Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

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It’s not about do’s and don’ts

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“Now flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.” (2 Timothy 2:22, NASB)

do's and don'tsThe negative command is to flee youthful lusts, but Paul goes on to give a positive one. Youthful lusts are to be replaced by the pursuit of righteousness, faith, love and peace.  The negative command cannot be successfully accomplished unless the positive one is employed.

Too often we think of the Christian life in terms of the things we will not do. When this mindset is operational it is easy to become upset at the world all around us who is doing those very things. It is too easy to decry the degradation in the surrounding culture and long for the good old days where such behavior was not tolerated.

Instead of focusing on the negative, Paul gives us something to pursue. Rather than suppressing passions, Paul gives a worthy object for our passions.

Righteousness

When I see the word righteousness, I think of right standing before God. The beginning of this process is when we acknowledge our unrighteousness and accept God’s provision of Jesus as the means of our inheriting righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21). At the moment we accept God’s provision, we are declared righteous.

There is also an ongoing component to righteousness. Paul tells us in Romans 12:1-2 that we have to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Elsewhere, Paul uses the analogy of clothing when he tells us to “put off” the old self (Eph. 4:22, Col. 2:11, Col 3:9). The follow-up is to put on the new man and live in obedience to God.

It took a long time for me to understand that this is more than adherence to a list of do’s and don’ts. To really pursue righteousness is to cultivate a deeper relationship with God through the reading of Scripture, prayer and fellowship with other believers. As I deepen in my relationship with God, it becomes less and less about external behavior and more and more about what motivates me and where my desires will lead. Righteousness is all about letting God be in control.

Faith

Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us that we enter into a relationship with God through faith. Yet that faith can and should grow. On multiple occasions, Jesus challenged his followers because of their “little faith.” The implication is that Jesus’ follower should move beyond the little faith stage to a robust, mature faith.

I am challenged by those who seem to be gifted with great faith. Seeing those, I realize that I have so much room to grow in my own faith.

Love

Jesus told us that the two great commands are to love God and to love our neighbor. I cannot claim to be proficient at either of these and have much room for growth. I suspect that none of us can claim to have fulfilled either command to perfection. To pursue love, selfless love, is a worthy occupation.

Peace

In human terms we think of peace as the absence of conflict. Yet this is not true peace.  As Jesus points out in the Sermon on the Mount, hate is the root of murder and to hate is to commit murder without actually killing my adversary.

True peace is not only what happens on the outside. True peace must take place in our thoughts and emotions. Paul gives us indication of how true peace starts in Romans 5:1, it starts with “having been justified by faith.” This faith brings peace with God which can then begin to produce peace with ourselves and with others.

Conclusion

The Christian life should be so much more than following a list of do’s and don’ts. It should be so much more than a set of passionless rituals. A real walk with God should engage our mind and emotions in a pursuit of the things of God.

There is a gene for that

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It’s all in our genes

DNAI was listening to a local sports talk radio show on my way to an appointment. The host of the show was doing an interview with a sports writer who wrote a book on cats. The author of the book (who’s name I do not remember) was questioned as to why he liked animals and would write such a book.

The author attributed his like of animals to genetics. He grew up in a family that had pets. What caught my attention was his next statement. He said, “just as there is a gene that makes some people bad and a gene that makes some people good, there is a gene that makes some people like pets.”

Genetic research is not something that I spend a lot of time following, so I may have missed the announcement of this discovery. It seems to me that the author’s statement is hyperbole at best and a patent falsehood at worst.

The sad part is that such a statement would go unchallenged and would be so blindly accepted. From my perspective it takes a large degree of faith to bridge the gap between current knowledge and such a confident assertion. Yet dogma such as the book author proclaimed is widely accepted in America without critical thought.

