded him to get up and walk. Not only did he walk, the formerly lame man was jumping around and praising God for the miracle.

Yes, the people who saw this were amazed. Which is exactly how I would be under the same circumstances.

Peter then asks them the question quoted at the beginning of this post, “why are you amazed at this?” The people who witnessed the miracle were coming to the Temple, the place where the miracle working God of Israel’s history was to be worshiped. They should have come to that God with the expectation that he would intervene on behalf of his people.

The people had low expectations as to what God was willing to do on their behalf.

Perhaps I am speaking only for myself, but it seems that those of us who grew up in the church have low expectations as to what God is willing to do for us. Do I pray as if I expect the miracle to take place? Am I banging on the doors of Heaven in anticipation of my petition being heard and a response enacted?

The notion that God’s response to my prayers is in proportion to the faith in which I offer them is dangerous and goes against Biblical teaching. I am certainly not saying that my expectation of being answered is the currency that buys a correct response from God. God is not a vending machine that gives me what I want if I put in the right amount of money. The amount and quality of my faith has nothing to do with it. My expectation of an answered prayer is not something that I can muster up. I don’t need to exercise my “faith muscles.”

What I am saying is that my prayers are tepid because I am not allowing myself to connect with how awesome and powerful God really is.

I need to remind myself that God does want to work in history, this is the major lesson from the incarnation. God does want to bring healing (emotional and physical). God does want to draw people to himself. God does want to bring me through the difficulties of life with my faith intact. I should not be amazed when I see him doing the very things for which I pray.

Then when God acts, I should be grateful but not amazed.

Leaders – How well are you getting people grounded in the faith?

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GroundedIt should come as no surprise to anyone who is at all paying attention to the culture around us that we can no longer assume that the people we interact with subscribe to a Judeo/Christian worldview. In fact, an increasing percentage of the populace is hostile to such a view.

This begs the question of church leaders, “what are you doing to get your people grounded in the Christian faith?”

I believe that good preaching does part of the job, but assuming that the average sermon is 30 minutes and the average parishioner attends 50 service per year (I like easy math), that is 25 hours per year of instruction that may or may not address the issues that the parishioner struggles with.

Highly motivated people will find web sites, podcasts or other materials that will address the questions and concerns they have. They may even take classes or pursue a degree to become better trained to understand what they believe and why they believe it. But what about the ones that are not so self motivated or who don’t know where to turn?

I know that some denominations have formalized catechetical training. I have never been part of a group that had such training but I wonder if the nature of the catechism is such that it addresses or helps people understand and respond to the challenges to the Christian worldview that are on the rise.

There is not a one-size-fits-all approach that will work in every church context, but I thought I would catalog some ideas on how to go about getting people grounded in the faith. Here are some ideas in no particular order:

  • Develop and teach a “Bible 101” or foundations class. When you do this, I would encourage you to distinguish between the essential doctrines of Christianity and the non-essential issues. There is nothing wrong with having denominational distinctiveness as long as it is understood that not all true believers agree on non-essentials. To give an exchatological interpretation the same importance as the deity of Christ does damage to the Church Universal.
  • Along the same lines, avoid drawing unnecessary lines in the sand on non-essential issues. For example, while I believe in a literal six day creation, I refuse to argue with those who believe in a longer time frame. If we can agree on God as the agent of creation, that is good enough for me.
  • Provide a means of getting questions answered. This could be through a Sunday School class geared toward answering world view questions, occasional Q & A sessions with the pastoral staff or an email address where questions can be sent in and answered. Help people find the answers they need.
  • Train small group leaders and Sunday school teachers  in how to handle Biblical and world view questions. While “I have to ask the Pastor” may be an appropriate response if the leader does not know the answer, it would be so much better if the question could be handled effectively (and correctly) on the spot.
  • Bring in seminar speakers who are trained to address the issues of the day. There are several seminaries that are training Christian apologists who would be able to help you find a suitable speaker.
  • Model grace to those who have questions or struggle in understanding and belief. Look at how Jesus handled those who raised questions and respond in a similar fashion.
  • Don’t ignore the young people in your church. They have the same questions and are often more honest about their struggles. Perhaps if we did a better job of answering their questions at a young age, fewer of them would leave the church in their college years.

Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:11-12 that it is the job of church leaders to equip those in their charge to minister to the people around them. Part of this equipping is to get them grounded in their understanding of the Christian faith and how it speaks to the issues of the day.

Leaders need to periodically gauge how well they are doing with regard to equipping their people. If you find that improvement can be made, try something new. Use one of the ideas above or listen to the ideas of your people. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

If you have other ideas, I would appreciate if you would share them in the comment section below.

Tune my heart . . .

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praying_handsI love many of the old hymns. The ones I most appreciate are those for which much thought was put into the lyrics. One of my favorite hymns is “Come Thou Fount.” Here are the lyrics:

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 12:1-2 that I need to be transformed by the renewing of my mind. This transformation is what the author of Come Thou Fount has in mind. Phrases like “tune my heart,” “by thy help I’m come” and “bind my wandering heart” speak to the need for God to transform me.

This morning I attended a Men’s breakfast where the speaker talked about prayer. As he was speaking, I thought about this need for transformation and how this should be the first thing for which I pray. Perhaps this is why my favorite prayer recorded in Scripture is, “I believe, help my unbelief.”

Now on to one of my pet peeves. I notice that in the last few years when “Come Thou Fount” is sung in churches the lyrics of the first verse have been changed. Instead of saying “Praise the mount” the lyrics have been changed to “Praise the name.” While this seems innocuous, I think it actually does violence to the meaning of the song. The mount to which the author refers is Mount Calvary, without which the transformation is not possible. If we take the cross out of the song, from where will the transformation come?

It is precisely because Jesus died and rose again that I can have hope to be other than I am. For what could I pray if there was no hope that my sin has been conquered? For what could I pray if Jesus did not rise and demonstrate that sin and death are vanquished? What hope have I without the Cross and the empty tomb?

But he did go to Mount Calvary and the tomb is empty, therefore I can be transformed.

Roy Abraham Varghese on the “New Atheism”

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There is a GodAt the foundation of the “new atheism” is the belief that there is no God, no eternal and infinite Source of all that exists. This is the key belief that needs to be established in order for most of the other arguments to work. Int is my contention here that the “new atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lewis Wolpert, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, not only fail to make a case for this belief, but ignore the very phenomena that are particularly relevant to the question of whether God exists.

As I see it, five phenomena are evident in our immediate experience that can only be explained in terms of the existence of God. These are, first, the rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world; second, life, the capacity to act autonomously; third, consciousness, the ability to be aware; fourth, conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding meaningful symbols such as are embedded in lanuage; and fifth, the human self, the “center” of consciousness, thought, and action.

Three things should be said about these phenomena and their application to the existence of God. First, we are accustomed to hearing about arguments and proofs for God’s existence. In my view, such arguments are useful in articulating certain fundamental insights, but cannot be regarded as “proofs” whose formal validity determines whether there is a God. Rather, each of the five phenomena adduced here, int heir own way, presuppose the existence of an infinite, eternal Mind. God is the condition that underlies all that is self-evident in our experience. Second, as should be ovbious from the previous point, we are not talking about probabilities and hypotheses, but about encounters with fundamental realities that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. In other words, we don’t apply probability theorems to certain sets of data, but consider the far more basic question of how it is possible to evaluate data at all. Equally, it is not a matter of deducing God from the existence of certain complex phenomena. Rather, God’s existence is presupposed by all phenomena. Third, atheists, new and old, have coplained that there is no evidence for God’s existence, and some theists have responded that our free will can be preserved only if suce evidence is non-coercive. The approach taken here is that we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.

Roy Abraham Varghese in There is a God – How the world’s most notorius atheist changed his mind.

I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 1:18 where he informs us that the problem of those who don’t believe is not a lack of evidence, but the suppression of it.

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