Opposing the Proud, Supporting the Humble

God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. This seems to be a core tenet at the center of understanding everything.

If you are enamored of your own self-sufficiency, awed by your own autonomy, then remember that thereby do you make God your enemy. He will work against you in your arrogant ways. 

Conversely, if you work hard to keep a balanced, full, and rich understanding of your complete nature, remembering the image of God woven through your entire being and  your desperately broken, fallen, sinful nature, this is humility. And by it, God becomes your supporter and friend, giving you grace, strength, and wisdom.

Building Life

Procreation shows us that building life takes more than just one person. We build life together. Sin alienates and separates us from each other. Separate, we cannot build life abundant.

A marriage is not two autonomous people wandering around following each individual's desires as they ebb and flow. It is the mystery of union, joining dreams and goals together to follow them as one.

Implicating Against Poverty

The idea of implicating prayers says that we must be acting and doing in the world in ways that support and bring to life the words of our prayers. Some who advocate for such prayers also advocate for the government to continue to take the leading role in combating poverty. They don't see the two as being contradictory. Instead, they often see them as consistent with each other. In both cases, they argue, they are utilizing and leveraging the resources they have (personally and politically) to drive resources to the poor.

But that's only true if 1) the government's actions toward the poor were effective in helping the poor, 2) those actions were not significantly wasteful, and 3) doing so was not giving to Caesar what irrevocably belongs to God, and therefore to the Body of Christ, to address and accomplish. I don't think any of these three things is true.

You Are Not Powerless

Jesus wants to challenge your largely unspoken belief that you are powerless to change things. The gifts you have received from Him give you a certain kind and sort of power. You need to know how to exercise that power with love and wisdom, but also with humility. You, and even the power you have, are flawed and incomplete. To let the insights of that power steer and drive you without intentional reflection and restraint would be arrogant and foolish. But to not use the power at all would be a dereliction of duty, an abdication of responsibility, and a genuine tragedy.

Perhaps you can't change very much in this world, but you are not valued or measured by the size of your impact. You are inherently valued by God no matter how much you shirk your responsibility. But somehow He will reward us all for doing what is good and right, and how we rightly handle our responsibility. Obedience to God is the measure we should aim to increase, not clicks or votes or pats on the back.

Hear, Obey, & Be Blessed

When you get a chance to do something that you know is obedient to God, how do you feel? When you approach a time that's set aside specifically for expressing gratitude to God, worshipping Him, are you resentful because it's intruding on or interfering with your time? Or are you thankful for the opportunity? Some of both?

The psalmist in Psalm 122 is overjoyed when he is told that the time has come to go to Jerusalem, the city built just for giving thanks to and worshipping God. What makes him so happy? Why is the thought of worship the trigger for that happiness?

In Ezra 6 we see both King Darius and Cyrus acknowledging that Jerusalem is where "the god of heaven" is to be worshipped. We don't know that they actually revered or worshipped the God who led Israel out of Egypt, but they did give up resources to support the effort of the Israelites' descendants' efforts to build the city where that God was meant to be worshipped.

In the last passage today (Luke 8:19-21), Jesus says, "My mother and My brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it." Another way of putting this is that those who promptly and practically respond when they hear God speaking are closest to Jesus, are becoming more like Jesus, are blessed.

The challenge for us is to daily remember who God is, in all His beauty, power, and grace, which He generously and graciously offers to us every day. As we grow more deeply in the habit of remembering this, the more naturally we will feel the psalmist's joy when we hear an opportunity to worship and give thanks to God, obey God, and thus become a little more like Jesus.

Progressivism: Coercion over Competition

Progressives prefer coercion over competition. They believe better outcomes will be achieved by a stronger central government forcing everyone to do what that government says is "right" than by a wide variety of solutions being attempted by many different groups to see which ones are more effective.


Progressives generally do not prefer a strong central government because they are truly enamored of strength or strong man, per se. They prefer centralized solutions for society's  problems because they genuinely believe that is the best route to a solution to those problems.


Conservatives, on the other hand, do not believe that centralized strength is the most effective way to solve problems. Instead, they assume that solutions will not be obvious, even to well-educated experts. They believe that the shortest and most effective route to effective solutions for societies problems is competition among a large number of potential solutions.

Today is Training for Tomorrow

When the time for action comes, when you finally get the opportunity to serve God the way you've always wanted and dreamed, the way you have responded to past temptations will have set the pattern, created the inertia, for how you respond to temptations in this time of opportunity. If you have always given in to temptations that wasted your time, drew your focus into fantasy, and required you to hide those parts of your life from what you share with God, then when you finally have the chance to pour yourself into the work you're called to do, you will carry the inertia of those distractions, those time-wasters, those sins, into the opportunity. And instead of pouring a purified, intensely focused and trained self into the work, you will pour your polluted, distracted self into the work. Your contribution to the work will be less than it might have been; the work will, very likely, be less than it might have been.

Today is practice for tomorrow. What you do in the small trains you for what you do in the large. 

Politics

If I comment about politics, it is from the belief that, at its best, politics (which is the pursuit and management of positions of power) gives us a chance to connect or reconcile with other people, to coordinate my efforts with the efforts of others to work towards worthy goals. Politics ideally balances solidarity (standing with and in support of others) and subsidiarity (I don't leverage power to impose a solution to a problem at such a high level of organization and logistics that the dignity of those being helped is lost in the process). It is my intention that Christian/biblical concepts of human dignity guide my opinions on public policy. 