Thoughts have consequences

Perhaps some thought should go into the repercussions of such a belief. If genetics determine who is bad, then why do we have rehabilitation programs in prisons? If genetics determines who is bad, then why not isolate the gene and kill all the babies that carry that gene? You might think that this is an absurd extreme yet the 20th Century has plenty of examples of mass killing of those with undesirable traits.

If there is no objective moral standard, who determines what it bad? We have seen the devastation when a totalitarian state defines who should live and who should die. The use of genetics could be a “scientific” means to the same end. In the totalitarian state, the state is the final arbiter of who is good and who is bad. Do you want to live in a world where decisions about you are made based on a genetic test?

You can’t believe in nothing

“When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything” is a phrase (perhaps wrongly) attributed to G. K. Chesterton, but is none the less true. Because we do not want God to have any input into our existence, we need to find some other means of explaining why people go wrong.

It must be pointed out that there have been cases of convicts who have turned their lives around. I recently found the story of Mary Kay Beard, the founder of Angel Tree. She went from being on the FBI’s most wanted list to being an advocate for the children of prison inmates. This turnaround in her life can be directly attributed to her faith in Jesus Christ.

So even if it were proved that there is a genetic predisposition to crime, there is something or someone stronger than genetics.

Heavenly minded or no good at all

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Heavenly MindedI have heard it said that a person could be so Heavenly minded that he is of no Earthly good. Perhaps it is only me, but I find that I am in greater danger of becoming so Earthly minded that I am no good at all.

I do not how it could be possible to be too Heavenly minded. Paul tells us to “Set [our] mind[s] on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.” (Colossians 3:2). The verb is a present tense command. It carries the idea of continually thinking or considering the things above. It is an ongoing day by day, minute by minute activity.

I suppose the point of the platitude is that some might be so wrapped up in Bible study and “spiritual” activity that they miss opportunities to be of practical help to those around them.

But if we look to Jesus to show us what being Heavenly minded should look like, we see a very different picture. While it is true that Jesus spent hours in prayer with his Father, it must also be noted that he spent more hours in meeting the intellectual, spiritual and physical needs of those who came to him.

Another approach to this question is to examine what Jesus taught. Jesus boiled all of the law into two commands to love. First is love for God; second is love for the people around us. The degree to which I am fulfilling the second command is an indication as to how well I am doing the first. Love of God will result in love for man. Why is this the case? Because God loved us enough to send Jesus, the same Jesus who met the needs of the people around him.

To flip this around, to love our neighbor by meeting his physical needs without addressing his great spiritual one is a shallow and unsatisfactory love. If the greatest need of humanity is to be in relationship with God (as the Bible teaches us), it would be impossible to fully love my neighbor without loving God first.

It is only by being truly Heavenly minded that I can begin to be of real use to those around me. As Jesus reminds us, “what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26).

Longing for a home I’ve never seen

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CloudsWhat makes a businessman decide to practice insider trading? Why does a successful and well known actor solicit a prostitute when he has a beautiful wife at home? When John D. Rockefeller was asked, “how much is enough?” he responded, “just a little bit more.” Why was he driven to get more when he had so much already?

There is no simple answer to each of these questions. We are complicated creatures and our choices come from a variety of motivations, some of which we may not be conscious as the choice is made.

I suspect that a sense of longing for something that is missing is part of the answer to why these people responded the way they did. A passage from C. S. Lewis’ essay, The Weight of Glory comes to mind:

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I am watching as my world becomes less coherent due to the rejection of the Judeo Christian ethic with nothing of substance to replace it. I see freedom being eroded around the world by the rise of totalitarian governments both atheistic and Islamic. I see much of the church ill-prepared to withstand the challenges of the day. And I get frustrated at my own inability to respond properly to all of this. Within and without I see the effect of sin and I long for something better.

In the Parable of the Virgins (Matthew 25:1 ff) Jesus tells us to be prepared for his return. I suppose that the awareness of how flawed this life is and the longing for something better are part of that preparation.

More thoughts on this longing can be found in the post Longing for a home I’ve never seen, Part 2

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