Limitations of the Physicalist Worldview

Assuming a physical-only universe, presented with a phenomenon that doesn't seem explainable from within that worldview, we downplay or otherwise explain away the aspects that don't fit in. The assumption is that *everything* has to be explained, everything has to have a physical cause and effect explanation.


The mature spiritual worldview instead expects that there will be phenomena that can't fit within the finite explanatory framework that we are within. Not frustrated by the requirement that everything has to fit within the arbitrarily bounded worldview we're capable of, we can play within the universe.  We know that further explanations may arise in time, but we're not less because we don't know everything.

Our Identity, Every Day

God tells us who we really are. He gives us our identity. The world has many ways of determining and shaping our identity. They assault us throughout the day, every day, telling us who they think we should be. And so, we need to be hearing that statement of affirmation and identity from God every single morning of every single day and throughout every day. We need to nail down that foundation of all we do and everything we are before we go out and have the world tell us other things, which are not true, about ourselves.

The Movement of Culture

I think about people who habitually listen to the radio. And they just keep listening to it, no matter what the lyrics say, no matter what direction culture moves in. And they themselves are changed by the movement of culture, the changing of the culture. And I want to ask them, is there a stopping point? Is there a static place where things will not change anymore? And of course, the answer is no. The culture will always be changing, because we are alive. But which direction will it be changing in? The current state of our culture and the direction it is moving in do not indicate that there is any appetite for moving in the direction of greater honor or dignity or deep meaning and purpose. Instead, there are always people who are trying to "push the envelope" and move in the direction of deeper transgression, deeper malpurpose, ever deeper commitments to being led around by one's desires. 

God Knows You

Your feelings are a broken, poor barometer

For who you are and who you've always been

 

The Creator of orgasm and laughter

Knows you better than anyone you've ever met

 

He bows down to serve you in every moment

Keeps every subatomic particle going

Holds out the world for you to savor

Present in every grief and each celebration

 

So you shouldn't be surprised that He knows you

Knows who you are, what you've done, where you've been

He was right there with you, allowed it to come to pass

He grieved when you turned away, rejoiced when you returned

But He enables it all to happen. He was never not there

Risking Reconciliation Among the "Deconciled"

The world, especially this culture in this era, calls us to creature comforts, to please ourselves and focus on maximizing our own pleasure. God, in contrast, does not give us His presence and power to retreat into pleasure seeking. It is woven into the definition of following Christ that we absolutely will be in situations of discomfort and difficulty. We absolutely will be placed in situations of brokenness and conflict, where the risk of betrayal is real.

It should be natural, is to be expected, that in a fallen world, our own congregation should be divided and conflicted. We live in a "deconciled" world, of which any congregation is a part. Living in Christ means building bridges, reconciliation, being in the chasms of division, in the deep valleys where relationships are dissolved and loneliness rules. God longs to bring life to those valleys, bring connection between the distant and divided. He has not chosen to build those bridges by His disruptive miracles alone. It is inherent to the nature of salvation that the saved, those who have been bridged and reconciled to God, would be the seeds of further bridging, further reconciliation. The work of reconciliation is not a happy hand-holding around a kumbaya campfire. It is more like going into the fires of disagreement and disconnection, bitterness and enmity, and letting God's miracles disrupting division somehow work through our broken, cracked pottery.

If you're a Christian, you can't avoid the stress and strain of being in the middle of conflict without denying the movement and call of God in this broken world.

Building Bridges and the Poor

I am fascinated with boundaries, with the point where something stops and another thing starts.  If you and I disagree on an issue, I want to try and go back to figure out exactly why.  We agree here and here and here, but right here is the point where we diverge—why?  Most of the time I think we can pin down the reason for the divergence, even though it’s often not obvious at first just why we disagree.  Many disagreements arise because of a disagreement about an underlying principle, not so much in the points above or below that point.  If I believed as you did at that crucial juncture, then I would agree with you about the final apparent disagreement, and vice versa.  I find there is value in determining that critical divergence point.  Usually it helps people stop seeing the one they disagree with as less than human.

For instance (as I hope to elaborate upon later), many people who care about the poor find satisfying political expression of that caring by voting for Democrats, progressives, liberals.  I’ve never voted for a Democrat.  Once a progressive knows this about me, if they don’t know anything else about me, they are liable to write me off as a shill for rich businessmen who cares nothing for the plight of the less-fortunate.  But I care a great deal about the poor, and hope my work in the world is some small contribution to benefiting them.  To many progressives, this makes no sense. In their minds, the only reasonable course of action to combat poverty is to join political progressives to shape society to make it more just for the less fortunate.  People who don’t do this can’t be very serious about combating poverty, they believe.

I hope that my writing here can help explain some of these conundrums, and dispel some caricatures.  Perhaps I might change a mind or two along the way, but I’m not holding my breath.  I’d be happy to build understanding, to create a few more human connections between different people and groups of people.

Reality is the Bridge

I want to speak and write the truth. I want to see how the reality of things can be a bridge between the imperfect way that one person sees things and the imperfect way that another person sees things. If we believe that each person has their own truth, then we are islands, irreconcilable, disconnected islands. The reality of the way things really are is the bridge between us. But if we believe that somehow the true nature of things is permanently and completely hidden from our comprehension, then we won't look for that bridge.